I was approached by Catholic Services to rent to refugees

[Natasha Attia]

Hi landlords,

Who had an experience of renting to refugees with no employment or rental references? I was approached by Catholic Services. Have you done it? Have you have any issues? I am struggling to find tenant now anyway.

[Chris Mason]

Originally posted by @Jay Ingram:

My friends own a company designed for renting to refugees. They have some great tenants and some that aren’t. Make sure they have a thorough orientation on the expectation of a tenant and home care. For example, a friend told me a Somali family that lived in one of their units never used a shower curtain and eventually they had to replace the flooring due to water damage. They own hundreds of units and now make sure that everyone knows expectations going forward!

Having lived in a bunch of 3rd world countries while in the Marines, I'd say this is the most important. 

To wit: We had to teach a local that we didn't consider it OK to chew on twigs and spit them out while in a motor vehicle that you do not own (chewing on twigs from a particular plant being the local equivalent of brushing one's teeth). That's not to say he's a bad person or any of that, just that his cultural norms/expectations were vastly different from ours. He literally grew up with donkeys and camels as the family "vehicles," so it 100% makes sense that spitting twigs out off to the side wasn't something he gave second thought to... plop a 19th century cowboy in a Corvette, and he might spit chewing tobacco without really thinking about it! (the guy with the twigs will probably have cleaner teeth though) 

They don't know what they don't know, and you don't know what they don't know. It's entirely plausible that the Somali in the above example had never been in a shower (I could stop the sentence here, but I'll continue) where water on the floor could cause damage. In Eastern Europe there were bathrooms in homes where the entire floor (plus most of the walls) was tiled like the shower, leading to a drain in the middle of the bathroom, meaning a shower curtain is a matter of preference (some people like to keep the steam in, or might have bathroom electronics out on the sink, but it's not considered "necessary" as it is in our "standard" bathrooms), so this isn't even necessarily limited to folks from the "3rd world."

Oh here's one: sitting on a toilet. Instead of getting up on the toilet, turning around to face forward (putting 100% of body weight on one side of the toilet in the process), planting both feet on the seat, standing up, and squatting down (for #2 or #1), which will cause the bolts holding the toilet in place to come loose (our toilets are built to assume weight roughly evenly distributed on the seat). Some places have bathrooms that lack sitting thrones and toilet paper, unless you are in a hotel/restaurant that caters to Westerners (you could pogo stick bounce on one side of this toilet all day and not cause any bolts to come loose):

Let's see... smoking cigarettes inside. Still the norm on a lot of the planet. 

Kitchens and cooking. I'm sure there's lots of interesting differences there.

I guess my big question would be what "Western Cultural Norms 101" support the charity outfit will be offering. It's not that western cultural norms are better or anything like that, but there's about a 99.99% chance that your rental property was built from the ground up to assume western cultural norms would be practiced by residents. They don't know what they don't know. And you don't know what the refugees don't know. Does the charity outfit know, from their experience, and go over this stuff?