How to make your landlord let you live rent-free

  . . . and pay you even more to move out

  One landlord’s story.

 His name has been changed to protect him from retaliation.
      In six short months, Mr. Moro, a thickly accented immigrant, has dealt with three different health inspectors about complaints from four different tenants in the 12 units he owns and several other units he manages in Cambridge.
      All facing eviction for paying no rent or refusing to pay rent increases, these tenants called in health inspectors and got Mr. Moro cited for code violations in their apartments. They knew it was their one and only defense against eviction.
      And a very good defense, the way the eviction laws are written. As long as there are code violations, they can’t be evicted. As long as there are code violations, their nonpayment becomes legally withheld rent. And each day that each violation exists counts as a permanent reduction in the rent owed. Finally, if they can show the judge that the landlord was negligent, the judge can order the landlord to pay triple damages and their attorney’s fees. Knowing the ropes, these tenants had visions of free rent — and even more money in their pockets.

SIMPLE STRATEGY
      So what did Mr. Moro’s tenants do? They found a lot of code violations. They made sure they lasted a lo-o-o-ong time.
      Sound hard? Not when health inspectors cooperate.
      Sometimes these inspectors didn’t even inspect. One citation said a light didn’t work. But it did work, just turn on the switch. It turns out the tenant just called up the inspector, who wrote up the citation from his desk.
      Then there was the inspector’s report saying there was “no second means of egress” from a unit. But there was, because the year before, that very same unit had been cited for no second exit, and Mr. Moro had built a huge staircase to the unit up the back of the building. The inspector just took the tenant’s word for it over the phone.
      And what about the citation: “Porch not sound”? “Please,” asked Mr. Moro, “tell me which post or boards on the porch need to be replaced.” But the inspector couldn’t tell him because he hadn’t climbed the three flights of stairs to look at the porch. Taken the tenant’s word for it again. “It’s safe,” said the tenant, “but it doesn’t feel that good.”
      The inspector wrote: “windows in poor condition.” Mr. Moro walked round and round, checking each window, wondering what the inspector wanted him to do. Mr. Moro finally asked, “Please tell me which windows and what’s wrong with them.” The inspector got angry — had he even seen the windows? — and threatened: “Do you want us to come down with a team of inspectors and do a ’thorough’ inspection of your whole building?!”
      They wrote: “cracked foundation.” Mr. Moro walked round and round the foundation. He found was one slightly loose brick. He mortared it. On reinspection, the inspector ordered him to add mortar half an inch higher.
      The tactic is to cite more violations than really exist, make it hard to figure out what to do, make the repair process take longer, so that the landlord looks negligent and the total sum that the tenant gets to deduct from back rent or put in his pocket grows bigger and bigger, thanks to the inspector’s help.

TAKING YOUR TIME
      Now it’s the tenant’s turn to stretch and extent the time their unit is “out of code.” It’s simple: just don’t let the owner or his workmen in to correct the violations!
      Mr. Moro says he has been denied access to apartments cited for code violations “four or five times” in the past six months. What the tenants are doing, he says, is trying to stop him from fixing the code violations in the required 30 days.
      “The tenants don’t respond to phone messages,” he says. “They don’t respond to notes on the door. They don’t respond to a certified letter. They won’t leave the key. They insist on being home while the repair is done.” Even when Mr. Moro has caught the tenant at home and asked face to face to get in to repair, the tenant has said, “I cannot let you in.” These delaying tactics have happened to Mr. Moro “at least a dozen times over the past three years.”
      The tenants have gone as far as stopping the repair right in the middle of work. One tenant kicked a worker out abruptly, causing the worker to leave his notebook. The tenant refused for days to let the worker pick up the notebook. Another tenant locked a worker out — leaving the worker’s winter coat, keys, and wallet locked in the apartment. The tenant refused the five seconds required to let the worker pick up his belongings, and the worker walked home in the cold.
      These tenants violate the State Sanitary Code when they deny access to correct code violations. Do inspectors cite them for denying access? No way. Do inspectors help the owner gain access? “As . . . slowly . . . as . . . possible,” says Mr. Moro.

