The real issue is that apartment managers can come after you for the remainder of your lease. You can suddenly be in 10-20k of debt if you need to break your lease early. That's both more accessible and worse than many medical debt horror stories.
I understand that some of the people who break leases are experiencing hardship, but others are just breaking their leases because they can -- and a lot more people would do that if it was easier. That would put landlords on the defensive and result in more restrictive lease agreements and/or higher rents to reduce the risk, which would ultimately make things worse for all the renters who really do intend to honor their agreements to the best of their ability.
Also, in many places, landlords are legally obligated to make a good-faith attempt to find replacement tenants before they sue lease-breakers for the remaining rent.
I have no problem with requiring a tenant to rent for a year, to prevent quick turnover and the risk and costs associated with that.
But multiple landlords now have all had the same policy: the lease will never go month-to-month, basically. You can, but e.g., for my current lease, it costs ~60% more to go month to month. This creates bizarre pay-off points, and greatly raises the costs of trying to move. When it's "+$2k/mo to go month-to-month", that's not risk-reduction, that's just greed, trying to make sure I can't move.
IME, it used to be that after you rented for a while (e.g., a year), the lease went month-to-month. You were a long-term stable renter, and you'd paid enough rent at that point to cover the overheads of finding a new tenant and making the necessary touch-ups to the apartment. (Beyond what was covered by security deposit.)
(I recently had this conversation with my parents recently. The previous generation has no idea about some of the provisions that renters of my generation are having to put up with.)
An average price of $18,000 to break lease on a 3+ year old lease is absurd. We need more housing, to drive competition in the rental & housing markets.
If I ever get to buy a house (… if my landlord doesn't first capture any gains I might get…) the first thing I'll have to do is not get to live in it: the most logical course of action would be to rent it short term, until I can get out of my own lease.
I'm not sure where you live, but in a lot of places, a landlord refusing to allow a lease to go month-to-month is illegal.
When I've lived in areas where housing was not scarce, it was reasonably easy to find apartments that would do month-to-month leases right from the start.
It's at those individual lease boundaries that I (rather technically) have the opportunity to go month-to-month, if I want to be bled dry.
My note about it being a 3+ year lease is the total time we've rented, consecutively. That the lease is broken into separate segments by the contract is an implementation detail, when discussing recovering the costs of / managing the risk of short-term tenants. I'm not a short term tenant, after having been here for that long.
> a landlord refusing to allow a lease to go month-to-month is illegal.
That's news to me! I've never lived in such a place, and boy would that be nice. A cursory Google search indicates that, in my jurisdiction, "allows the landlord or tenant to end a month-to-month lease at any time, as long as they give 30 days' notice". The state I lived in previously is the same.
(This is where the nuance of "what the lease actually says" meets the "how it is implemented".) Technically, my lease becomes month-to-month at the end of its lease period. To my landlord, not signing a new lease would result in (their, legally speaking) 30 days notice to move out. (They've made this somewhat apparent to us in the past, as they tend to not send out the new terms soon enough and then get antsy when they're not signed.) They want the increased rent, and it appears they'll get it from me, or the market.
Is that wrong? Do you think you are entitled to live in someone else's property, at a price below what others in the market would pay, for as long as you like?
There has to be some balance here. Someone is contracting to let you live in their property. If they don't get something out of it, why should they do it? Why would anyone be a landlord? And if nobody wanted to be a landlord, wouldn't it be harder for you to find a place to live in your price range?
Rentals don't just exist without landlords to own and maintain them. No apartment buildings would get built if there weren't landlords ready to buy them from the property developers. The existing ones would be left vacant because it would be cheaper than filling them and keeping them habitable.
Every time the government makes it harder to be a landlord, they also make it harder to be a renter. Even well-intentioned programs like rent control always end up impacting the majority of renters negatively.
If you are a renter, the best thing you can do for yourself is to advocate for more housing and more landlords to rent it from. It's supply and demand.
There are also extended-stay hotels. But other than that, is near-universal home ownership such a bad thing? What's the big difference between paying a mortgage and paying rent? Rent already pays for mortgage, repairs, and maintenance anyway. All that's left is closing costs when you move.
Keep in mind the median housing unit price today skews higher because things like studios and SROs never go up for sale. SROs are effectively illegal to build in many cities today.