Posting for a friend who doesn’t have reddit.
Location: Seattle Metro Region, Washington State.
Is there a legal basis for landlords completely banning overnight guests when in the lease you are allowed to have guests spend the night for a period of time? When said guests have not been disruptive?
A friend’s landlord is banning him from having guests over at all because according to the landlord people are feeling uncomfortable. However none of the other tenants have communicated such to him. Said guests haven’t done anything to make the other tenants feel uncomfortable. No exchanges have happened and the guests are smaller in stature than most of the tenants. [Edit: not little people. Just people physically smaller.] And my friend is quite gentle and open to communication.
There is a group chat with the landlord and all of the tenants, but the demand to not have any more guests spend the night has been via private message with the landlord (who does not live anywhere near the house.)
This also seems to be a pattern with moving goalposts.
In the lease it is said no guests for more than 48 hours.
In one exchange the landlord said no more than 72.
And now it’s no one staying the night at all and no guests at all more than twice a week.
Comments
Is this a roommate situation, or separate units?
>the guests are smaller in stature than most of the tenants.
Why do you think that’s relevant: do you think a small person can’t threaten, intimidate, or harm a large person ? Or is size a proxy for age, gender, race, disability, etc in this case ?
Frankly, that comment sets off some alarm tingles and suggests that there’s something factually and legally important, or discriminatory, omitted from the story. So let’s stick with the law outside of that:
If there’s a lease that addresses overnight guests, then that’s the controlling condition. A modification to that rule has to either be mutual, done at the renewal of a lease or rental period, or part of a house rules document that is incorporated by reference instead of being written into the lease itself.
If the guests are disruptive or part of some other conduct that is violative of the lease, including unapproved or short-term subletting, then the landlord may have a basis to end the tenancy.
But if they are ordinary visitors or overnight guests, then the written lease conditions control. Having visitors is an ordinary use of residential rental property, the same as eating and sleeping are.
>the landlord (who does not live anywhere near the house.)
I’ll posit that maybe there’s something personal, private, or intimate about the reason why the landlord or the other tenants are uncomfortable with your friend’s guests. Maybe it is (in common language) a discriminatory basis.
Landlords who share the premises, or who rent out only one room in a house to a boarder, are exempt from virtually all anti-discrimination housing laws. Even in Seattle (though the precise side of the metropolitan boundary is crucial).
A landlord who lives elsewhere would be at some risk if they used an arbitrary or pretextual basis to evict a tenant (or even pressure them to not make use of their home upon threat of eviction), when the underlying issue would be discriminatory.
Maybe someone has a fear of “Little People”?.