SNAIL’S PACE
      Mr. Moro has tried four times over the past six months to get inspectors to cite tenants for denial of access. It never happens. “Let’s give it one more try,” says the inspector, looking like he’s trying to help the landlord get in. But when the next time comes, he just says “let’s give it one more try” again. “They won’t take the landlord’s word,” says Mr. Moro, “but they take the tenant’s word on violations, give the landlord a short time to repair, then give the tenant forever to grant access.” They are just “dragging it to death,” says Mr. Moro.
      An especially egregious example: a middle-of-the-night “no heat” complaint. An inspector called Mr. Moro about midnight one cold winter’s night to say a tenant had called complaining of no heat. Mr. Moro told the inspector he already knew about the problem because he had earlier “jump-started” the furnace. Mr. Moro was afraid the pipes would freeze, the tenant had set the thermostat way too low, and jump-starting bypassed the thermostat.
      “Go check it out anyway,” said the inspector. So Mr. Moro trekked through the cold night to find that the tenant had once again deliberately lowered the thermostat in order to complain of no heat. Mr. Moro asked to be let in to reset the thermostat. The tenant refused. Mr. Moro called the inspector saying the tenant denied him access. The inspector said “The tenant has the right to deny access” (not true) and refused to help Mr. Moro get in to turn up the thermostat.

A KAFKA TRIAL
      So Mr. Moro tried again to get in the apartment. The tenant still refused access, then turned around and called the police, claiming the landlord was harassing her. Mr. Moro told the policeman that he had been ordered by the health inspector to correct a no heat situation. The policeman responded: “You’re gonna have to sue the tenant to get access.”
      Despite all this, the inspector wrote up a report citing Mr. Moro for no heat, even though the tenant was entirely responsible. But now the tenant had another code violation to show the judge. No heat is a very serious violation. Mucho rent saved. Mucho “negligence.”
      Mr. Moro has tried to get inspectors to “witness us in” — to be present at the appointed repair time when, after 24-hour written notice, owner and worker both show up at the apartment. “It took ten trips and ten refusals with one tenant,” said Mr. Moro, “before I got the inspector there.” Finally, with inspector present, the tenant let them in. But the inspector could not stay for the whole repair, and once he left, the tenant kicked them out.
      Such are the ways tenants delay repairs, make landlords look negligent, pile up rent reductions and get triple damages.
      Now the scene shifts back to the inspectors when everything — finally — is fixed. Mr. Moro calls the inspector to reinspect and verify the corrections. Does the inspector respond in 24 hours as he responded to the tenant’s first call? Rarely. “The tenant was not home.” “I couldn’t get in.”
      Mr. Moro says it “easily takes three days to a week” to get an inspector to reinspect. “And it takes two or three phone calls each time.” The longest was 10 days to get a reinspection.

MORE OBSTRUCTION
      So comes the day of reinspecti on. All the work is done. But, what?! Suddenly more code violations show up. More citations. Still an “out of code” apartment. More denials of access. More time and money for the tenant.
      “Out of a dozen reinspections in the last six months, that’s happened to me twice,” said Mr. Moro. “The inspector is working with the tenant,” he says. “He’s over in the corner talking privately with the tenant for 10 minutes, but he’ll only talk to me for a minute and only in front of the tenant.” What caused the new violations? “You suspect the tenant did, but how can you say who broke the glass?”
      That’s another thing that tenants can do. Prodded by huge financial incentives built into the eviction laws, they can, in the privacy of their castle, undo the landlord’s repairs or inflict new damage on the apartment. And to the judge, it just looks like a whole lot of landlord negligence, a building so badly maintained that it’s about to fall apart.
      At long last, the second set of violations are corrected, the reinspection completed. So where’s the final report — the official paper that says no more code violations? Until the report is written, the apartment is still “out of code.” Still more time to add money for the tenant.
      “It easily takes me two weeks to get that paper in hand,” said Mr. Moro, “unless I don’t do anything except stand outside the inspector’s office door. I usually have to make many requests, and then I must follow through and go down there [to the inspector’s office] myself.”
      “I’ll mail it to you,” one inspector told Mr. Moro. A week later, Mr. Moro called back to ask the inspector if he mailed the final report. “Oh, I forgot.”
      How do you know that inspectors are colluding with tenants to delay repairs and reinspections and reports? “You know,” said Mr. Moro, “because not all inspectors are like that, and the tenants know which inspectors to go to.”
      “And you get a hint from the inspector,” said Mr. Moro. “He hints: ’if you are nice to the tenant, I won’t follow up; if you are tough, I will throw the book at you.’”

---

Time for a Change

Linking code violations to evictions encourages fraud, collusion and willful damage to apartments. But there’s even more. Even if an owner wins an eviction, the tenant’s (often free) lawyer can threaten to appeal — unless the owner pays the tenant $5,000 or more to move out. Now, as the appeal winds slowly through court, the owner faces the prospect of the tenant living rent-free for two more years and continuing the harassment described above. He knows his costs could easily mount up to $25,000 or $50,000 in that time: more lost rent, more costly repairs, triple damages and tenant legal fees if he loses the appeal (no matter that legal service lawyers are already paid with tax and charity dollars), not to mention the owner’s own legal fees. Gee, $5,000 is a real bargain.