Chapter IX: Problems with Roommates

One place that I generally can’t help you against your landlord is if you are having problems with your roommates. If your roommate turns out to be a real jerk, and you can’t live with him anymore, that’s not your landlord’s fault, and the law is not going to punish the landlord because you made a bad choice with to live. Your landlord has no responsibility to see that your roommate cleans up his messes or stops playing his radio too loud at night. You are going to have to find a way to deal with that one by yourself.

If your roommate runs out on the lease, you will have a cause of action against your roommate or his co-signer. But the landlord will have a cause of action against you for your roommate’s end of the rent if you signed a rental agreement containing a joint and several liability clause (see the section on interpretation of rental agreements). These clauses make each tenant responsible for the acts and omissions of the other tenants. The landlord is hoping that one of your roommates or his co-signer is an extremely wealthy person. The landlord will then collect all of the money owed from this one, and leave that extremely wealthy person with
nothing more than a cause of action against the other tenants.

The good news is that you will probably win your case against your roommate and the co-signer. But the bad news is that you may not be able to recover any money. There is an old saying among lawyers: “Winning a judgment is easy. Collecting on it is hard.” If your roommate is penniless, you can’t get blood out of a stone. It has been my experience that people with a lot of money don’t do really stupid things that subject them to liability wherein they might lose their money. People without any money are generally free to act the fool, wreaking havoc upon anyone they please, so long as they do not run afoul of the criminal law. Even if they do run afoul of the criminal law, you cannot threaten criminal prosecution to obtain an advantage in a civil dispute,
and your attorney can be disbarred for trying.

A lot of tenants will try to use the remedies mentioned in this book as camouflage for the fact that they are really just not getting along with their roommate. My advice to you is not to try it. Judges have an uncanny way of seeing through all of that stuff. Though you may technically have a right to get out of your lease, if the Judge senses that you have an ulterior motive, he will bend over backwards to find against you.