Should Your Landlord Be Able To Decide If Your Significant Other Can Stay The Night?

Remember the days of Three’s Company, when the only way a man could convince the landlord to let him stay in an apartment with two single women was by pretending to be gay? Even when I first moved to New York in the mid-’90s, more than a few landlords told me I could only have male roommates and that female overnight guests were frowned upon. But times are changing and most people just expect their landlord to butt out, so long as they aren’t knocking down walls or installing hot tubs in the bathroom. But there are still some people out there that don’t want any unwed hanky-panky going on under their roof.

This is the question being posed on Reddit, by someone who says that after his girlfriend spent the night for the first time, his landlord “came down and told both of us separately that I was not allowed to have her stay over.”

His story is complicated by the fact that he’s not living in a completely separate apartment from his landlord’s house, but instead is paying rent for a bedroom, den, and cooking area, with a bathroom that he shares.

“I have my own door leading outside and there’s no reason for her to be down here other than the freezer,” he writes.

Tenant laws vary by location (this person happens to live in Alberta, Canada) so it’s hard to get into legal questions of whether or not this person’s landlord should have a say in the matter.

So instead, we just wanted to ask the Consumerist Hive Mind for its opinion on whether landlords should be able to have some say in who stays the night at your rented apartment.


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