Airbnb tenant refuses to leave for more than a year
latimes.com
latimes.com
This type of smarmy legal thinking drove me nuts as an attorney and was one of the factors that led to me becoming a software dev.
Do these attorney's demand a substantial retainer up front? It is quite the risk, requiring high levels of both dissonance and intestinal fortitude to contort the law to vigorously represent an admitted deadbeat.
But I am one to cast stones. I was successful in my criminal defense practice and enjoyed the client work. It's working with other attorneys that was the problem.
The landlord signed a long-term rental contract on a unit that did not meet rental code. Yes, the tenant probably knew it was out-of-code when it was rented. Just like any other person renting from a slumlord.
Other than it being Airbnb, and other than the person trying to claim the value of the rental is zero because of the livability issue, it’s a big-standard slumlord situation.
The proper move is to escrow the payments etc but generally you have a lot of rights as a long-term tenant (and many hotels/etc will take specific steps to avoid you being considered a long-term tenant as a result) and you don’t lose them just because the owner is a slumlord or allows the unit to fall below code.
Rentals are really a high-risk market with a lot of legal protections for the tenant, but everyone hopped into the market over the last 10 years thinking they’d just double their money overnight, and this is what happens when a tenant who knows the rules meets a landlord who doesn’t. The number the landlord recovers won’t be zero most likely but they also won’t get it in a timely fashion, or possibly at all.
Where there is money to be made, you're always going to find people who carefully read and understand the rules, and follow them to the letter to gain an advantage. Especially in the fierce housing market. The landlord was foolish and did not follow the rules, and it's costing him.
Is it "smarmy" to do a backdoor Roth IRA[1] contribution? You're getting favored tax treatment but doing it in a "weird" roundabout way, seemingly counter to the intent of the Roth's income limits, but supported by law. Is it a "loophole"?
1: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/backdoor-roth-ira.asp
With a back door Roth IRA there is no clear, obvious victim. You could consider all taxpayers the victim, and some would. Criticizing tax loopholes, especially for the rich, is extremely common sentiment. But to most people “the state” can’t be a victim as it is too big and powerful.
In this case it’s very obvious that a real human person just trying to make a living is being systemically fucked over. They’re not really fighting the human scum who took over their property, they’re symbolically fighting the idiotic, bumbling bureaucracy of the state of California and their unjust laws.
Like, I don’t know if the incredulity expressed in your comment is genuine, or if you’re just trying to play devils advocate… it’s very natural and easy for (seemingly) everyone else to understand the power dynamics here
Your "exploit" description is a little emotionally charged. Business transactions happen all the time where one party gets screwed because they failed to read the contract, or failed to know the law, or failed to do due diligence. As a business person, you kind of have to sweat the details if you're going to hang your shingle out there and try to make money. This landlord got screwed, no doubt, but it was due to their own incompetence + having a smart counterparty to the transaction who apparently did her homework.
>a little emotionally charged
No, it isn’t. This is the correct usage of the word.
Not surprised the place with a cult-like hatred for landlords is speaking out against this landlord… I don’t much care for the opinions of 13 year old “communists” and r/antiwork losers so I don’t browse that site.
Hell is other attorneys, as Sartre famously said.
The guest seems to not have a contract for a long term stay. So how can they have any protections that cater to real renters? Does this mean everybody who breaks into a house has those protections?
What would happen if the owner evicted the guest via some private security firm? Would police help the guest to get back into the house? On which legal grounds?
>> Because she stayed in the unit for six months, Hirschhorn qualified for L.A.'s recently adopted Just Cause Ordinance, which requires a landlord to have a legal reason to evict her
But...
>> Hirschhorn’s attorney told the Times that "she was not required to pay rent because the city had never approved the unit for occupancy and that its shower was constructed without a permit."
So she's staying in an unlicensed rental unit, not paying, and yet entitled to renter protections?
The previous article was saying that she had to pay the market rate and she considered the market rate for an unoccupaniable unit as 0$. That should fail in court imo; plenty of people rent storage spaces that are unoccupiable and those have costs > 0.
I guess the 0$ is pretty critical to her side as you generally can't legal _not pay rent_. You can put the money into escrow (i.e. LA's REAP [1]) if the property is in violation of a housing ordinance.
