Most states legally allow a landlord full access to the property as long as the tenants are given 24 hours notice before an inspection. I married into the situation and the tenants bugged out when I statred handling things in a more business-like way.
Usually you spell stuff like that out in the rental agreement so yes, it would be grounds for eviction.
In a place like this the health department would make them leave immediately. It’s unfit for human occupation.
It’s also amazing the place didn’t burn down. With all those cigarettes and all that trash, that place was a fire waiting to happen.
Me too. They must be in a private hell in order to let things get so bad.
Is there anything to indicate if it’s an apartment or a separate dwelling? I can’t imagine that neighbors wouldn’t notice a smell, if they were close enough.
Yes, in New York at least, it is common to have Collyer eviction proceedings. I am working on the appeal of one right now, and I’ve written a legal article on the subject.
The usual legal theory of the case is nuisance and breach of an obligation of the lease. When a tenant’s apartment becomes overly cluttered, it can be a fire hazard, source of offensive odors and breeding ground for vermin. Each of these is a ground to find the tenant’s apartment to be a legal nuisance.
Commonly, these will be identified because of odors or vermin affecting neighbors, or where building maintenance staff go in and observe the conditions.
The cases can be very difficult because almost always there will be a mental health aspect to the condition, and the courts will often seek to have social services become involved. Most of the time, the landlord simply wants the condition resolved, not an eviction of the tenant, but there isn’t really any other tool the landlord can use other than an eviction action.
In relatively rare cases, the conditions can be improved to a non-nuisance level with appropriate care. Unfortunately, many compulsive hoarders, however, are not sufficiently impaired to qualify for serious mental health care, but not well enough to give themselves an acceptable quality of life, particularly if they are evicted from a home they have lived in for many years.
I think there is a pretty universal consensus among lawyers, judges and social service professionals that there is no good way to resolve the situation in most cases. However, courts reluctantly agree that landlords have the right eventually to evict to protect the health and safety of other tenants.
Thanks for that legal perspective Billdo. Can you share your legal article with us? I’d be very interested to read it.
Imagine if this person called you up and said, “I’m moving this weekend–can you help me?” You show up expecting to shlep some boxes and help carry a sofa or two. Instead you see this.
It has happened to me twice. In both cases, the tenants were friends of mine, female and suffering from depression. In both cases, they were asked to move out by the landlord…I’m not sure if “official” eviction proceedings had started or not.
One I did have a little warning about and was more clutter than filth–I ended up boxing up piles and piles of old receipts, check stubs, bills, and other important-looking papers all together because it all had to go and I didn’t have time to sort through and find out what was really important and what could be thrown away. Hopefully, it all got sorted out later. She also had bags and bags of old pop cans that she meant to take to the recycling center to sell–I had to beg and plead with her to just put them in the apartment’s recycling. She also had several years worth of phone books lying around–this was back when they were not accepted as curbside recycling but when the new ones came out you could take them to a local supermarket where they had bins to be recycled. She’d never make it to the store with them when they had the bins out, so she just kept them for the next year. I had to sneak those into the dumpster…it’s great to save the planet, but you have to save yourself as well! She ended up eventually moving back in with her parents, where she still is today.
The other was way worse and I had no warning. My husband and I had helped her move before, and she was never packed on moving day. He asked her if she was packed, and she assured him she was, and that all he would be there for is to “lift heavy things”. Well, not only was nothing packed, but it looked very much like those pictures. It was a room at a rooming house, so we didn’t have to deal with cleaning a kitchen or bathroom (those were shared, and therefore in inhabitable condition). It was bad. Underneath the trash and clutter there was mouse shit everywhere. I packed dirty dishes into boxes–again, it all had to go, and there was no time to wash them. Underneath the mess was a beautiful hardwood floor which had actually started to buckle, unbeknownst to my friend. Yeah, no way she was getting that security deposit back. I’ve lost track of her since then–I’ve heard that she has moved out of state. She’d had a lot of shit happen to her in her life, and this was by no means the worst thing that ever happened to her, unfortunately.
In neither case was the landlord stuck with the clean-up, though. After we shoveled the stuff out, it looked pretty much like any vacant apartment, except for the damage to the hardwood floor.
And even later in that topic the guy who took those photos say that the cat was found staying with one of her friends (she dropped him off there awhile back).
