10 of the Craziest Landlord-Tenant Disputes

Disputes between tenants and landlords are a common occurrence. It’s easy for these disagreements over rent, living conditions, or other issues to become heated, and matters often escalate to court. While many stories follow a predictable pattern, the details of some conflicts can be very colorful—even bizarre. Here are ten crazy landlord-tenant disputes that are unusual because of the original grievance or the shocking actions of those involved.

Related: 10 Landlords Who Murdered Their Tenants

10 Dispute Over Bible Study Group

Many apartment complexes offer a room where residents can host parties or other events, but in 2006, a Raleigh, NC–based company, One Management Inc., sparked a lot of controversy by putting a surprising restriction on this amenity when they banned tenants from using the common areas of their rental properties for Bible study groups.

In a memo sent to the company’s 40-plus properties, One Management used the federal Fair Housing Act, which prohibits religious discrimination, as the basis for this decision. According to an article in Go Upstate, the company argued that if they allowed this type of study, it might cause people who belong to a different religion or who were not religious to feel like they were being discriminated against. One group that was impacted by this new rule was a weekly Bible study at Heritage Court Apartments. Ironically, it turned out that the ban itself was in violation of the Fair Housing Act, as interpreted by the U.S. Department of Justice.

A letter from Linda Cruciani, assistant general counsel for Fair Housing Enforcement at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, stated that Heritage Court Apartments could permit religious activities in the common areas. Cruciani explained that voluntary religious activities are permitted on the condition that everyone has equal opportunity.^[1]

9 Interior Surveillance Cameras

It may not be unusual for landlords to install surveillance cameras outside a building, but when they insist on putting cameras inside a tenant’s home, that raises completely different privacy concerns. A group of housemates in Australia were unsettled by the interior cameras the landlord installed in the rental house they shared in early 2023. According to an interview with Yahoo News Australia, one of the tenants, referred to as Jessica, stated that the reason given for installing these cameras in the common areas was to ensure the kitchen was kept clean.

This sounds strange, considering the housemates were already paying an extra $15 a week for cleaning services. Jessica was suspicious when the landlord allegedly revealed that she had been watching her walking around the house during the prior three weeks and questioned her on whether or not she was still employed. Jessica claimed the woman also wanted to know what she was concealing under her hooded blanket when she went into the bathroom. Jessica, who was understandably disturbed by the idea of being spied on, explained she had just been on holiday during those weeks she was at home, but she didn’t think that she owed the landlord an explanation.

“There’s six of us, and we’ve all raised our concerns,” Jessica told the news outlet. “[The landlord] ensured she wouldn’t use it to watch us, but after the questions I’ve been getting, it’s clear she is.”^[2]

8 Renting to an Employee Can Be Tricky

According to an article on The Real Estate Solutions Guy website, a landlord referred to as Steve, in Modesto, California, needed work done on a property he owned, so he made a deal with a handyman who wanted to move into a house and work in exchange for part of the rent. Over the phone, Steve would approve purchases of work supplies from a local hardware store. At one point, the hardware store owner informed the landlord that the handyman appeared to be purchasing an excessive amount of materials. Additionally, his kids would go back and try to return some of the supplies for a cash refund.

The handyman/tenant became less productive and eventually stopped doing his work altogether but refused the landlord’s request for him to vacate the house. This led Steve to take him to eviction court, where the handyman complained that the house he rented had no kitchen, but when questioned about this, he admitted it didn’t have a kitchen because he had torn it out himself.^[3]

7 Exotic Animals

Property owners who allow pets typically set clear rules in the lease about what type of animals they allow, the number of pets, and even the weight and breed of dogs, as well as other details, but disputes over pets are still a common occurrence. It can be a real struggle for people who own unusual pets, such as reptiles, rodents, and even birds.

In 2014, a Maryland resident and former National Zoo employee, Ethan Hutton, told The Washington Post how challenging it was to find a place to rent that would allow his menagerie of animals, which included two geckos, a parakeet, a parrot, and his more traditional cat and dog.

Washington Humane Society worker ChristieLyn Diller said she did not inform the landlord about her pet rat because the company did not specify a fee from tenants for keeping that type of animal. But when someone who came to do repairs notified management, Diller was given an ultimatum. “It was sort of an immediate, ‘[It needs] to go or you need to go,’” said Diller.^[4]

6 No Boundaries

A 2021 Newsweek article highlighting bad stories about landlords quoted a Reddit user who recounted some disturbing experiences they had during the final week in a rental property, saying the landlord “kept asking me to do things on his time and when I refused he would say ‘Do you have a problem with that?’ aggressively like he was going to do something to me.”

