What is landlord harassment? Azibo defines it as; “Landlord harassment
refers to any intentional actions or behaviors by property owners or managers that
interfere with a tenant’s legal right to peaceful enjoyment of their rented living
space. These actions typically try to pressure, intimidate, or force tenants to leave
the rental property.” Everyone has a human right to peace in their own home.
Feeling safe and secure is a fundamental part of quality of life. Remember
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the bare minimum human needs are things like food,
water, shelter, and sleep. The things you genuinely cannot survive without. But the
hierarchy has more layers than this. The second layer being your safety and
security. Can you live without those? Yes, but most people can tell you that it is
not ideal or fair to just survive. And yet, landlords will still completely disregard
their tenant’s wellbeing.
For starters, they should not be allowed to make up/exaggerate complaints to
make their tenants do what they want them to. An example of this is telling their
tenant that the entire floor of the apartment they live in has been complaining of a
smell coming from only their door. After having someone come in to inspect the
source of the smell, it turns out it was only one person on the floor who had
complained. And the source of the smell had been coming from the public elevator
on the floor the whole time. Landlords will find ways to legally make life harder
for their tenants in hopes they will move out on their own; such as making paying
rent difficult as to make them late on rent on purpose. If their tenant becomes late
on rent (to no fault of their own) that can create a means to evict them legally. One
way landlords make it difficult to pay on time is making the client pay the rent in
cash at grocery stores (rather than online or direct deposits).
Imagine being woken up in the middle of the night to your fire alarms
going off. You panic and look around the house trying to find what could be the
cause, but there is no fire, or smoke, or anything anywhere in the house setting
them off. It looks like some kind of malfunction maybe. You worry about your
neighbors being woken up or concerned something is wrong, and there’s blaring
alarms going off nonstop in your ear. You just hope it stops so you can continue to
sleep again. Except it wasn’t a malfunction, it was your housing management
intentionally setting off alarms late at night to bother you after you were late on
rent that month. It happens again a week later, then next month, then twice in one
week, completely unpredictable and keeps you living in fear of not knowing when
or if they will go off again. This was what me and my family had to experience the
last few months in the townhouse we were renting. Which we had to move out of
because the rent had been raised to a point where we could not keep up anymore,
for just a three-bedroom town house!
Summer Heacock, 42, Rented a house with her husband in 2017, landlord
would only talk with her husband and would ignore her questions and thoughts,
despite being on the lease. When her husband moved out a few years later, and was
no longer living in the home, the landlord would still insist he speak to her husband
who was still on the lease. Despite her being the head of the household, and the
only one still living there. This is an example of gender discrimination, in a way
that is hard to see and be held accountable for a lot of the time.
What causes landlords to feel the need to do such things to tenants? The
biggest motivation is always going to be money. Landlords harass tenants who are
behind on rent. Or maybe they will force them to move out so they can raise rent
prices if they know their current tenant couldn’t, or tenants they personally don’t
like for various reasons. Avoiding paying for new appliances when they break
down along with necessary repairs around the building, and even things as bad as
ignoring mold to avoid spending extra money.
But from the landlord’s perspective, they will obviously want whatever is in
the best interest of their business. If a tenant is not paying rent, your business is at
risk. If your rental property is damaged, it will be harder to get new renters, and
you can lose money. Bryn Potter, 56, is renting out the lower part of his house, and
had a woman who stopped paying rent for months and moves out suddenly leaving
the majority of her belongings and furniture throughout the property. Leaving Bryn
to deal with loads of her stuff to figure out what to do with so he can continue
renting out the house.
In the end, I believe landlords shouldn’t be allowed to get away with treating
their tenants so badly. This is not an excuse for tenants to treat landlords poorly
either, but people who are just living their lives doing the best they can deserve to
be treated as humans and not purely money machines.