I'm still going with this was probably a slam dunk for him to evict her if he actually went to a lawyer in the first place instead of trying to placate her when he first started having problems.
[1]: https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/los_angeles/latest/lam...
Airbnb provides a contract page that can be considered a rental document in the eyes of California regardless of length.
> Does this mean everybody who breaks into a house has those protections?
See point 1.
California is a real life big rock candy mountain.
There's obviously abuse enabled by this, but the correct amount of renter-initiated abuse is not zero.
According to [1] the tenant and landlord had agreed to a 187 night rental, with the tenant paying $20,793 - which has been paid.
The landlord then agreed to an extension outside of AirBnB (which to be fair just sounds like him being a nice guy when she said she couldn't find a place to move to) and there were minor maintenance problems (which the landlord wanted to fix but the tenant wouldn't give him access). Also the rental property wasn't built or operated with the right permits. The tenant is also disabled (or at least claims to be). Apparently these factors have made it difficult to get an eviction order.
The tenant does sound like a dick though.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-10-04/airbnb-g...
Hence, many hotel managers do not allow people to stay beyond the number of nights they qualifies the customer to become a permanent resident (30 nights in many US states).
I've only rented via Airbnb a couple of times and this was a while ago. I gave up on it because of the (infamous) arbitrary host specific "check-in" process, ability for hosts to make all sorts of specific demands for the check-out process, application of random fees all over the place... Leave a towel in the wrong spot? Yeah that will be $100. Don't load the dishwasher properly? $100. Forget something in the fridge? $100. It never ends and obviously the "host" is incentivized to apply as many random fees and convoluted requirements as possible to trip people up and ensure they can basically shake their guests down for another substantial amount of fees which in some cases can be the equivalent of staying another day or even two. Then you get to end up in the also arbitrary Airbnb dispute process...
Additionally, hosts are able to apply completely random and arbitrary demands for the entire guest stay. Oh, a pissed off neighbor that hates the fact someone put a property on Airbnb calls the police every time you walk through the hallway above a whisper? Sorry, not our problem even though the host is well aware of this because it's happened 10 times.
It's not really price competitive and in the end you're essentially required to do a bunch of random chores to the individual host's specifications upon "check out" and then you get to worry about finding a bunch of random fees tacked on to your stay later. You're also often subject to a variety of host-specific requirements for what they deem acceptable/proper use of the property. There are plenty of horror stories around like hosts that don't drink alcohol attempting to impose their viewpoint on guests and say things like "no alcohol allowed". Makes for a nice, relaxing vacation!
From what I understand this has gotten better but contrast this with hotels: as long as you don't destroy the room on check out you walk out of the property and never give it another thought. I think most people also have a fairly good idea of what constitutes acceptable/normal use and behavior when it comes to hotel rooms. When you step outside of this the worst that happens is someone from the hotel calls you or comes to the room, explains the situation, and gives you a warning and chance to rectify the situation immediately. Again, with Airbnb the host is incentivized to look for a reason to kick you out and you end up on the street with no (immediate) recourse.
Note I'm not saying I'm some kind of nightmare guest in hotels or short term rentals but again, there are plenty of stories online where there are seemingly valid points from the perspective of the guest that result in all kinds of absurd situations.
Back on topic, this is yet another fundamental problem with the short term rental/Airbnb approach. Anyone should have absolutely seen this coming. Real estate is an extremely complicated and region specific hodgepodge of state laws, municipality laws, sometimes even zoning, random regulations down to HOAs, condo boards, apartment property managers, etc. I'm not saying this is a good thing but it is the way things are and hotels are an established and well-oiled machine by comparison.
Wow. Is that a law most Californians support?
Its also like 300,000 dollars to get a liquor license in L.A. which is the government essentially excluding all small business from starting a bar and playing favoritism to big corporations with the stated intention of safety/regulation.
Now for the problem: it takes many months to evict here, best case. As a result, we will never take a chance on a marginal tenant. No other decent landlord with whom I’ve spoken will either.
Unintended consequences are real, especially when owners are deprived of their property rights. You might think I’m conservative, but for the most part I’m a flaming liberal. ;-)
Just like rent control.
