Freeloading tenant attacks landlord

A tenant who had not paid rent for a year attacked a Marlborough landlord with a frying pan, sending the landlord to the hospital for stitches in numerous locations on his head. The landlord has been ordered not to drive until he recuperates, estimated to take about a month.

The tenant stopped paying rent a year ago. The owner sent him an eviction notice for nonpayment of rent. The tenant then called the local health inspector, who cited only two code violations: a missing (stolen) fire extinguisher and improper egress from the third floor where the tenant lived in a studio apartment. Those code violations show that the building and apartment were in otherwise good shape. Moreover, the local building department inspected the third floor and said there were adequate egresses. The health department still insists they are improper. However, those code violations allowed the tenant to claim that he was "withholding" the rent and blocked the owner's efforts to evict him.

We call this tenant strategy the "free rent trick," and it is entirely legal in Massachusetts. What is lacking in this state is a rent escrow law that would require tenants who withhold rent to escrow it (pay it to the court) as it would otherwise become due to the landlord. A rent escrow law would thus retain all the tenant's powers to stop paying rent to the landlord and force him to make neglected repairs, but it would stop the abuse of our state's rent withholding law that lacks a mandatory escrow provision.

The attack on the landlord shows how intense the hostility can become when a tenant plays the "free rent trick."

Read the full story from the Boston Globe at this web address:
http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2008/01/elderly_landlor.html