Landlords have duties to tenants beyond that of providing
habitable premises with working heating and plumbing systems, roofs that don't
leak, etc. They also must take
A decision by California's Fourth Appellate District Court
of Appeal includes an instructive discussion of these matters. The case (Vasquez
v. Residential Investments) from which the discussion arises has facts
that range from mundane to tragic.
Abigail Ramirez and her infant daughter lived with Abigail's
parents in an apartment building owned by Residential Investments, Inc. When
the family moved in, a glass pane was missing from an arrangement of glass
panes on the top half of the door. A piece of cardboard covered the opening.
The tenants made a number of requests that the pane be replaced. They felt that
its absence created a security risk. After some length of time, Abigail's
brother replaced the cardboard with a piece of plywood that he affixed using
finishing nails.
Some time later, Abigail, who had recently been living with
her boyfriend (the father of her daughter) moved back into the apartment of her
parents. Her boyfriend, Jesus Vasquez, who had heard that Abigail had been
seeing someone else, came to the apartment armed with a knife. When he was
refused entry, he pushed out the plywood piece, reached through the opening and
opened the door from the inside. He then killed Abigail.
The lawsuit against Residential Investments was brought on
behalf of the infant daughter. It alleged that the owners were negligent by not
replacing the missing pane, and that the negligence was a direct and proximate
cause of Abigail's death. In defense, the apartment owners argued that property
owners have no duty to take precautions against criminal activity that they had
no reason to anticipate. The trial court ruled in favor of the defense and
granted summary judgment, holding that the incident was not sufficiently
foreseeable so as to give the owner's a duty to prevent Vasquez from gaining
entry to the apartment.
The appellate court reversed the trial court's decision, and
sent the case back for trial. The appellate court did not say that the owner's
were, in fact, negligent; but it did say that it was a triable issue, one that
a jury should decide on the basis of the facts of the case.
In its discussion the court noted that the law is clear on
the point that there is "…a duty by landowners to maintain property in
their possession and control in a reasonably safe condition." But then the
court went on to acknowledge that this is, at best, a general principle that
gives no specific direction. The discussion points out that the determination
of duty requires a balancing act in each particular case. A landlord has a duty
to exercise reasonable care, but what is reasonable depends on the
circumstances, "…considering the foreseeability of the risk of harm
balanced against the extent of the burden of eliminating or mitigating that
risk."
The court's discussion reviewed a long list of landlord
liability cases (the legal landscape is, of course, littered with them). Of
particular note was one in which a landlord had failed to fix a lock to a
common hallway, thus making it possible for an intruder to enter and rape one
of the tenants.
Although rape had never before occurred on those premises,
robbery had. The court held that, even though the foreseeability of a rape
occurring might have been slight, the foreseeability of criminal activity was
stronger. Moreover, the burden of repairing the lock was minimal. Hence, the
landlord had a duty to do so; and the failure to do so constituted negligence.
He did not have a duty to guarantee the safety of his tenants,
but he certainly had a duty to maintain a "first line of defense."
In this decision a ruling from a Georgia court was
approvingly quoted: "The landlord is no insurer of his (or her) tenant's
safety, but … is certainly no bystander."
The moral here for landlords --
fix the locks. And take care of other matters that constitute risks of
foreseeable harm.
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