Hoarding Behaviors Impact Landlord Liability
When I worked for a consortium of self-insured cities right after college, I experienced my first example of animal hoarding, if rats can rightly be called “animals.”
In a small complex of apartments in the Peninsula area of San Francisco, apartment dwellers walked by a unit and noticed a rat once in awhile hanging out on the windowsill. No big deal, they thought. Live and let live. Pretty soon as they passed, the curtains were chewed a bit at the bottom edge. Still no big deal, right? Until a lot of rats crowded on the sill and the curtains were about two feet long instead of four.
Eventually, the neighbors looked in below the curtain fray and saw many, many rats scampering about or lying on the furniture, perhaps watching Animal Planet. The apartment building owner called the city for help.
Rats Gone Wild
Oh, it started out innocently enough—two rats that bred. Then those rats bred. Then the tenants turned their bedroom into the "rat bedroom" and moved into the living room. Soon, the rats took over the whole apartment. There were over 300 when I arrived and the city workers, wearing respirators, were still caging and counting.
If you own rental units, you probably have some horror stories of your own. Tenants who cook meth, store junk, hoard dogs or cats or paper. We never really know people until we either marry them or clean up after them, right?
“Domestic squalor” is the term used to define those who slowly destroy their own living environments. As we know if we watch episodes of Hoarders, hoarders may experience extreme loneliness after the death of a loved one or may have a mental illness. A whole new field of social work has arisen to deal with this tragic issue. However, landlords must proactively manage the issues to avoid liability.
How to Send Hoarders Packing
There are factors that can either encourage or discourage these types of problems in habitational risks. Managing these factors—environmental, biological and equipment—can help you avoid cleaning up a mess.
Environmental factors include blocked hallways, poor lighting which encourages acts like using dark areas as toilets, overgrown plants, and floors left in poor condition.
Biological factors include vermin left untreated, such as roof rats we harbor in central Phoenix neighborhoods. These pesky critters may destroy wiring and bring hosts of other problems, such as mites and odor.
Equipment factors, such as leaking boilers and other poorly maintained apparatus, and often the root cause of other injuries and incidents like mold.
Only a global assessment of your properties can help reduce these types of losses. Ask any repair persons entering your properties, for example a plumber who replaces a leaking faucet or a heating specialist who repairs the heater, to report on the overall condition of that property. One way apartment owners ensure they can enter premises when needed is to place lease language allowing them to enter monthly to replace HVAC filters. This ensures your equipment is better maintained and allows you to eyeball the property for signs of animal or paper hoarding or signs of filth.
In cases where domestic squalor is left unchecked, you will need to marshal outside resources before safely deploying workers. If you never faced this problem as a landlord, visit this URL to see what can happen when hoarding runs wild. Your city or county health department may offer guidance, as the city I represented did in the rat affair. Local charities such as Catholic Charities can assist with the human element, which may be the harder to deal with.
Landlording is never easy, but with today’s increasing disenfranchised population and many living alone without family support, hoarding behaviors are on the rise. Taking proactive steps to address problems head-on before they escalate can save you countless hours and problems.
