Who ever heard of paying for water when renting?

Factual Questions
1

As I’ve shared in a couple of threads, next week Mrs Stone and I are moving to NC. Among the many things I’m doing this week is calling the utilities to have them put in my name. One of the utilities the landlord gave me to call is City of Durham Water and Sewer…

Huh?

In twenty years of renting appartments in and around Boston, I have never had to pay for water. I think it’s a state law. A buddy whos dad owns and rents out places in CA says that it’s a law there too, that the landlord is responsible for Water and Sewer.

But, according to the nice helpful clerk at Durham Water and Sewer, that’s not the case in North Carolina.

So my question is… What states make the renter pay and what states make the landlord pay.

… and my follow up question is. WHY? Why would they be different?

(I thought of putting this in MPSIMS or In My Humble Opinion but figured it was mostly a factual question. Mods may decide otherwise. … especially since my unasked question is ‘Has anyone else been suprised by this difference?’)

2

Well, for starters-if you’re a single person living in a two bedroom unit, using the second bedroom for an office, you’re not going to use a great amount of water. Put a young couple with one infant and one toddler in the same unit, and their water usage will be 2-3x that of the first example. Why shouldn’t one pay for what they use-rather than expecting the landlord to underwrite that expense?

3

Apparently not, as 1) I live in CA, 2) I rent an apartment, and 3) I pay for water/sewer/trash.

4

Please don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that I shouldn’t pay for it. Only that it took me by suprise. I very much think that people should pay for what they use. It’s just that I never thought about it, given that I never had to pay for it. I just assumed that landlords factor in that expence, just like they do property taxes, repairs, etc. when calculating the rent they charge me.

In fact, now that I know not all states force the landlord to pay for it, I’m actually against the MA law. It’s not fair to them or the renter. (IMHO)

5

The landlord is responsible in the sense that if the water bill is NOT paid, then the city can apply a lien to and/or condem the property…and the landlord can’t use as a defense that the renters were supposed to pay the bill.

For this reason, many landlords will INSIST on paying the bill, increasing the rent by an estimated water bill amount.

6

Our (older) CA apartment building is designed with only one water heater and meter on each side of the courtyard. Each one serves 4 apartments and there isn’t any way that individual use could be measured. I don’t know how common that construction would be.

7

I have rented in three different apartment complexes in Maryland and have never paid for water. As a matter of fact, while searching for these places, I don’t recall any of them stipulating that the renter pays for water.

8

In California (at least) it’s very common for water and garbage to be included in rent, but by no means required by any state-wide law. Occasionaly, you’ll even find old places (typicaly large houses that have been diced up into apartments) where gas is included if there’s just one meter on the building and they don’t want to mess with multiple meters and individual piping to each apartment.

I won’t discount the possibility that this or that city won’t have laws requiring landlords to pay for various utilities. Keep in mind that they’ll certainly pass the costs along to the tenants in the rent.

The apartment I’m about to move out of has a separate $10/month line item on the lease addendum for trash and water/sewer is billed by an outside entity that specializes in this sort of service.

A house I used to rent came with nothing included - I had to set up accounts with the water, trash and power companies.

9

Actually, it doesn’t sound like that bad an idea to me. Making the tenant pay can often be even more unfair. I used to work for the water department in another NC city, and we had a lot of problems with this issue, especially with cheap apartments. If your water bill suddenly shoots up due to a plumbing problem, it’s city policy to reduce the bill after all repairs are made and verified. If you own your house, it’s simple: get it fixed, then fax in the plumber’s receipt. But if you live in an apartment, you don’t have any control over your plumbing; if the landlord doesn’t feel like fixing it, you’re stuck with a sky-high water bill, and there’s pretty much nothing you can do about it.

10

What’s always pissed me off is that we get a copy of the water bill and are expected to pay a share depending on the number of units in the building. Never included is the for-profit clothes washing machines in the basement. Those must be a fairly significant portion of the water usage in the building. I pay to use the washers, then pay again for the water. I should probably complain louder.

11

My mother is a landlord, and she expects tenants to pay all their own utilities for a couple reasons.

First, tenants should be responsible for all their own usage. She doesn’t want to subsidize a tenant’s waterbed, a 50-gallon aquarium, or an indoor jungle.

Second, tenants don’t always inform her that there are plumbing problems. A toilet can run for weeks before the tenant thinks to tell her; once she knows about it, she’s got a plumber out there within 24 hours. If she paid water, tenants have less incentive to tell her or call a plumber, possibly risking not only a gigantic water bill for her, but structural damage to the house from water leakage. If they have to pay the bill, they’ll (usually) call faster.

Robin

12

I’ve both paid and not paid for water where it has been a fixed rate - either way, it’s been explicitly stated in the tenancy agreement. Right now, I pay for it, and I’m on a meter, which seems only fair.