If your sympathies side with those on the side of the parasitic rent extraction machine depleting the productive capacity of the real economy (the side of the economy where people work rather than charge for access to assets), you won't be a champion of either of these things and will argue that they are well meaning but inadvertently bad for the victims of the parasites.
Realistically some parasites can't be killed without killing the host - they entrench themselves that deeply. When Cuba decided to overhaul land rights, for example, the US invaded.
If you ignore the Airbnb element — then on the surface this appears to be an issue of a landlord letting a property which was not fit for occupation. It is the landlords obligation, not the renters, to determine whether their property is fit for purpose. If they failed to do so, then the renter is protected from punitive actions (such as being evicted) for wanting these fixes made when they are discovered.
Seems reasonable to me.
And if the residence isn't fit for occupancy, then nobody should be living there, rent or no rent. While apparently legal, the dissonance required to argue "I won't pay rent because the home isn't fit for purpose" while living long-term in that same house makes my eye twitch.
Depends a bit on whether it was "not fit for purpose" knowingly before living there, or part-way through. A landlord shouldn't be able to get around rental protections by intentionally neglecting the property, nor should they be able to hide serious problems and go "welp, move out" when discovered.
There is an inherent huge power imbalance between the landlord and the renter, where if the landlord ad-hoc decides to throw you out before you have a new place lined up, you might find yourself homeless. When people have such power over others, they often abuse that power in various ways, like asking for sexual favors, raising the rent cost exploitatively high at inopportune moments, or blackmailing the renter to keep quiet about violations, etc.
We as a society recognize that simply telling people "if you don't like the thing your landlord is asking of you in the middle of the night without warning, you are free to move out and become homeless until you find a new location" is not a humane and viable solution. Hence, we have laws for what can and can't be done.
The worst markets were the most regulated with the most "protections". The US was exceptionally bad. There are several checks (ie: credit check), wait time, deposit, papers, onboarding process, more wait time, bank balance checks, more papers to sign. etc... for a few months rental. And you'd think all these people will make for a better maintained property. Nope.
But have you considered that as you were traveling across different countries, you'd be biased towards seeing the problems that affect you (finding a new place to rent) and you'd not be seeing the problems that don't affect you (existing renters being abused)?
Traveling is not the same thing as moving.
Imagine you are a lone mother taking care of her kid, you are carpooling to work, and barely making ends meet. Then your landlord starts making some demands on you and starts hinting that he might throw you out otherwise. Is it realistic to say "The mother should just move out the next day, and find a new place for herself and her child, and find a new means of transportation to her job. If that new landlord abuses his power she should just move again the next day."
Your viewpoint isn't uncommon, but the last few hundred years of modern society has repeatedly demonstrated that if people have leverage over others in terms of their access to food, medicine and shelter, then that power will be abused. If companies could they'd be paying you in scrip, we had to outlaw it, not simply tell workers to find a non-scrip workplace.
Perhaps future generations will look back on this period and see us as barbaric because of it.
Moving is very expensive. You have a deposit on the new rental. You have to pay for moving your stuff over to the new place. You might have to take time off work to search for a new rental. You probably have some overlapping lease time where you are paying double on rent.
Some highlights: * Tenant is a Harvard Alumna. * Tenant pulled the same move a year ago in Oakland * Tenant appears to be a general crazy person.
*edit removed amp issue from link (sorry about that).
Some folks may remember Pacific Heights[0], where a very different side of Michael Keaton was revealed.
That 100k is probably approaching the opportunity cost if it hasn't exceeded it already. Time to move on and pay the ransom. Although if it were me on the receiving end I doubt I'd see it so rationally.
> Some highlights: * Tenet is a Harvard Alumna. * Tenet pulled the same move a year ago in Oakland * Tenet appears to be a general crazy person.
Your amp link has a video that is impossible to stop. Here is a non amp link.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12597887/Airbnb-gue...
Well one thing is certain, the tenant will have harder time renting anything in USA in the future.
