Almost every state it is illegal for a landlord to retaliation against a tenant for exerting their legal rights. Under most landlord statutes, a landlord can’t evict, harass or raise the rent of a tenant for actions such as complaining to a government agency or requesting legally-mandated repairs.
Identifying what is a illegal landlord retaliation
If you come across a landlord tenant dispute it can go south and you as the tenant can decide to inform the authorities the tenant is protected from certain retaliatory activity. However, the landlord is not permitted to go after the tenant in a number of ways. The kinds of retaliatory acts covered by most states statutes includes:
Increasing the rent
Ending month- to- month tenancy or refusing to renew a lease.
Firing off an eviction lawsuit if a tenant decides to stay put up a fight in court; and
Petty inconveniences like draining a pool, removing laundry facilities, canceling cable services.
The tenant must prove that these actions were retaliation. That is where the state laws against landlord retaliation come into play.
State Landlord Retaliation laws
Under the state landlord retaliation laws protect tenants from vengeful landlords. If landlords try to evict a tenant for informing government agencies of code violations or for requesting that the landlord make repairs and maintain the rental property in fit and habitable condition.
How to Prove the right information That It's Retaliation
If you’re highly determined to fight back by filing suit or hunkering down and defending against an eviction, there’s one more issue you need to think about. How do you prove your landlord is trying to retaliate against you? In the real world, landlords are rarely so foolish as to say directly, “If you complain to the housing department, I’ll evict you!” Instead, they’re likely to stick it to you for a trumped-up reason, hoping to mask the fact that the real motive is to get rid of a tenant whom they regard as a troublemaker. Common examples of cover-ups that are really retaliations are:
an unexplained termination that follows hard on the heels of a long-term tenant’s legitimate decision to withhold the rent
a refusal to renegotiate a lease following a tenant’s complaint to the health department, and
sending a termination notice alleging misuse of common facilities after a tenant has used the common room to bring tenants together to fight a proposed rent increase.
Fortunately, however, many states give tenants an edge when it comes to unmasking illegal reasons to end a tenancy. In many states, the landlord is presumed to be retaliating against you if a tenancy is ended (or services decreased) within a certain amount of time after your exercise of a legal right, typically six months but sometimes 90 days or one year. This means that it will be up to the landlord to prove to the judge, should you end up in court, that his motives were not retaliatory.
THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE.
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