Dear Prudence: I don't want to rent to fatties

[cereta]

Q. Take care of yourself! (Seriously, I mean it!): I own a few houses in a student town that I let out to students as houseshares. These contracts require that if one person leaves before the contract is up, the rest of the tenants find someone new, or take on the responsibility of that person’s rent. In one of the houses that I own, a young lady has unfortunately passed away. I don’t want to sound judgmental, but this young person was extremely obese, and the number of pizza boxes I saw in the recycling when I visited the house suggest that no one in the house was leading a very healthy lifestyle. To me, it is not surprising, in this case, that something like this might happen (she died of an “undiagnosed heart condition”—basically a heart attack from obesity). I know that it’s a hard time for the remaining tenants, who seemed to be quite close with this young person, and I offered a few months leeway with rent, but they do not seem to be looking for anyone new very hard at all. It has now been a month, and I am wondering how long they expect me to just swallow this loss of income. As these young people had just renewed their lease for the coming year, I am resigned to either advertising for a new tenant myself, and going through the hassle of house visits, etc., or just dealing with earning less than I could from this particular property. I am considering telling future tenants that tenancy in my properties is dependent on leading a healthy lifestyle and not taking unnecessary risks, just as a clause to put in the contract. My husband says that I am overreacting to something that is unlikely to ever happen again—that I shouldn’t push my current tenants to fill their spare room and that I should just let it go for now—but the situation is stressing me out so much! Who is right here?

A: What you are, I think, trying to put into your tenants’ clauses is a desire to control for life, a wish you must know on some level is completely impossible. Your pizza-box sleuthing does not mean you know for certainty why this young woman died when she did, and the healthiest person on the planet can still die unexpectedly. They can be hit by a car, and healthy as they may have been up until that moment, their health will not protect them from death. Tenants will, sometimes, inconveniently, die. They may die unexpectedly. You wish to speculate on the causes of death because you are deeply uncomfortable with the idea of something happening that you neither controlled nor wished for. In no state in America is it legal for a landlord to demand their tenants lead a “healthy lifestyle” in order to rent property (I wonder how you would quantify, and test for, a healthy lifestyle in your tenants. Weekly endurance tests? Spontaneous fridge checks? Group meditation? Would you screen for pre-existing conditions? Ask for written descriptions of their weekend plans, in case it involves motorcycle riding or skydiving?) You are overreacting, but not to something that is unlikely to ever happen again. Your tenants will all die. Some may die while they are renting from you. You, too, will someday die, perhaps under inconvenient circumstances, at a time when you do not particularly wish to, and for causes that you cannot yet predict.

Here are the things you may do: Ask your tenants (gently) how the search for a new roommate is going. Give them a deadline (gently) for either moving someone new in, or for making up their late roommate’s share of the rents. Here is something you may not do: Attempt to exorcise your fear of death and the unknown by controlling the people who rent property from you.

Comments

[recessional]

Yeah, this.

Whereas what I read from her is that she's the kind of anxious-control-freak person who would have expected them to have a new tenant within DAYS if she weren't giving leeway, and when she says "a few months" she means (whether consciously or subconsciously) "I am the most generous person in the universe and so I say this but we all understand you're terrible people if you take longer than, say, a month, and are not performing Effort in a way I recognize."

(I am sadly very familiar with this kind of person.)