See Conor Dougherty & Luis Ferré-Sadurni, California Approves Statewide Rent Control to Ease Housing Crisis,N.Y. Times, Nov. 4, 2019; Carla Herreria, California Limits Annual Rent Increases with New Law, Huffpost, Oct. 8, 2019; About Just Cause Eviction and Rent Increase Protections, OregonLawHelp.org, (updated July 25, 2019).
In a surprising development, the Eighth Circuit has held that mortgage debts are extinguished by foreclosure. CitiMortgage, Inc. v. Equity Bank, 2019 WL 5778343 (8th Cir. 2019). While some states, like California, generally prohibit deficiency judgments (claims against borrowers when the foreclosure sale does not garner enough to pay off the debt), most states allow lawsuits against the borrower to get an order to pay the rest of the debt agreed to by the original note. The promise to repay the loan is embodied in the “note” and the right to foreclose is embodied in a separate agreement (the “mortgage” or “deed of trust”) and the contractual obligation usually persists after foreclosure unless either state law or the contract language provide otherwise. The Eight Circuit ignored these traditional distinctions in CitiMortgage, and decided that the foreclosure ended both the contractual obligation and the lien on the property. The case involve the sale of 500 …
When a landlord breached a commercial lease obligation to make structural repairs to the property, the tenant was entitled to lost profits in addition to specific performance. Motsis v. Ming’s Supermarket, Inc., 2019 WL 5704322 (Mass. App. Ct. 2019). The tenant had been constructively evicted when a sprinkler pipe froze and burst, leading to an inspection by the city that found numerous unsafe structural conditions that led the tenant (a grocery store) to move out of the premises). The trial court properly ruled that the tenant was not limited to a right to terminate the lease and recover relocation costs. The Massachusetts Appeals Court rejected the argument that specific performance is limited to promises to convey title to land, holding that it is available and proper in lease arrangements as well. In addition, the landlord’s “disregard of known contractual relationships…constitutes an unfair act or practice” under the state consumer protection statute.
Owners who traversed a road over neighboring land to get to a public way for more than 30 years established a right to a prescriptive easement despite a grant of permission by the owner of the servient estate that occurred long after the statute of limitations had run. Betts v. Smith, 27 LCR 473, 2019 Mass. LCR LEXIS 187, 2019 WL 4546578 (Mass. Land Ct. 2019) (citing Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 187, §2 which defines the rules for obtaining an easement by prescription). There was no express easement since the party who granted the easement was the son of the owner and “one cannot convey what one does not own,” (citing O’Donoghue v. Commonwealth, 99 N.E.3d 843 (2018)). Nor could an easement by necessity be established because the original conveyance granted an easement that was never constructed and there was no evidence that that road would not have been adequate.
A Massachusetts court has held that hiring a landscaper to regularly maintain a strip of land is sufficient to constitute “possession” and can ripen into adverse possession once the statute of limitations runs. Miller v. Abramson, 131 N.E.3 863 (Mass. App. Ct. 2019). This was the case when a line of vegetation formed a natural boundary line sufficient to signal that the adverse possessor claimed the property as their own. This was so even though the line of vegetable was penetrable.
When a landlord sued to evict a tenant for failure to pay rent, the court ordered to make rental payments (for “use and occupancy”) during trial. The Massachusetts Appeals Court held that before ordering such payments, the trial judge must hold a hearing to determine whether the payments should be reduced because of defective conditions in the property. Davis v. Comerford, 133 N.E.3d 373 (Mass. App. Ct. 2019). And while such payments are normally paid to the court and held in escrow, they may be delivered directly to the landlord if needed to make mortgage payments on the property. The court interpreted a state statute making tenants at sufferance liable for “use and occupancy” but noted that case law did not measure the value of use and occupancy by the agreed-upon rent but upon the “sum which the trier of fact finds the use and occupation were reasonably worth,” 133 N.E.3d at …
Rules governing court-ordered rental payments while eviction litigation is pending Read More »
New regulations adopted in 2016 provide that a discriminatory housing practice includes “[f]ailing to take prompt action to correct and end a discriminatory housing practice by a third-party, where the person knew or should have known of the discriminatory conduct and had the power to correct it.” 24 C.F.R. §100.7(a)(iii), 81 Fed. Reg. 63074, Sept. 14, 2016.
Because the Texas partition statute requires the proceeds of a partition sale to be divided “according to [the owners’] just rights therein,” joint tenants were entitled to 50% of the sale proceeds even though one of the co-owners had used his own funds to purchase the property. Gallagher v. Townsend, 443 P.3d 847 (Wyo. 2019). At the same time, the court would be entitled to adjust the amounts each party received to reflect the fact that one co-owner had paid more of the property taxes.
The Montana Supreme Court held in Covey v. Brishka, 2019 MT 164, 445 P.3d 785 (Mont. 2019), that it was so obviously unreasonably dangerous to construct a 4.5 million-gallon constructed pond on a mountainous property that the owner was strictly liable for an “abnormally dangerous condition” when a storm caused a cascade of boulders and water onto the property lower down the hill.
After years of conflicting case law, the New York legislature has formally codified the obligation of landlords to mitigate damages when a tenant breaches lease obligations by abandoning the premises. 2019 N.Y. Laws 36, §4, codified at N.Y. Real Prop. Law§227-e.
