The tenant-landlord relationship has always been tenuous, with horror stories on both sides: nosy landlords who get up in your business, refuse to fix a leaky refrigerator or broken windows. Tenants who steal appliances, ruin carpet and fail to pay rent for months.
Those are the exceptions, but some disputes can end in evictions or lawsuits that sour the relationship with those who follow.
The Seattle City Council voted Monday to impose a one-year moratorium on rent-bidding platforms, which allow landlords to take competing bids from prospective tenants and then sign leases with the highest bidders — a little bit like eBay, but for apartments.
The council began looking at the platforms after the board of directors of the Associated Students of the University of Washington approved a student-senate resolution calling on the city to ban them.
The Wisconsin Legislature has passed a Republican bill to protect landlords.
The Senate passed the measure 18-14 Tuesday. It allows local governments to inspect rental properties only in blighted areas with numerous complaints, decreasing values or increases in single-family home conversions to rental units. If an inspection doesn't reveal a violation or the violation is fixed within a month inspectors couldn't return to the property for five years. Inspection fees would be waived in either case.
The city's controversial renter relocation law is here to stay.
After kneading out disagreements over the policy, the Portland City Council this morning unanimously expanded and made permanent the requirement that landlords pay between $2,900 and $4,500 in tenant moving expenses in some instances.
Last year, a New Jersey Superior Court judge told the state’s cities in no uncertain terms that they’d failed in to build enough affordable housing. Now, a county judge has begun handing out some long-anticipated numbers — and two wealthy towns will be forced to build more units than they’d like.
The average rent for tenants living in rent-stabilized buildings in New York City grew by 3.1 percent in 2016, the lowest increase in six years, according to a new study released by the board that regulates rents in the city.
The smaller uptick suggests that the historic freezes imposed on some rents in 2015 and 2016 had a noticeable impact on tenants living in rent-stabilized apartments — though there were still modest increases for some apartments.
Every year in Milwaukee, thousands of eviction notices are filed. The state Senate is expected to take up legislation later this month that critics say unfairly favors landlords -- and would increase the number of evictions. Republican proponents maintain it’s about ensuring quality housing for tenants in the most affordable way to landlords.
Marc-André Giasson is joining a growing number of Toronto tenants who say they've been burned by a landlord claiming to need to their apartment for personal use, then putting it back on the market.
Giasson's apartment was sold to new owners several months ago, and his former landlord told him that they needed it for their own use.
So he signed a document agreeing to move out at the end of his one-year lease and began the onerous process of looking for a new place in a city where rental housing availability is at a 16-year low.
One snowy winter day, after standing at his restaurant job washing dishes, Jinlong Chen came home to the apartment that he and his wife shared with several other families on Beach Street in Boston’s Chinatown. He opened the door to their room to find water and debris everywhere. Part of the ceiling had collapsed.
Life is somewhere between hard and heartbreak for the majority-Latino tenants remaining in The Melrose apartments, where residents of 40 of its 72 units are facing an eviction deadline of Feb. 1.
This is the latest, and probably the final, wave of no-cause evictions at the apartment complex, where tenant rights have gone head-to-head against its ownership for the past year.