Even creepier than this was the claim that a motion sensor camera captured the landlord walking through the rental, including the bedroom, and going through the tenant’s personal belongings without permission on multiple occasions. The renter was so uncomfortable with this man’s behavior that they avoided spending the night at the property in the last week. The weirdness reportedly continued right up until the end, when the tenant and their girlfriend were moving boxes out, and the landlord kept staring at them.^[5]

5 Black Mold

Most people who have lived in a rented property at some point know how frustrating it can be when management fails to make repairs in a timely manner, if at all. However, this kind of negligence can sometimes lead to more serious problems.

Newsweek quoted a Reddit user who said a leak that was not repaired for weeks resulted in a five-foot-wide path of black mold. They claimed that even when the landlord was standing underneath it, they “denied there was mold and refused to fix it or do anything about it.”^[6]

4 Emotional Support Animals

While parrots are not as unusual or controversial as many exotic pets we hear about, a trio of parrots who were identified as emotional support animals for a woman living in a Manhattan co-op at The Rutherford were at the center of a high-profile dispute in 2016, which led to the resident being evicted.

The New York Post said, “The drama started when a neighbor told the building’s board that there was little chance the noisy birds could provide any sort of emotional solace.” The neighbor who brought the complaint, Charlotte Kullen, explained that when Meril Lesser first moved in, she only had two birds, but when a third bird was added in 2015, Kullen claimed her life turned into “a living hell.”

While city investigators did not observe noise issues, a decision was made to go ahead with eviction proceedings, even though Lesser produced letters from her psychiatrist verifying that the parrots were emotional support animals. However, when federal prosecutors became involved, they concluded that the building’s board was discriminating against Lesser with this action. Lesser may have lost the battle by having to move out, but she won the war when the co-op was ordered to buy her unit at the above-market rate of $165,000.^[7]

3 Creative Resolution

In an article on The Real Estate Solutions Guy website, Robert Taylor described how one landlord thought outside the box and came up with an interesting way to deal with the wild college students who were renting his property. These football and golf athletes had a habit of throwing raucous parties with guests who would get drunk and urinate in the neighbors’ yards.

At first, the landlord tried some obvious approaches to the problem by going to the tenants’ parents and to the police for help, but when neither proved effective, he called their coach, who got tough with the boys and “made them run extra laps at practice several times until they got the point.” The guys never caused the landlord any more trouble after this.^[8]

2 Milking COVID Protections?

During the COVID-related shutdowns, many landlords across the U.S. were legally prevented from evicting tenants for failing to pay their rent. However, some owners like Maria Nicoletti and Rodrigo Vidales felt that their renters were taking advantage of this protection.

According to Nicoletti and Vidales, their tenants owed $89,000 for a rental property over three years, during which they only paid one month’s rent and a court-ordered sum of almost $11,000. However, the judge also ordered a 10 percent rent reduction, primarily due to the need for pool maintenance and repairs. The owners, who were dependent on the income from the rental, said that they could not afford a hotel when they traveled from their home in Virginia back to Los Angeles to try to evict the renters, so the family stayed in a converted shuttle bus.

A particularly outrageous aspect of the story is when one tenant, Lisa Marie Maestas, won a new Chevy Camaro on The Price Is Right but continued to claim she could not come up with the rent money, according to what Nicoletti told the I-Team on NBC4 Los Angeles in 2023.

However, Maestas showed the I-Team emails that complained about harassment from the landlords, as well as issues such as mold, plumbing problems, and termites. While the landlords later received $60,000 from the state’s rent relief fund, they would not accept any further money from the tenants because they had already decided to evict them by that point.^[9]

1 Landlords Who Tried to Drive Out Their Tenants

If a property is substandard or unlivable, it is usually due to neglect; however, occasionally, landlords have their own reasons for actively making living conditions intolerable. This was the case with the notorious Kip and Nicole Macy. Over 17 months, from September 2005 to December 2007, the married couple harassed and terrorized the tenants of their San Francisco apartment building in hopes that the renters would move so they could profit from selling the individual apartments, which were located in the growing South of Market district.

The Macys went to extreme measures to force people out: turning off power, cutting phone lines, burglarizing units, boarding up windows, and even “tried to compromise the structure of the building so the floor would actually collapse,” DA George Gascon said in an interview with 20/20.

When it came to the one holdout, Scott Morrow, the Macys’ actions took an especially shocking turn by sawing through Morrow’s floorboards.

Kip Macy was sentenced to four years at San Quentin after being convicted on felony counts of residential burglary, stalking, and attempted grand theft. While admitting to “bad decisions” regarding the last remaining tenant, Macy also made claims about him, telling 20/20 that Morrow had profited financially from the prior landlords and that Morrow “had parts of his floor cut out from underneath.”^[10]