Burnt Orange Report

I know lots of kids who get trapped into long leases and thier roomates bail out on them and it ruins thier credit and they can't find a place to live and so on and so forth. Isn't there someway to remedy this? If so, I think you could really get out the youth vote with it.

Not to defend crappy land lords Ki, but, that's the risk you take for signing a lease, it's a contract, if you sign it you are responsible for it. There are places that write seperate contracts for two tenates, if you are concerned about a sorry roommate, you should go for that. At the very least, if your roommate bails on you and they are on the lease you can go after them financially, of course in TX you'd probably end up oweing your lawyer more than you win and even if you win, who knows if you'll ever actually get your money back. TAKE IT TO THE PEOPLES COURT:)
Judge (Julie)will set them straight.

I had a problem when my landlord, or more accurately the property management firm, decided to simply not deal with the deposit.

Took them to court and won, largely because the house was in a different district from Prospect Realty, the property manager.

When they found out that the venue would not be in a court where they had made contributions to the judge, they settled.

They were awful land lords too, and left a slab leak unfixed until the city, called by a neighbor, complained about water leaking out from under the house.

What are the specific problems with the code though?

I've been told that the Texas code is based on the law of the Lord of a Medieval manner, as opposed to modern contract law, but I don't know the specifics.

Here's the deal:

In the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, courts began to "read in" a lot of contract law which, until then, had been purely a law of property. Like that of the medieval lord, but more accurately the kind of law that governs buying and selling houses.

The old law is this - if you rent land, all you are entitled to from the landlord is legal possession of the land itself for the term of years specified. If you rent a house, and the house burns down the day you move in - tough luck. In fact, you as tenant may be required to rebuild it. The landlord does nothing under the old law except demand (and receive) rent.

In the middle of the last century, leases began to be treated more as contracts. What this meant was that all of a sudden there were a lot of implied promises (implied warranty of habitability, the implied obligation of good faith, voidability of the rent obligation based upon public policy, no retaliatory evictions, etc.) that were construed against landlords.

Taken to the extremes, bad landlords were being forced to make all kinds of repairs never imagined, while tenants were permitted to withhold rent until these repairs were made. This resulted in some landlords simply walking away.

In Texas, the Legislature panicked, and drew up a reactionary landlord-tenant code which severely limits the landlords responsibility to make repairs; moreover, it also limits landlord liability for repairs tenants make (in some jurisdictions, tenants can deduct all the repairs from their rent bill; in Texas, only one month's rent is deductible).

Landlords are required to "try" to make repairs but only after they've gotten notice (and in the case of broken air conditioners, this notice has to be from the local health authority, *not* from the tenant). It's pretty easy for the landlord to just shrug it off. And regardless of whether the landlord succeeds or fails, the tenant still must pay rent.

One good thing is that, as you allude to, it's easy to get your security deposit back in Texas, and indeed you are entitled to treble damages (now here's the thing - did they settle on just the deposit, or for three times the deposit plus fees, which you were entitled to?)

But in terms of actually having decent housing, "decent" is largely the tenant's responsibility in Texas, much as it was in pre-1950s common law.

Commercial leases are dealt with, in part, under the Property Code, but mostly under post-1950s common law. This common law requires the the landlord to keep the implied promise of habitability. There is caselaw where businesses have been allowed to withhold rent until the landlord fixes, say, a leaky roof.

Residential tenants, though, don't have this right. You must pay your rent, and your landlord may or may not fix the problem. This, I find very upsetting.

Now, you may lease from a good landlord who will make the repairs simply out of generousity, or based upon some kind of contractual obligation contained in the lease contract document.

Under the URLTA, which is in effect in many states, the Landlord's responsibilities to keep up the premises are much, much broader.

Ultimately, this all sort of a compromise between property and contract law, but the deal struck in Texas was a raw deal - I feel very adamant about that.

We settled on the deposit and legal fees.

The legal fees were about 8x that of the deposit, so I figured I'd call it acceptable.