Letters to the Editor
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akaSmith:
Yup, we're moving toward common ground
As to what the LAW says about people with disabilities having to reveal their diagnosis, they simply don't. If they actually ask for an accomodation (the mother's temporary presence perhaps), the medical substantiation must say what need must be accomodated. Stating the need is not a diagnosis. For instance, the letter could state that the daughter needs her mother with her for the next two weeks to help her cope with emotional trauma. The letter would not need to say (and should not say) that the daughter is having a new bout of PTSD symptoms due to a recent rape attempt.
LW needs to know what's going on. She needs to know why mom is there. A legal or medical verification of a disability is, for my money, a sufficient response. LW doesn't need to know the diagnosis, just that there is one. Then, as you also said, LW can find out what her legal rights and responsibilities are. If the verification is not forthcoming, the woman and her mother have no leg to stand on.
If it were me, I'd still want to know if there was something I needed to know in case of an emergency. Not a demand, just a request. It seems a sensible precaution.
It also seems that we are in agreement that the situation just doesn't sound right. I do hope that LW does call the state housing authority, or legal aid, or a lawyer, then follows through once she knows where she stands.
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GreenFire, I think we are now on the same page.
I am so grateful that I don't need a roommate any more to survive. The stories I could tell . . .
I wish the LW the very best.
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"Mark"
is the term that comes to mind, and it sounds like there's a few of you out there in SalonLand. CosmicMojo, do you encounter a lot of grifters? Have you gotten this far in life without ever being the target of a con? Then I guess your Mojo works. The rest of us have to watch out! I manage to be generous most of the time, but after years of being a soft touch I've learned a lot about people who take a yard when you give them an inch.
"Unless there really is something unnerving about how these two new renters are behaving" - well, clearly there IS - Reluctant Host felt compelled to seek advice about the situation! The words Uncomfortable, Frustrated, Nevous, and Helplessness are clues here.
Maybe this is a mother/daughter tag team, maybe not. America seems to produce a lot of people with personality disorders - some are mild, just people with inappropriate boundaries; some are full on sociopaths who get away with their cons for years. There was an article in SFGate yesterday about a particularly pernicious con - "Police seek local victims of alleged 'Black Widow'" .
The phrases doesn't understand why her presence is an imposition and defensive and secretive are cues that something's up. Maybe they're just an ordinarily dysfunctional mother and daughter, Mom's well-meaning nose is in everything and Daughter can't escape so she retreats into secrecy and defensiveness. Maybe the illness is even mom-induced. Who would be comfortable with a dynamic like that moving in to their apartment? And that's a relatively mild scenario. A far worse one would be your DL, passport and valuables gone and a $10000 credit card bill. Granted that's unlikely, but it's not THAT unlikely. Virtually all of these different housemate-from-hell stories have happened to people I know.
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mom?
not only are mother and daughter con-artists, it's most likely they are homosexual lovers using m-d relationship as a front both for their sex and for their use of other people. they are con artists period, even if only from moving in to give "mom" a free space: two for the price of one.
i do not envy anyone going through the growth-process of ridding oneself of parasites
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Get them to pay their per person bills then forget or get out
From the number of letters, this situation is rather common. I had a similar summer sublet experience, where 3 roomies bailed for the summer and I was left with sublets: a hippie who never cleaned and adopted a kitten that shat all over the house, and 1 Mormon selling "encyclopedias" that morphed into 4 Mormons. They rarely paid utilities and even balked at rent. I talked to the landlord, paid my share, and got my name off the phone bill at least (these days, there always options for phone service). I stuck it out for 3 months of summer and moved on in the fall, but made sure I was financially clear of their bills.
It was a hellashish summer sublet, but I made it clear I was the alpha dog, and only slept there.
Good luck, and get out.
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Maybe someone has suggested this, but tell the roommate that the landlord has called and stated that only ONE person is permitted to sublet
Not two. Explain that the mother must leave as this was not part of the agreement, and according to the landlord, everyone will be evicted at this goes against fire codes, insurance policies, etc. and it will not be continued. I also sense that something is peculiar here; this is not merely the result of culture clash (if indeed this is the case). The subletter is moving into another person's home, temporarily. She clearly has little respect for her new roommates as she is not concerned with discussing the matter with them to clarify whether or not it it permissible to bring an additional person into the home.
