Protect landlords’ rights to remove bad tenants
Everyone is a tenant advocate until it’s your neighbor who throws a 2,000-person keg party on your street, causing massive fights, and leaving Hudson Avenue in Albany looking like the Coachella parking lot. Or, until it’s your neighbor smoking two packs a day in their nonsmoking unit with the windows closed in your apartment building where the HVAC system evenly spreads the Pall Mall aroma into every adjoining unit.
My company manages hundreds of rental units for property owners throughout the Capital Region, and by far the most common complaints we receive from tenants aren’t leaky toilets or flickering light fixtures. They complain to us about neighboring tenants being disruptive and obstinate. Most times, prior to involving us, the aggrieved tenant will have already done their due diligence by politely requesting of their neighbor to, for example, stop allowing their cat to roam and urinate in the shared hallway, and only after they receive the standard rebuttals of “Mind your own business!” or “I’m a tenant and I have rights!” from the offender, will we receive the formal complaint and become involved.
At this point we corroborate the reports with other tenants, collect evidence, and issue a formal series of notices to stop the behavior, which is typically met with a defiant claim that they are being harassed or discriminated against. They also state that they will be contacting their attorney or a local tenant advocate group in an effort to support their rights to freely conduct any number of obnoxious behaviors expressly prohibited in their lease and universally recognized as being offensive to neighbors.
Next, if the behavior continues and the offending tenant is in an active lease, we could pursue an eviction for violating the terms of their lease or being a general nuisance, but this is rarely practical as it involves attorneys, is costly for all parties, and the time it takes to navigate the state’s court system often exceeds the remaining term on their lease. Instead, it almost always makes more sense to provide the requisite 60- or 90-day notice that their lease will not be renewed when it expires and begrudgingly wait it out until then.
Of course, this scenario is no consolation to the neighbors who must continue dealing with the issues. Despite our pleas for them to have patience, the best tenants often vacate, unwilling to wait it out and
resigned to the realization that bad tenants already have far more rights in New York than good ones. Other neighboring tenants perceive our lack of action to be a license for them to engage in their own offensive behaviors, prompting a lease-breaking tit-for-tat with the original offender to prove a point. The rest will wait it out, not willing or able to move, counting the days until they have a new, hopefully less dreadful neighbor. It’s a bad situation for everyone.
The right to not renew a tenant’s expiring lease is one of the last remaining tools a landlord has in New York to deal with unruly tenants when all other methods have failed, and yet some tenant “advocate” groups and the New York politicians held hostage by them are now attempting to remove even that right through the proposed statewide “Good Cause Eviction” bill, which would be more aptly named the “Tenancy-for-life” bill. This bill, if passed, would explicitly grant all residential tenants the right to lease renewals for eternity, and would only permit a landlord to not renew a lease if that landlord were granted a court order from a judge.
This is not just an issue of concern for multifamily dwellers, but for all New Yorkers with a close neighbor, considering that roughly half of our landlord clients are renting out single-family homes.
I urge even the staunchest of tenant-advocates to consider the following scenario when deciding whether to support or oppose this bill: Imagine the nastiest, most destructive person you have ever met renting the home right next to yours. This person’s behavior is making your and your neighbors’ lives miserable, every day. Would you be thankful for their right to remain your neighbor for eternity? Do you think it is fair that you and the landlord have unwittingly become married to them for life? Clearly, the answer is an emphatic “No.”
This is not just an issue of concern for multifamily dwellers, but for all New Yorkers with a close neighbor, considering that roughly half of our landlord clients are renting out single-family homes.