A long time ago, when me and two other people were looking for a place to live, one of the real estate agencies we contacted actually showed us a house that was almost as bad as the one in the OP. Not quite the level of filth, but close. They SHOWED US the house, in that condition! The leasing agent - young, wearing a suit, ex-frat-guy type, probably very inexperienced - kept apologizing over and over again for how dirty it was, telling us repeatedly that everything was going to be cleaned up, that the inhabitant was going to be evicted, et cetera. After a while I had to just stop the guy and say, “look, I’m not in the real estate business but surely you don’t think that ANYONE is going to rent this house in this condition! Clean it up first! It doesn’t matter what you say to me, there’s no way that I can possibly picture this house as ever looking any different from how it does now, and this is far and away the filthiest house I have ever seen in my life. So sorry, but really, come on!!!” The guy apologized and said that the company made him show the house to people in the state that it was in. That’s insane! Whoever owns that company must be insane!
ETA: maybe that agent was being punished for something? Or put through some kind of hazing process? I can’t imagine any legit real estate company like that one ever imagining that anyone in a billion years would actually have the skill to get someone to sign for that house, with how it looked.
Is it weird that the first thing I thought was, “Whataburger and Taco Cabana cups? Crap, she’s from my city, isn’t she?” (Seeing as how I’ve never seen a Taco Cabana outside of the San Antonio/Austin area. Well, maybe Houston.)
It’s very sad, but I’ve seen people who I believe could easily get like that. I’ve never seen their houses, but I’ve met them in hospitals and care facilities, and I know just how possible it is.
It’s definitely Houston. We have them in Houston (some of my friends were big in the Taco Cabana), Shipley’s Donuts is big-ish there, and it’s a Houston forum, which fits with the hurricane thing in the thread. Which makes me feel bad, I lived near that person!
She certainly ate out a lot. Even tho all that trash ended up at home, meaning she chose “to go” a lot, she still made frequent trips To The Outside World, interacting with other people on a regular basis. Walking Among Us.
http://www.houston-imports.com/forums/showpost.php?p=8842088&postcount=152
Whew!
We evicted a tenant once for living like that. I’ve also helped two friends clean up their apartments that looked like that, all the way down to the cat shit all over the place.
::shudder::
Threads like this always make my skin crawl.
My mom is only a few steps away from having her house look like this. It is very sad.
Both Hallgirls have committed that if things EVER look anywhere near this for me, they will do whatever it takes to help me make things right. They both have committed to fight me tooth and nail to get help if it ever comes to it. (It’s doubtful that it will, as it is such a fear I have and maybe part of the reason why I am such a purger with my physical materials and an outright neat-freak.) Seriously, this has been one of our (frequent) conversations, as we all have watched my mother get increasingly worse over the years. It’s right up there with “what to do when I’m brain dead” (pull the damn plug already) and “when I die” (creamation, no burial).
What I don’t understand is, if she can afford that many cigarettes and that much take out, why didn’t she just hire a maid in the first place. Seriously, you can’t look around at that and think it is an acceptable way to live! I have worked with people that had different disorders like hording and social anxieties that prevented them from leaving the house and even they knew that on some level they needed help to keep from getting that filthy. I just can’t get my head around that mess.
OTOH, these pictures make me grateful all I have to complain about is my boyfriend and his kids not picking up the dirty towels on the bathroom floor, it could be SO much worse.
How does that computer even work?!
I don’t know how much cigarettes cost, but I can tell you that being in such a situation is not about lack of money; it’s about some severe mental dysfunction. As I said above, for months after my son died, my apartment would have looked much the same (mnus the cigarettes, cat stuff, and horrid bathroom) because I hated myself so and had much more self-loathing than self-preservation.
My mind is all about problem solving. All of this is looks terrible and it is but most of it is fairly easy to fix. A couple of family members could order the largest dumpster available and fix 75% of it in a weekend. Don’t think I am talking out of my ass. We bought our house in not the same but similar conditions. They have dumpsters for less than $300 take away nearly the size of an 18 wheeler. Most of that is easy to pick up and could be done in a few hours. The problem is the furniture and smoke damage but that could be left until later.
