Crazy Tenant = So Much Damage

[Graeme Ford]

Hey BP! not having much luck getting responses in the forums, but I'll keep trying. I have been thinking about the worse case or "nightmare" tenant situation. This of course involving extensive amounts of purposeful damage being inflicted on your property and you not being able to do anything about it, or at least feeling like there is nothing you can do. 

What steps would you take to mitigate the extent of damages and resolve the issue efficiently? 

[Marcia Maynard]

@Graeme Ford Okay. I get it. Well how about a real scenario that had us sweating?

Long term tenant, whose cognitive ability starts to deteriorate as she ages, now in her late 70's. One young guy, in early 30s somehow schmoozes his way into her life and starts hanging out at her apartment (a duplex unit in a group of four duplex buildings). Soon this guy becomes an unauthorized occupant. 

We are unaware of anything going on until we are working outside at the property one day and meet a probation officer outside the door to the unit. He's checking to see if one of his charges is living there. No one's home. We introduce ourselves and he tells us the name of a person who has listed the apartment as their current address. Never heard of the guy and we inform the officer it's the apartment of a retired senior woman. Probation officer tells us the guy is going to get arrested again soon, warrant out, and "this guy is bad news, so don't confront him if you see him." With his name, we look up info in the court records and find out he has a many drug related offenses, including meth.

When our tenant comes home, we go to talk with her. She denies knowing anything. We start watching the apartment like a hawk. Soon we see quite a bit of traffic in the evening. Lots of surely looking characters in their 20s and 30s coming and going. We think drug dealing. During the daytime, all's quiet on the western front. We (husband and I together) go to the unit to talk to the tenant again about our observations and through the front door we see a young woman exiting the bathroom. The place is noticeably messy. Our tenant becomes defensive and adamant that these friends of her and are welcome, that they aren't living there, just visiting. They appear stoned out to us. We observe our tenant is out of her normal character, looks disheveled and acts angry and agitated.  We are sure something bad is going on. We let her know we need to do a maintenance check and give her the proper 48hr notice to enter. Two days later we arrive with our handyman, but she refuses to let us enter. We contact our neighborhood police officer to alert the police about our observations of possible drug traffic and concern for our tenant. They increase patrols, but tell us is little there is little they can do until either the tenant complains or they see criminal activity.

What about the neighbors? No one is talking. The tenant in the unit on the other side of the duplex often works out of town and says he hadn't noticed anything. We continue our surveillance. More activity. We contact the probation officer when we see people there and he tells us the guy he was looking for is in jail, arrested the same day we had met him. The guy who has started living in the apartment with our elderly tenant is obviously someone else! 

We finally get his name and eventually a no trespassing order for him. We even find out the name of his mother and talk to his parents. Very sad story. The son of a wealthy family who had gotten involved in the meth scene and ended up homeless living on the streets. Well educated, good looking, personable and adept at manipulation. Uses others to feed his drug habit. We actually meet the guy sitting on the front steps and see how persuasive he is. We tell him he can't be living there and needs to move on. The talk... "You know and we know you can't be living here, time to move on. Living here in not an option for you." He moves out. On the street again or the next couch he can find. We give his parents tickets to my husband's Christmas concert, a fundraiser for a charity organization in town that works with homeless people. We listen to their story, we feel their pain.

Without our tenant objecting to his being there, we had to go the route of serving her a "comply or vacate notice", contacting her case managers (Section 8 and senior assistance), and rallying the village for her safety. The police were on alert. After the crowd of undesirables were gone, our tenant was still angry with us for intervening. We continued to watch the property and sure enough, six months later the activity starts up again. 

We made our presence known. Made it uncomfortable for people who don't belong on the property to be there. Employed the techniques of Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED, look it up). Increased lighting, cut back bushes, cleaned up the premises, etc. Asked neighbors to be on alert. Stories of their observations start to come out. Oh yeah... verbal confrontations outside with people screaming at each other. I'm documenting everything we observe or hear about.

One summer night the apartment is again full of people. Loud, others coming and going, some stoned out. We call the police. People scatter. 

We continued to work with the senior services agencies in our town and the Section 8 case manager to get our tenant into a more appropriate place for her.... assisted living. Her mental health had deteriorated. We physically moved her belongings, including her cat, to her new apartment at a senior care center. Her last words to us were, "You know, I own this place (referring to our 8-plex), it's been in my family for generations. But it's okay now because I know you will take good care of it."  Bless her heart.