Maybe a landlord is not "due" rent if s/he has failed to render and maintain a habitable apartment.
But actually I think that's not the answer. I've seen lots of rental apps that ask if you've ever been in litigation against a landlord. The intent there can only be to weed out the unmeek; I expect this is the same.
Am I unusual that I feel that it is totally normal and morally acceptable (often even morally upright) to lie on questions of that nature? I wouldn't even think twice.
2: Not at all. Lying is perfectly justified in this situation.
The meta-question seems to be: "Have you ever availed yourself of remedies or rights to which you are legally entitled?"
I'll bet it isn't illegal for them to ask, though the fact that they are asking probably means they have no way of knowing unless the applicant tells them.
(Not legal advice, just tenantly sophistry). I'd be with Junior Mint in quibbling about 'due' -- if you were within your rights to withhold the rent, it wasn't 'due'. And I wouldn't feel bad about lying,
Kurt Vonnegut is dead.
So he can't collect rent from you anyhow.
The landlord might use lying as a pretext for eviction, though of course you can just fight all over again.
Emerson is right in 8. Those advocating lying are forgetting the basic rule that it's not the crime, it's the cover-up that gets you. (Plus, of course, we should not lie).
In Texas, we have a standard rental application that pretty much everyone uses, so I've never seen any questions of that nature. OTOH, it has its own draconian provisions about rent acceleration. Your landlord can, at any time and for any reason, ask you to pay out all the remaining rent on your lease on penalty of eviction. And lease termination clauses are very inflexible, even in places where they don't need to be because they're plenty of demand.
It might actually be prohibited by statute, but barely and unenforceably. The retaliatory eviction statutes I've seen read something like this:
a landlord shall not retaliate by increasing rent or decreasing services or by bringing or threatening to bring an action for possession or by failing to renew a rental agreement after any of the following... For exercising any of the rights and remedies pursuant to this chapter
Doesn't say the landlord is only prohibited from retaliating for things you've done to that landlord. But it also doesn't say that a first-time rental application can't be denied for this reason. You'd have to be offered the apartment at a higher rent than otherwise to have a complaint, I think. And even then, I don't think you can get damages. The only remedy is possession (i.e., right not to be evicted), so you couldn't collect anything.
And with that, I'm off to Property class.
I think LB's got it... the word you want to finesse isn't "willful", it's "due". It's a reasonable interpretation, and I don't think you're lying in applying it in this case. (That being said, ignorace may be your friend here. I wouldn't go researching case law on whether or not rental offsets affect the amount of rent "due" under a lease; you might find an answer you don't like, and then you would be lying. Better to go with your gut.)
To clarify 9, I think 12 is completely reasonable, as long as the facts are such that you can believe it when you say it.
IIRC there was a lawsuit brought by lawyers and/or law students against landlords in, I believe, Cambridge, MA who refused to rent to them because they were too likely to exercise their legal rights. The attys/students lost, I believe.
That's standard on every rental application I've seen. "Due" would be the word I'd want to finesse; rent isn't "due" if the other guy doesn't hold up his legal end of it, or if there's a law that says you're allowed to deduct repairs from the cost of rent.
If you think this is fun, try immigration law.
The 'not lying' bit of 9 is, of course right. I meant something more like 'this is not an area where I'd have any moral worry about a certain amount of sophistry.'
14: It's probably pretty easy for the landlord to make the case that it's not about legal rights, it's ability and likelihood to pay rent, and since they're not singling out any one group, they're not violating fair housing acts.
I came across something similar in NYC. The landlord wanted to know (as part of an application) if I had ever been in housing court for any reason, the clear implication being that this was the mark of a troublemaker. Indeed, I think a private company in NYC keeps a database of names of tenants who have been in housing court, so that landlords can discriminate on precisely that basis. There was a recent decision about it, but alas, I've completely forgotten how exactly it turned out.
So, why the word "willfully"? Because it's okay if the only thing keeping you from paying your rent was a gang of leprachauns holding you down on the couch?
