House arrest

Landlords are often powerless against bad tenants

by Walter Crockett

Just another day in Judge John Martin's Housing Court. Bedraggled tenants hold their babies, pace the hall, long for a cigarette. Spiffy lawyers clutch their briefcases, banter with their colleagues, let their meters run. Unlucky landlords wait to get screwed.

One old fellow who owns a three-decker off Shrewsbury Street is trying to evict a tenant for non-payment of rent. The tenant doesn't show, so the landlord wins -- sort of.

"You're all set. You got your default," the man's lawyer says to his hearing aid. "But the odds of you collecting your money are between nil and nil."

Two weeks ago, I wrote about landlords from Hell. This week, it's only fair to add that Hell produces far more tenants than landlords. And some of our laws make tenants from Hell feel right at home.

The Worcester Property Owners Association had a booth at the Home Show this month. As talk in the aisle turned to landlords' rights, a woman from Webster walked by, and you could almost see the steam coming out of her ears.

"Since when do landlords have rights?" she interrupted. "My place is empty, and it's going to be empty until we sell." She had just evicted a tenant hellion from her newly decorated apartment after a three-month struggle. His parting shot? "He takes a can of black spray paint and writes -- as tall as you -- F-U-C-K -- right across the whole room."

Landlords aren't angry. They're furious.

"It's frustration and rage," says Bob Sweeney, a Worcester cop and former president of the property owners association. "The laws are totally against you -- not only the laws, but the process."

A landlord for 25 years, Sweeney started his own tenant-screening company and eventually sold it. The company checks a prospective tenant's criminal, credit, and rental history and any eviction records from Housing Court. It's an essential tool for any landlord who doesn't want to get burned, but it still isn't foolproof.

"I just went through an eviction last week," Sweeney says. "The guy owed me $900 in past rent. I didn't get a dime back, and I'm sure I never will. And I've got a crew of three working, spending $1000 to get the apartment so it's rentable. So there's almost two grand I'm out -- and I can screen a tenant as well as anybody."

Sweeney says he rarely takes a case to trial in Housing Court -- he chooses the court's mediation service instead.

"Your best bet is to go into mediation because you're not going to win anyhow," he says. "The judge is going to give them as much time as they want unless you can prove there's been a drug raid or something."

So Sweeney took his second-floor tenant at 11 Bancroft Street into mediation. "The first thing I said is, `I want my $900, and I want my apartment vacant by the end of the month.' The guy, he says, `I can't be out by the end of the month. I'll give you $450, and I'll be out by the 12th of March.'

"It's all BS," Sweeney says. "He's biding time; and I know I'm not going to get the $450, but what I want is that held out over his head, and he'll move out in the middle of the night. And just as I suspected, on the 12th in the middle of the night he was gone. But he left tons of rubbish. They painted my walls with brown paint, just making graffiti on them."

You might call this theft, and you might call it malicious destruction of property, but there's no real penalty for it.

"I could go back in now with that court order in hand, get the proof of damages, and win an award for probably $2000," Sweeney says. "But I've got to find him. I've got to prove his ability to pay. Now you take him back into court, he'll say, `Well, I can't barely pay the rent I've got now. I'll give you five bucks or something.'"

It's not like the good old days.

"In the old days you bought a three-family and all the in-laws and out-laws moved in," says Bob McCauley, host of WTAG's popular Real Estate Roundtable. "And if you had an apartment that was vacant you looked for somebody from the bowling team and then you looked for somebody from the shop or somebody from the church, and that's kind of the way it went. Now it's altogether different."

Anthony Vigliotti, Worcester County Register of Deeds, points out that many of the descendants of three-decker owners have grown up in single-family neighborhoods. They see three-decker life as a step backwards. So elderly people who still own three-deckers are forced to rent to people they don't know. Then they find themselves in a very expensive Catch-22 -- the law says they can't refuse to rent to families with children, but the law also says that they have to delead their apartments before they rent to families with children.

Bob Sweeney has deleaded 11 Bancroft Street three times, starting with when he first bought the property. "That's when the law said that kids only eat paint up to four feet high and a two-inch biting edge, and they don't eat window sashes," he says. "But now they say kids eat paint up to five feet high and a four-inch biting edge and the entire window sash. These kids under six are getting taller all the time."

After a child in his three-decker was found to have lead poisoning, Sweeney says, he was forced to put $9000 worth of vinyl siding on his house -- not because there was lead paint, but because the latex exterior paint on the third floor was flaking, and the Health Department found lead in the wood underneath it.

"The child did not get poisoned in my building," Sweeney says. "But they don't care about that, they found a villain, because the wood has lead in it." The story goes on, but you get the idea.

Bob McCauley has a standard piece of advice: "If somebody says, `I'm thinking of buying a three-family house,' I say, `Do yourself a favor and go down on Thursday morning and sit in on a session of Judge Martin's Housing Court, and then call me on Sunday and tell me whether you're prepared to be the owner of a three-family house.'" "I've got enough stories that I could write a book and scare Stephen King," says attorney Peter Heintzelman, who has specialized in landlord-tenant law for 13 years. "The Housing Court system, by the time you blow the smoke away, is really a wealth-redistribution system. It takes money out of landlords' pockets and gives it to lawyers and courts and tenants. Part of the eviction-lawyer's job is like a cancer surgeon's: most of the news we have for landlords is bad news."

When Heintzelman represents aggrieved landlords, he advises them to forget seeking justice and retribution and focus instead on getting their property back at the least possible cost. And when he represents tenants, he can almost always find some technicality that will cost the landlord a bundle.

For example, if a landlord fails to keep a security deposit in a separate interest-bearing account, the tenant is automatically eligible for three times the rent, plus legal fees -- no matter how badly the tenant has behaved or how far behind the rent payments are.

Another example: if a landlord doesn't keep a separate electric meter for the front-hall lights in a three-decker, a complaining tenant is automatically eligible for the cost of the extra electricity or three times the monthly rent, whichever is greater.

"Who came up with the three-times rule?" Heintzelman asks. "It was meant in the '70s to level the field against bad landlords. The goals are certainly admirable, but if you see the impact it has on landlords and how rents go up, it smacks of injustice. Boy, does it make it hard to buy into the Worcester rental market. And doesn't that kind of shoot the community in the foot?"

Although Judge Martin has taken some criticism for being anti-landlord, everyone interviewed for this column praised him for fairly interpreting an unfair set of laws. And don't even think about appealing his decisions.

"Appeals are just too cost-prohibitive for landlords," Heintzelman says. "The last appeal I had on a landlord-tenant case was 40 hours of legal time, and I pride myself in doing things fast. Forty hours at $150 an hour -- jeez, you might just as well give the tenant a condo."

The bottom line is that our state's housing laws -- which penalize landlords without penalizing malicious tenants -- are gradually forcing amateurs out of the rental business and providing them with little incentive to improve their property. The landlords most likely to survive are those professionals who know how to cut costs and cut corners. And this means our city's marvelous stock of two- and three-deckers could be doomed to gradual neglect and decay.

Then they can call it the city from Hell.

e he targets a neighborhood destroyer. I just might be there too.