Update us, LW. And rent Volver, directed by Almodovar.
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I'm wondering ...
... if perhaps the LW misjudged these people and that is why she is refusing to update us. Let's hope the situation has had a happy resolution.
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Could be
she doesn't want to admit she has unresolved issues with Moms. Maybe even as we speak the old gal is baking cookies and spiffing up the kitchen.
I wish I could get someone like that for free in my house.
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Being nice
In my first letter on this thread I asked what was wrong with the LW. Why did she not make friends with these people instead of bitching about them?
Maybe I was a little hard on the LW.
We have this situation here where all of the combatants have their living situation dictated by a lack of money in a place, probably, where it is expensive to live. Hence three people share a house. Hence one of them sublets their room when they go away for the summer. Clearly tenant #2 who is subletting her room is more concerned about getting the money than anything else, as this will make her life a little easier, and bugger tenant #1, the LW, who is stuck in town for the summer.
Probably the new subtenant (#4) and her mom (#5) have parallel difficulties. We have no idea what their financial situation is, but I will bet that they cannot afford a suite at the Ritz Carlton.
So you are all in this situation together, and you can either get on and be supportive to each other, find the best bargains on food, or you can be at war with each other.
Now, here is a confession. I am a landlord. I have seven apartments next door to my house. My tenants are poor, but they mostly get on with each other despite provocations and deprivations of all kinds.
My tenants are of different ethnicities including African American, Mexican, Caucasian, and mixed. At weekends the Mexicans drink and play their music loud, but the children and babies seem to be able to sleep through it.
But the tenants get on together, for the most part. They babysit each other's kids, they launder for each other, they help each other put out the trash.
Room mates move in and out. Sometimes five guys are sharing a place that would be the right size for me alone. Sometimes the room mates move out and one guy is left to pay the rent alone, so maybe I reduce it a bit. Sometimes it rains for days and no one gets paid and they can't pay the rent on time. Sometimes their electricity or cable gets cut off for non payment.
However, it is much better to assume that people are trying to do their best in a difficult situation and to try to work with them, than to decide in advance that they are all bad and call in the full force of the law against them.
At times, I have even allowed people to take showers or cook in my house when their power has been cut off. When a hurricane left us without power for ten days, I excused the tenants rent for that period, got ice for them each day, and paid some of them to work cleaning up the property, and provided them with portable generators and a gas barbecue. Fortunately the insurance company picked up the tab for some of this, but I would have done the same even if it did not.
As a result I have had relatively little trouble with my tenants. I did have to get court papers to evict one guy, and may have to do so again in the near future so as to do some remodeling, but generally speaking, the legalities of each situation tend to come second to human needs.
However, without wanting to revisit the issue of ethnicity--well, I guess I do want to revisit it a bit--those of us who have come to the US from elsewhere in the world will have been much more accustomed to having to get on with neighbors and their families as a matter of survival, so we instantly recognize (at least we think we do) the ethnicity and attitude of the LW as being that of a particular culture that sees every little detail of life as being a matter of individual rights and entitlements.
Now, if this woman and her mother are going to stay for ever an refuse to leave at the end of the sublet, then clearly there is a huge problem and they will have to be removed by some legal means. And if the mom is going to hang around until the end of the sublet, then they need to chip in a bit more to cover the cost of utilities, extra toilet paper, etc. But these are not insurmountable difficulties.
And as someone who has worked in public health, I would guess that the likelihood of the daughter having some secret, but virulent transmissible disease is rather small.
It does not appear that the mother is dealing crack out of the apartment, flushing her lingerie down the toilet, or a doing something really heinous like smoking.
So since overall I suspect that the likelihood of the daughter and mom being fellow strugglers is much greater than the likelihood of them being sinister aliens escaped from a Stephen King novel, application of Occam's Law suggests that there is no need to panic yet and that going with the flow is probably the best plan for the intermediate future.