To the non-lawyer, "willfully" could well have the sense of obstinate, arbitrary action, so that you could deny ever having refused to pay rent on that basis. Unless, you know, you actually did say, "fuck the landlord, I'm just not going to pay him the rent he's due."
Please do not mistake the above for legal advice, however.
Housing laws vary by jurisdiction, so whether it's legal would depend on city or state anti-discrimination ordinances. I know that Boston housing law prevents an individual landlord from retaliating against a tenant who wins a housing court case (for all of six months), but I don't know if there's a general provision that prevents landlords from asking this sort of question before they rent.
As a practical matter, housing discrimination is just very hard to prove. I woulndn't be suprised if 14 is true. And I too have heard about litigious tenant blacklists in NYC (Times article). This is one of those cases where what's nominally illegal may not have a huge effect on actual behavior.
It seems unlikely that retaliation could apply to a different (and not yet contracted) landlord, so I really think that's out of the picture. My impression is that housing discrimination only covers certain protected categories (race, sex, maybe marital status, etc), and that outside of those categories the landlord can be as arbitrary and discriminatory as they like. "Sorry, I only rent to people with an even number of vowels in their name." I'd certainly say that they're an ass for asking, and that would make me not want to live there; this has always seemed like a basic problem with housing discrimination cases; the best case is that you win, and then you're living with an antagonized, if hypothetically legally constrained, landlord.
3
You may think lying is morally justified but legally it may be a crime (fraud).
19
Willfully is included as the original post said to mean deliberate. So if you forgot to pay the rent you are ok.
Some landlords won't rent to law students.
26: At Davis the university would rent apartments (these were principally married student housing) to law students, but law students couldn't get in to teh graduate student dorms. I guess that some law students had found a loophole in the K.
w-lfs-n, if you don't have theSan Francisco Tenants' Union site bookmarked yet, do it now. I'd call them up and ask them their interpretation of the question and how they'd advise you to answer it.
The landlords in SF are a particularly loathsome breed. Why was it that you wanted to live in SF proper again?
The landlords in SF are a particularly loathsome breed.
One of my best friends is a landlord, though I don't know what he's like as a landlord. Come to think of it, he's half-Indian, so he's probably a bastard to his tenants.
(I did have a wonderful landlord a few years ago; a Japanese lady who had written a textbook on education, I think, and was also an actress.)
he's half-Indian, so he's probably a bastard to his tenants.
Is this a stereotype I should be familiar with?
You should be familiar with all the major stereotypes, dear Standpipe. Concentrate on the racial ones by Monday, ethnic by Wednesday and the more complex, characterological stereotypes by Monday after next. Feel free to email me if you're having trouble.
I do my best learning one-on-one.
Teach me.
You've got the Parsee thread and the anti-Christ thread. That's gotta be two of the four or five best threads on the internet right there.
Around here (Rhode Island), landlords put any old thing they want on applications (and leases for that matter). Probably it's often illegal, and certainly it's often unenforceable. Maybe it's an East Coast thing, but it seems that a lot of landlord/tenant relationship stuff around here is governed by laws which apply regardless of the text of the lease, so it'd be pointless for someone to try to figure out on their own what their position actually was. Contacting a tenant's rights association of some kind, as someone recommended, is surely the way to go.
Protagoras, you're a Rhode Islander? With JL, that makes three of us. Cool.
I'd call them up and ask them their interpretation of the question and how they'd advise you to answer it.
It doesn't matter in my case because I've never not payed on time. I'm just outraged in principle.
San Francisco rental law is as tenant-biased as you are likely to find. Don't deny the landlords their entertainment.
Just on a technical note, I don't think its legal to just withhold rent in any of the jurisdictions I've been in (NY, TX, parts of CA). You have to go through a court process or hearing to prove your case. After that, you usually get to put rent in escrow until the landlord fixes it. Plus the landlord gets some penalties.
I worked as a tenant organizer for a while in NY, so this was correct at least as of 2002. Usually tenants get away with withholding rent anyway, but occasionally there are problems if you get the wrong judge at housing court. If you've paid your rent, though, and you take it to housing court, you often do better than the folks who withheld it.
If you're in Texas, you pretty much are out of luck any which way, though.