Shame on such city leaders who care only for votes.
this is FALSE, and typical of the kind of table-talk among older landowners
1. Otherwise good tenants just without means who would otherwise be homeless.
2. Hellish tenants without means who also would be homeless.
3. Hellish tenants with means who play the "But I would be homeless" card as an excuse to cheat landlords.
The tenant in question here is 3. rather than 1. A judge cannot side with everyone as 1, must treat everyone equally with the given facts but should not enable those refuse to pay or exploit technicalities to create a situation without relief.
The landlord didn't understand the law, was too generous, and failed to hire a lawyer.
If the judge does not evict (1) then state should pay the rent for them.
this is FALSE and also typical of uninformed commentary
Regardless, I don't think this should matter for the eviction, although the city could imposes additional fines for the landlord if they wanted to. "You rented it illegally therefore I don't have to pay rent and I can stay here for as long as I want" is obviously not reasonable.
Fact is the services were rendered and that some bureaucratic procedure may not have been entirely correct, something she did not suffer any damages from, is frankly none of the tenant's business but between the city and landlord.
This has all the hallmarks of someone intentionally trying to find flaws to exploit (also see the whole business with the shower).
If there’s any language regarding the dwelling being habitable, then the lack of a license makes it by definition not a habitable dwelling and thus the he never fulfilled his end of the agreement, making it necessary to refund the rent paid.
In other words, services might be rendered, but not the services as agreed upon in the lease.
The secondary matter would be if occupying someone’s property is an allowable remedy until the payment is made, which is a bit more thorny, on the other hand, occupation notwithstanding, it’s not uncommon to maintain possession of someone’s property until payment is made as a form of leverage (e.g. keeping a customer’s laptop until they’ve made payment for repairs made on said laptop).
What’s interesting is that he’s a Netherlands native, but then acts stumped about LA’s Just Cause requirement.
In the Netherlands leases for consumers are always under a Just Cause principle and pretty much the only way to cancel a lease as a landlord is non-payment.
End dates in leases are void, landlord wanting to occupy the property themselves is not a valid reason to cancel the lease, sale of property is not a valid reason to cancel the lease (lease gets transferred over to new owner).
Basically the only way to get a tenant out is if the tenant cancels the lease themselves or if there’s a significant period of non-payment.
The legislature has to choose who gets the power in rental relationships and i see the arguments for either choice.
By which definition of "habitable"? Because I've never seen a definition of "habitable" that involves legal licensing issues.
It’s a wrong analogy.
But in this guy's case, because he was renting out an unregistered AirBnB, and for a term of greater than 30 days, it was treated as a normal tenancy rather than as a short-term stay, and thus normal landlord-tenant laws apply.
Generally, one of the main rules of rental law is that tenants cannot be evicted for nonpayment of rent if there are habitability and compliance issues with the unit, which it appears there may be. (EDIT: also, it appears the unit itself was never permitted for occupancy, so he shouldn't even have been renting it out on AirBnB. This is probably why he didn't register it as a short-term rental.)
Basically, she's the tenant from hell...but he's also made a number of serious mistakes which let her take advantage of him in the first place.
How does this setup work logistically? Does the woman ever leave? What if the owner just waits for the woman to go grocery shopping and breaks into his own property and changes the locks? Are there any cases of such a thing happening?
Or what if he just turned off her water from the main house? So many scenarios, I don't understand.
If he turned off the water, she would report the issue to the city and they'd force him to turn it back on, and he would likely face a fine.
His only option is to fight it out in a court that is heavily tilted in favor of tenants, and she (his "tenant") knows it.
Taking the article at face value; there is nothing here that I can recognise as property rights. It reads like state-sanctioned theft. To a level of crazyness where I'd like to read the court records to find out the details.
The main problem is he doesn't have a lawyer and doesn't understand how anything works. There are a half dozen ways to evict this insane, scofflaw mooch legally.
This was a PR piece designed to make him look good.
Everybody I know who owns rental property has dealt with problem tenants. It's a hassle. But, nobody should be buying rental properties without understanding how/if the local laws protect tenants.
And I'm guessing in many jurisdictions, regular rental laws apply to Airbnb, at least in part. As they appear to do in this story. This is, in part, why hotels have different regulations (though even then, guests have some rights).
I was just about to travel for Christmas (outside France), so I had to urgently find somewhere else to live in a few days, then move all my stuff, just before I went away. That was difficult.
