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Comment by saithound | Hacker News Reader

> In the United States, the power is almost entirely in the hands of the landlord.

Very much this. The current outcome of any tenant complaint is a private warning not to make a fuss, with an auto-served eviction notice if the tenant makes a fuss anyway.

This situation can only be improved by legislating away at-will evictions (no, less demand would not help fix this, see pandemic). No chance of that in most of the U.S., though.

Uber/Lyft improved upon taxis because there were a lot of people who wanted to supply the service, but it was illegal for them to do so until Uber/Lyft punched a hole on the legal system. The rental market does not have this problem, in some sense the opposite.

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Believe it or not, California no longer allows blanket at-will evictions as part of it's recent rent control law. Landlords still have more leverage than tenants but it's a bit better.

In an at will eviction, can a landlord just evict anyone when he just feels like it?

Yes, they can decide not to renew or extend a lease often with 30 days or less notice.

How is ‘not renewing a lease’ an eviction?

You still have to move. It's the same effect as evicting someone. It often takes months to find and get into a rental in my area. Then you get hit with first, last, and deposit which takes time to save up for. Moving costs are also on top of that.

My last lease in California consisted of 24 documents and addendums totaling 63 pages of dense legalese. Some of those were disclosures required by California law, but most were putting obligations on me (sometimes overlapping and contradictory). I might have been the only tenant there to actually read them every year (they changed every time). If a landlord can find any breach of those terms they can give you just 3 days to fix it before they give you a notice to vacate (giving you just another 3 days to move out). For a professional with a full-time job, some problems just cannot be fixed in 3 days.

Sure, it's not "at-will" and you can fight it, but it sure does feel lopsided if you can be told at any moment to find another place to live in one week for any one of a host of reasons you "agreed" to that change constantly.

Current rent control and just plain tenant law is going to preempt something outrageous (you write as the lease makes outrageous demands but don't give details - California limits what can be considered a nuisance[1]). There's a reason most leases in California follow a boiler plate format. A lease that isn't legal isn't going to go well during an eviction attempt. And remember, an eviction has to be ordered by a court and can always be challenged there.

Contracts just generally can't preempt rights. Of course, the type of contract is important. Ordinary residential tenants have rights. If you're a commercial tenant, any imaginable conditions are possible.

[1] https://selfhelp.courts.ca.gov/eviction-tenant/notice-types

It is less about any of the terms being individually outrageous, the point is more that there are sixty-three pages of them.

They were clearly boilerplate forms, from several sources (hence the overlap and contradictions), "If any terms of this Addendum conflict with the Lease, the terms of this Addendum shall be controlling," etc., 6 documents and 20 pages after some other terms on the same subject. I claim to have read it, but I make no claims about having understood it.

There is an asymmetry of resources here that gives a large property management company a lot of ability to make your life unpleasant (and rent control gives them a good reason to want to). By the time you end up in court you have already lost.

you can only legislate away at-will evictions if you have rent control and rent control exacerbates the housing crisis

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