OPINIONS: The heartaches of rental relationships, especially these days

A couple of years after I moved out, a good friend of mine moved into the other side of that same duplex. A man lived in what used to be my apartment. And during the first few days that my friend lived in the place, he heard the man shouting angrily on the phone at someone. But the shouting continued night after night. And the scary truth became clear; he wasn’t on the phone. He was shouting obscene, absurd stuff, having loud fights with imaginary foes. The walls shook. He seemed clearly schizophrenic. My friend, who feared for his safety, soon moved.

Later, I visited my former landlord. Her husband had passed on. She had been very frightened by the tenant and ultimately had the schizophrenic man forced out, but not before he tore up the place, busting holes in the wall and doing about $9,000 in damage.

I felt really sorry for the woman. She and her husband had always been good about responding when I had a problem at the place. They never bumped the rent up on me. It stayed at $325 from 1997 to 2003, which was a great deal. Now, with her husband gone, she had to deal with a severely troubled and volatile man.

I thought about her recently when I got a call from a property owner who wondered if I could write about his situation with tenants who had trashed his place. I told him that this newspaper does not cover specific disputes between landlords and tenants. That’s a policy. For instance, whether somebody is paying their rent isn’t something we’re going to address in a news story, unless it is somehow pertinent to a bigger issue, like a major crime.

That said, the landlord-renter relationship, at least in general terms, is a very relevant economic story these days. That relationship historically is often tense. Either side can betray their responsibilities. That’s always true. A landlord can fail to address plumbing issues or fix the heat in a timely manner. A tenant can be perpetually late on rent and fail to abide by rules established at the start of the contract, such as bringing in a pet when no pets are allowed. Or, they may simply fail to clean, letting the property fall into total filfth.

The two sides have completely different motivations. The landlord is seeking long-term returns free of everyday worries. But a tenant, who is focused on the everyday comforts, does not have a long-term economic investment in the place. He often has little stake in it outside of finding the money for the term of his lease. Of course, that’s the luxury of renting. You’re not bound by a place. But that same detachment is what leads to lack of care for a property and trouble for the owner.

And these problems seem even more intense now. Many people who got into the rental business in the early 2000s are really struggling. For instance, one man I talked to had a really good tenant living in his rental home for several years. But the tenant, like so many others, lost his job and couldn’t keep up the rent. So, he moved out and into a house with his mother.

This can be a tough thing, not just for the guy who lost his job and moved out, but the landlord too. There is a real ripple effect. For instance, the property owner I spoke with accepted new tenants, who trashed the house. He said they moved a lot of mattresses into the place, but hardly any other furniture. And the place became a party den.

Now, if a landlord is making a mortgage payment on that house, he now has to sink money into repairs, before he can rent it again, or he can go the route of potentially “throwing good money after bad” by taking it to court, where the tenants who did the damage might never pay even if they lose. If he puts the money into repairs, while not getting any rent, he may fall far behind on his mortgage payments. If he fails to make the repairs, he’ll likely need to lower the rent and get new tenants who, upon seeing the poor conditions of their new living quarters, are potentially even less concerned with maintaining the place than the previous tenants. Likewise, if the property owner has now fallen behind on mortgage payments, he probably can’t make repairs when the tenants need them.

So the ugly cycle may continue again and again. And a place falls into disrepair and loses value over time. The one-time dream of easy money off property management becomes a nightmare that can’t be escaped. That nightmare is very real for many people who bought property when it seemed residential values would never bump their head on the ceiling.

Magistrate Judge Harry Rice said he has seen this play out in his court. He gets the oh-so-enviable job of refereeing these disputes. And the judge noted an increase in civil property cases, such as evictions, in his court since the economy went south.

“The economy is making it that much worse,” said Rice. “A lot of the tenants have lost jobs or they have taken pay cuts. So they’re in dire straits on being able to pay the rent, but then you’ve also got the property owners who are sitting there counting on the rent to make their mortgage payments, especially if they bought property with the vision of property values going up … Well, the economy has knocked a hole in all that.”

While we look at the broad economic figures, like unemployment rates, national debt and interest rates, there are the personal tensions in this recession that bring the difficulties home — literally. The landlord-renter relationship is certainly strained these days. And there’s a lot of heartache on both sides.

Zach Mitcham is editor of The Madison County Journal.