I moved into an apartment in college about 6pm one night with three girls. The only functional plumbing was one toilet out of three, one sink, and most lights didn’t work. The kitchen sink had stagnant water with huge stuff growing in it. I beat the pipes with a hammer until they worked and then I fixed the garbage disposal so the kitchen sink worked. We went to the store to get light bulbs and they worked. I fixed two bathtubs in one hour. Mopping and cleaning fixed much of the rest of it. It wasn’t perfect but we went from something like the place in this thread to a functional apartment in 6 hours. Simple neglect is nasty but it usually isn’t that hard to fix.
Here’s the article I wrote, though without the footnotes.
“Capitalism Gone Mad”: Compulsive Hoarding and Collyer Nuisances
It was New York’s biggest news story in 1947: The infamously reclusive Homer Collyer had been found dead in the Harlem mansion that he shared with his brother Langley, and Langley was missing. In the decades they had lived there, the brothers had quite literally filled their home with barricades and elaborate booby-traps, ostensibly to protect them against break-ins due to the changing racial nature of Harlem. All eight major daily papers extensively covered the ensuing search for Langley. After nearly three weeks of excavating debris, a decaying smell led the authorities to find Langley’s body buried under one of his booby traps a mere 10 feet from where the body of Homer had been found. In the end 103 tons of papers, largely worthless miscellaneous items and garbage were removed from the house, which had to be razed due to the damage caused by the accumulated clutter.
Unfortunately, the Collyer brothers were not unique eccentrics, but rather suffered from a relatively common condition known as compulsive hoarding, also referred to as Collyer brothers syndrome. Although the excavation of the Collyer mansion became a grand public spectacle, more mundane cases of Collyer-type accumulations provide serious challenges to landlords, neighbors, emergency personnel, the courts and indeed the tenants who live in them as well as to real estate practitioners. Although a landlord may bring a “Collyer action” to evict a tenant based on the claim that an “apartment is so cluttered with papers, refuse and/or rubbish as to constitute a nuisance,” prosecuting these actions can be anything but straightforward. Moreover, as one housing judge has recognized: “I have never seen a landlord that truly wanted to evict these people – they just want the problem to go away.”
MENTAL HEALTH AND SOCIAL SERVICE ISSUES
At the heart of the problem is that Collyer-type accumulations are frequently symptoms of mental illness. Although it been referred to as “‘capitalism gone mad,’ . . . the urge to collect objects of significance only to the collector,” compulsive hoarding is generally considered to be a variety of obsessive-compulsive disorder, though it is also linked to Alzheimer’s disease. On the other hand, sometimes the problem may simply be that a frail, elderly tenant has lost the physical ability to keep his or her apartment clean.
Because of these issues, a court facing a Collyer action has to consider whether the tenant is mentally impaired and unqualified to litigate on his or her own behalf, and whether social services are appropriate. A housing court judge has explained that in each Collyer case he has been assigned he has considered whether it is necessary appoint a guardian ad litem to protect the tenant’s interests, in addition to social service and legal aid referrals.
In the course of social services involvement, an interested agency may petition for a guardianship under Article 81 of the Mental Health Law if the tenant is uncooperative with efforts to eliminate the Collyer condition or is otherwise seen to be unable to manage their own affairs. Depending on the circumstances, a guardianship can be an effective tool to improve the living conditions of the tenant, or a source of significant friction in which the tenant strongly opposes the efforts the guardian takes in the tenant’s interest. For instance, Matter of Linden-Rath, tells the success story of “a remarkably vigorous and charming woman, now approximately 103 years of age and the widow of a German count,” whose hoarding behavior, and the resulting Collyer-like state of her apartment, were substantially reduced through the efforts of a guardian appointed with her consent. On the other hand, Matter of Murray F. describes how the Collyer condition in one couple’s apartment was only brought under control after years of battles between the tenants and the agency appointed as their guardian, during which time the tenants “continually harassed everyone involved in the case” including constant letters, phone calls and faxes to court staff, and threats and physical abuse to the guardian agency personnel.
LITIGATION OF COLLYER ACTIONS
Although Collyer conditions sometimes indicate a tenant’s incapacity, many otherwise competent and productive people choose live and work in excessively cluttered quarters. Living in clutter is legally unobjectionable, until the point that it becomes “nuisance, specifically the accumulation of newspapers and debris in [tenant’s] apartment causing a health and fire hazard.”