I was lucky some lovely Mormon friends stopped by, and when I asked if they could help me move my stuff, they obtained the church van, ignored that they weren't insured to carry me or my things, and did a brilliant job of helping me move quickly.
Same without purchase in fact. The owner can tell you to leave if it plans to move in.
I am however not sure if law is specific enough to avoid being exploited with loopholes like "owner move in legally for 1 month (while not actually living there and doing renovation), then start renting again to someone else"
In order to avoid squatting, put the property to use or hire a security company. Don't expect the state to provide protection for land that's not being put to use.
When I lived in CA I had to help my friends and family with lawsuits against some legitimately bad landlords (a meth head in one case, heroin in another, and frivolous eviction because they wanted to jack the rent up for a new tenant before the lease ended). While I was researching California Civil Code (not to mention what cities like SF and LA have stacked on top of it), the deck is completely stacked against property owners. Like it’s relatively trivial to exploit the law to live rent free for six+ months while a lawsuit is pending and then ride off into the hills and do it again with your next landlord.
Fun fact, if you stay in a CA hotel for 30+ days you are legally a tenant and they have to sue for eviction if you don’t feel like leaving.
Although I think AirBNB rentals are in general morally wrong I don’t think these laws are always fair either, and I would definitely avoid renting out property in CA.
they should just stop paying
It’s a good old fashion siege
But hey, it's California, so there's probably some legal loophole that would mess that up even more.
Wonder if this would qualify for YC's non technical hack question? But then again, they've removed that question...
California renters pay 43% more than US, but the gap’s shrinking California rents up 14% since July-through-September 2019. Meanwhile, the typical US tenant paid 21% more...
Edit: to clarify this was mostly a stab at trying to deal with this sort of stuff yourself.
The reason he can't evict appears to be that the accomodation isn't considered suitable to let, because it has an "illegal shower". As a consequence he is denied access to remedy other causes of problems with the property (damp penetration).
I'm not American, and definitely not from CA; and I'm certainly not any kind of lawyer. It seems to me that the Department of Building and Safety must be guilty of gross maladministration, and the landlord should be able to sue for compensation and punitive damages. It seems obvious.
Meanwhile, I detest AirBnB. My neighbour is a non-resident AirBnB host.
Extending the "lease" beyond the date agreed to as well as writing legal statements to her without running them by a lawyer really screwed him over in the beginning.
Nothing wrong with exercising your rights but uh do make sure that they're actually rights ...
LA has a bunch of gangs/cartels operating in it already. Is this something that is already happening? What prevents them from offering a "service of getting rid from problem tenants"?
In other contexts due to jury nullification, prosecutorial misconduct and similar you might actually see vigilante groups for hire. The opening scene from The Godfather was based on reality.
While the tenant can always declare bankruptcy for money they owe you, engaging in illegal activity against a tenant could easily result in you owing that person far more than the nuisance and lost rent from them living in your backyard.
Reality is the landlord has a lot more to lose than the tenant, so what you're describing is completely impractical.
But could you really be prosecuted if there was never any explicit discussion for getting rid of a tenant? Am I responsible for the unrequested criminal actions of a group that I also happen to pay? Is it racketeering if they offer other, legitimate services? These are all asked genuinely, I'm now morbidly curious if it's possible to get away with it, haha.
I didn't reply at the time because I wasn't sure if they had upgraded to USB C but I can confirm that as of today, October 8th, 2023 Logitech is still selling $130 mouses with micro usb ports.
So do Dallas, Atlanta, Tuscon, Indianapolis, and a bunch of other extremely red cities which have an excess of law enforcement. It turns out that the amount of law enforcement isn't related to the presence of gangs.
What prevents them from offering a "service of getting rid from problem tenants"?
Because outside of Hollywood movies, life doesn't actually work that way. If problem tenants suddenly started disappearing, it would be pretty easy to follow the clues back to the gang and the landlord, and the punishment for both would far exceed the economic benefits to the landlord or the gang. Law enforcement many turn a blind eye to drug sales when they have to triage prosecutions due to limited prison capacity, but they aren't going to turn a blind eye to murder.