[ceallen]

One thing that raised a red flag to me is telling his tenant to stay at a relative's if the house was unlivable during repairs. Every state's law is different, but I'd be very surprised if it's not his obligation to provide short-term accommodations if the property cannot be lived in.

[erroneousfunk]

Agreed. For an article that provided so little view of the other side, and seemed to be on the landlord's side entirely, the fact that a huge red flag like that would slip through is, well, a red flag. If a landlord ever said something like that to me, I'd tell them to go live at a relative's house while I stayed at their place!

[67726e]

I agree that the article is hardly fair and unbiased. Aside from the women's boiler needing extensive repairs, the article claims that there were "other repairs needed" which could be really anything. Of course that is the only property of his they talked about. Who knows what the other issues where.

In the end... it's just click grabbing. Painting the situation as an overbearing, corrupt city government demolishing folks homes is sure to grab more eyeballs.

[keithpeter]

Yes, that was a bit of a throwaway line wasn't it?

However, the State legal authorities have seen fit to halt all demolitions while they investigate, and the qualifications of the building inspectors are being checked, and a close relative of a post holder is building housing for rent.

A barrel of knaves?

[bsder]

Yeah, I was pretty much accepting a government run amok story until this comment. If you can't get the heater or AC up and running again in 24 hours, your residence qualifies as uninhabitable, sorry.

However, as someone who grew up in a similar town, I understand that housing in these kinds of areas is a delicate balance.

While you can talk about "slumlord", the issue is that most of the people in these houses are stuck in the area, probably have fairly low fixed incomes, likely have bad credit (or possibly lost their house in the crash) and very few other choices. Most "slumlords" in such an area are not exactly raking in the dough, and, if rent goes up too much, the renters are out a home and now have to go live with someone else.

In reality, wiping out a few houses doesn't really help that much in these kinds of sparsely populated areas. In reality, the whole town needs to be wiped out or consolidated with another town to make much difference.

Unfortunately, that has its own set of issues.

[msandford]

I'll agree that often times the law says that. But if he's not making much money on the house (slumlords don't have premium properties and so they can't charge premium prices) then asking a tenant to stay with someone else could (emphasis COULD!) be a small kindness.

Before people go bananas on me let me explain. If the woman is out of the normal lease term and is now living month to month then the landlord could raise the rent. And if he's not making much money on the house then he might have to raise the rent to offset whatever money he spends putting this woman up in a hotel. So that would end up costing her quite a bit.

Of course I'm speculating wildly here that she was out of her lease and that he had the ability to raise her rent; maybe it was rent-controlled. Or perhaps he was making money hand-over-fist renting a poorly maintained property for a lot of money while treating his tenants poorly.

I do know that rarely is there a slam-dunk one way or the other, no matter what the subject is.

[Pxtl]

Exactly. When I ran into a problem with my furnace, my landlord came over with an armful of electric space heaters. Still left me on the hook for the jump in the electrical bill, but better than nothing.

[33W]

Very good point.