The question of when an apartment crosses the line into nuisance is obviously a fact-intensive one. Nuisance will be found in cases where “the apartment is literally overcome with thousands of books, magazines, cans, bottles, pictures, rags and assorted other items. There is barely room to walk.” One factor weighted especially heavily by the courts is specific fire hazards like combustible materials on the stove and overloaded electric circuits, particularly when there have been actual fires caused by the hazards. On the other hand, no nuisance was found when: “all rooms of the apartment contained articles roughly appropriate in amount, although varying in the quality of the housekeeping; dried flower bouquets were no more in number than can be seen every day in many other homes; newspaper stacks were low, a far cry from the previously reported fire hazard of a three-foot-high cabinet-sized mound next to the stove.”
A key procedural element in Collyer cases is that resolution of the case will usually involve a personal inspection of the premises by the judge, particularly as photographic evidence of the apartment conditions introduced by landlord may be misleading or stale. One element that may have to be overcome on a court inspection is judicial disbelief that tenants might actually live in exceedingly cluttered conditions. Although there are a few cases finding that Collyer-like apartments are used for storage only, particularly when the tenant has an identifiable alternate place to live, the psychological and social services data, media reports and case law show that people can clutter their living spaces to levels that normal people find incomprehensible.
Where a Collyer nuisance is found, it is considered a breach of the tenant’s lease for which a warrant of eviction may be issued, but under Real Property Actions and Proceedings Law § 753(4), the court is required to grant a ten day period to cure the breach. In practice, however, the courts will frequently grant longer cure periods, particularly where the tenancy is of long duration. Where the tenant cures the condition prior to entry of judgment, courts will permanently stay execution of the warrant.
In the end, litigation over a Collyer condition is likely to cause significant headaches to all involved. For landlords particularly, it can be a long, hard, expensive slog to achieve an eviction or a cure. Even with social services, mental health or guardianship involvement, there are likely to be significant challenges before a clean-up is achieved, and there is a good chance of tenant backsliding even after a full clean-up. In the end, however, because of the risk they pose to the building and neighboring tenants, it is necessary for landlords take action to force compulsive hoarder tenants to remedy the Collyer nuisances they create.
I was in a similar state for a while; like Skald mentions above, it’s mental issues usually, not money (or lack thereof). I went through a few years of depression and lived like a recluse in an apartment that looked remarkably similar-- only difference was that my toilet never broke down. I’m not sure what I’d have done if it had-- my furnace conked out one winter, and I never let maintenance in to take care of it.
Oh, and I smoked at the time, too, and the butts and ashes do tend to pile up like that.
The condition I lived in tended to reinforce the depression, too-- it became a self-reinforcing problem. I eventually got out of it under my own power, and have maintained a clean existence since then. (Came dangerously close to relapsing during my divorce, though, as depression set in and I let my place go to hell…)
But, like Shagnasty says, it usually isn’t difficult to clean up the property if you have the wherewithal to do so. My apartment took one day to fix back up… it was non-stop, but only one day. One of the side effects of the kind of clutter/filth you see in the photos linked to by the OP is that virtually nothing is salvageable. You don’t have to sort into keep/recycle/toss piles. Everything is a toss pile. Open a bag, fill it, haul it to the dumpster. Drag furniture and larger pieces out to the dumpster, too. Repeat until the place is clean. The apartment in the OP would take about a day to get to mostly-clean status, then one can insect-bomb, steam-clean or pull the carpet, and let maintenance in to fix the toilet.
For larger places, like Shagnasty also points out, roll-off dumpsters are easy to get. Nothing in a house like that is really going to be salvageable, so rent a dumpster, lug bags and furniture to it, fill, repeat. I’ve helped clear out a two-story-with-basement home that looked like the OP; took three people one day.
(Note: the above obviously doesn’t hold for situations where gross filth causes the floor or walls to rot, but the pics in the OP show remarkably clean walls and dry carpeting, so…)
The couple of people I know who were quickly coming up on this level of messy a few times in their lives knew it was messy but they were too embarrassed to have a maid come in. Besides, if they were leaving the house every day they could easily have picked up a bag of trash and thrown it out on their way to Whataburger every day and still had money to spend on all that Taco Cabana.