Q. I have a friend who has been renting for two years under successive one-year leases, and now his landlord is threatening to evict him if he does not agree to sign a third one-year lease (my friend wants to go month to month). I thought that in some states it is illegal to refuse a tenant the ability to pay month to month. Is this the case in New Jersey?
It all seems pretty unreasonable, because it means that the tenant can move only at one point in the year (before signing another yearlong lease), and the fact is that our lives don’t (and shouldn’t) revolve around our landlords.
A. As disappointing as it may be for tenants, there’s no explicit law in New Jersey protecting tenants from landlords who insist on renting with leases rather than on a month-to-month basis. A case can be made in favor of a month-to-month rental in some situations, but whether your friend can make this argument will depend on his persuasiveness, not legal authority.
Your confusion may stem from New Jersey’s provision that landlords cannot refuse to renew a lease unless one of several “just causes” exist. Unfortunately for your friend, that rule doesn’t require landlords to change the length of the rental term at the tenant’s request.
Specifically, termination is allowed after “the landlord or owner proposes, at the termination of a lease, reasonable changes of substance in the terms and conditions … including specifically any change in the term thereof, which the tenant, after written notice, refuses to accept.”
Under this provision, if the landlord had asked for a six-month lease, and the tenant refused, the landlord might be able to terminate, arguing that his “change in the term (of the lease)” is allowable. But that’s not the same as saying that a tenant who wants a month-to-month arrangement can require the landlord to offer it.
Under New Jersey’s law, changes in terms and conditions must be reasonable. Legal Services of New Jersey offers the following explanation of the “reasonable” requirement: “To be ‘reasonable,’ the changes must take into account the circumstances and interests of both the landlord and the tenant. This means that your landlord cannot make lease changes that he or she knows will cause you unnecessary hardship, unless he or she has very strong reasons for doing so. For example, at the end of your lease, your landlord wants to change the lease by putting in late charges if your rent is paid after the fifth day of the month. The landlord knows that you do not get paid or receive your assistance check until the third or fourth day … and that it will be very hard for you to get the rent money to him by the fifth. You refuse to sign the new lease, and the landlord takes you to court to try to evict you. … The judge should decide that the lease change is not reasonable because the landlord knows that you cannot pay the rent by the fifth … and should have picked a later date.”
One can imagine situations in which it makes perfect sense for a tenant to want to have the flexibility of a month-to-month rental instead of a lease. Suppose, for example, that the landlord knows that the tenant has bought a house and will be closing escrow within a few months. Demanding a yearlong lease, knowing that this will place the tenant in the unfortunate position of having to break the lease when the sale finalizes, certainly isn’t very nice. But it’s not illegal.
