Q–At the time I rented my apartment in a three-flat, I was separated from my husband. We now have reconciled and he’s moved into the apartment with me.
My landlord, who lives upstairs, says that when I rented the apartment, I only disclosed myself and my daughter as tenants.
He said that, because my husband now is living there, I have violated the lease. I’ve offered to add my husband to the lease, but the landlord has refused.
It is worth noting that my husband is black and I am white, and I am wondering if the landlord doesn’t want an interracial couple in the building.
My landlord is threatening to evict us unless my husband moves out of the apartment. What can I do?
A–First of all you should check your lease to see if you are, in fact, violating its terms. While you might have only disclosed the occupancy of yourself and your daughter, that doesn’t mean that you falsified that application.
At the time you filled out the application, because you were separated from your husband, you probably expected that only you and your daughter would be occupying the apartment. As a result, you probably were not lying on that application.
The question then becomes whether there is a prohibition against additional occupants in the lease. The lease would have to state in its terms that only two persons could occupy the apartment, or would have to state that only the persons disclosed on the lease application could occupy the lease.
If your lease does not contain either of those provisions, then technically your husband’s occupancy does not constitute a violation of the lease.
As a practical matter, there is little chance that a judge is going to evict you from an apartment simply because your husband has moved back in.
While your lease contains many obligations which you must fulfill, that does not include an obligation to put your life on hold while you occupy the apartment.
A judge would probably find that finding you in default for having your husband move back into the apartment would be against public policy, which encourages stable marriages, and therefore, he would probably not order your eviction.
If, however, your husband’s occupancy in the apartment created an overcrowding situation, you might face more jeopardy in this regard.
However, in order to try to evict you on this basis, the landlord would either have to prove that your overcrowding violated local ordinances, or would violate his standard occupancy policy.
Few landlords’ occupancy policies are that particular, or that standardized. Further, if this is a small owner-occupied apartment building, it is unlikely that the landlord has any standard occupancy policy which is clearly written and can be shown to a judge at the time of the hearing.
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Robert A. Boron, a Chicago attorney who specializes in leasing matters, writes about landlord and tenant issues for the Tribune. Questions to him can be addressed to Rental Q&A, Real Estate section, Chicago Tribune, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60611. He also can be reached by e-mail at rabltd@aol.com. Sorry, but he cannot make personal replies.