13

In various apartments I’ve lived in across Ohio, it basically came down to - if the unit has an individual meter, I paid the water bill. If there was no individual meter, it was included in the rent.

I’m not saying it is that way everywhere, but that seems to be the way it’s always worked out for me, and I’m glad. For most of those apartments that had meters, I was a single guy surrounded by families. I’m sure I would have paid more than my share of the water bill if there were no individual meters and it had been included in the rent.

14

I would say (pardon me for partially restating what others have pointed out) that the whole issue comes down to whether or not individual meters are (or can be) installed for each unit. In most cases its not the meter cost that’s the problem, it’s the cost of ripping up the existing plumbing, installing the meter, and then restoring whatever was ripped up (most water entrances are buried for multi building layouts). For the high rise (55 stories with 900 units) that I lived in in Chicago, installation of individual meters would also have been impossible given the plumbing layout.

I suspect that if laws exist, as discussed above, then they were enacted to protect the owner/landlord from the expense of retrofitting meters given other laws concerning tenant rights, etc.

15

Huh, your argument is exactly why I am against the landlord having to pay for it. As MsRobyn said, I think the tenants are much less likely to tell the landlord about a problem if they don’t have to pay for it. And I know I’ve had roommates in the past who used to waste water without a care. One was from Brazil and used to turn the shower on for hours at a time and sit in the bathroom doing other things (reading, studying, etc.). He said it sounded like rain and made him feel at home.

As a tenant, I’d rather pay it myself, knowing that I’m careful not to waste resources and I’d rather not add to my landlords profit just because they set the rent higher, expecting that I’d be as wasteful as other tenants.

I can understand the landlord paying it in places where it’d be expensive to retrofit an existing house, but in MA even new apartment buildings aren’t designed with seperate water meters. <shrug> Just one more law that I disagree with.

Thanks everyone who replied.

16

That happened to me with electricity. My 4500W electric water heater had some trouble (turned out all the newly-heated water was heading right out the overflow pipe), and by the time my landlord got around to fixing it, my electric bill for that month had doubled.

17

Exactly the same down here in SoCal. When I rented apartments back in Cincinnati, Ohio, a lot more things were covered and most places included water.

18

Ditto. Your buddy is flat wrong.

19

That’s assuming that the tenant knows about the problem. I’ve had repeated problems with leaking pipes that took a long time to detect, localize and fix. Not all plumbing problems are obvious.

20

I lived in several apartments and cities in NC over the years and some relevant factors are:

NC cities’ budgets have something called “enterprise funds”, which apply to those functions that provide certain services to the residents for a fee. Utilities are one type of enterprise fund. Water, sewer, electric power, gas, trash/recycling, buses are the ones usually included in such funds. Some NC cities are “electic” cities which supply electric power to their citizens, having bought it from a power-generating company. They can set their fees high enough to allow their property tax rates to be lower than cities that do not supply such service (done by the power company directly). Gas distribution can also vary between govt or “The Gas Company.”

NC cities often have a lot of influential folks often who own a lot of real estate, that do not want the *ad valorem * tax rate to go ever higher, so the cities institute or raise their service “fees” to gain their needed income.

Trash fees are always controversial, usually on how to charge for it. Some charge for a rollout buck at so much per month per residence-flat fee, say $12/month. This is regressive as the poor folks pay the same as the rich folks. Some try pay-as-you-throw, based on the amount of trash per house, by selling bags, or by weighing the bags at the curb (can’t cite instances, just have read about as an option). This can lead to trash being disposed of on a lonely road rather than in a paid-for bag.

As for water fees, single and two-family homes usually have a separate meter for each unit. Apartment houses can, in some cities, elect to have individual meters at the curb or internally-read-electronically meters, or, they can have a master meter, i.e. one serving a multi-unit building. In the latter case, the landlord will include the individual water use fee in the rent. I’ve never heard of a state law requiring inclusion/exclusion of water fees in/from rent.

The lastest fee gaining in unpopularity is the stormwater management fee. In order to pay for long-neglected storm drainage pipe installation to mitigate flooding, this levies a fee on every property based on the square footage of impervious area on the lot. If you have a single-family home, the areas of the roof, the walkway, the driveway, and any other paved area is billed annually. The owner of a large warehouse, for example, gets socked for the roof area. Standard rates are developed for, say, a single family house on a certain size lot, so that each one doesn’t have to be physically measured by the assessor for this purpose. This system may vary around the state, depending on how far from the coast you are, due to the Coastal Area Management Act.

By the way, the last and only apt I rented in Boston was on the top of Beacon Hill next to the State House and I dared not drink the water (included in the rent) after I left a jar of tap water on the sink for several weeks and there grew in it some indescribably slimy thing. Must have been from the lead pipes. But I digress.

Welcome to North Carolina. Home of the brave and land of the fee.

(I see I should have saved this epistle for my 500th post. Maybe I can find a more suitable subject for the BIG ONE.)