Date: Sun, 27 Dec 1992 23:37:38 GMT
From: gordon@sneaky.lonestar.org (Gordon Burditt)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Apartment Leases vs. Telecom
Organization: Gordon Burditt
X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu
X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu
X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 12, Issue 923, Message 1 of 9

A son of a friend has an interesting lease with some telecom
implications.  The apartments are rented mostly to just-off-campus
college students.  Are any of these provisions enforcable, or do FCC
regulations and associated laws override any of these?  The wordings
here aren't exact, and the descriptions are from my friend's son's
memory.  I think he's the only one who actually read the lease before
signing it.  The apartments are located in New York state, if it
matters.

The apartment has a very, very high rent, but you can get an 80%
discount (down to a reasonably competitive level. The apartments have
a nice location, and are a bit larger than most, and have better
parking) if you agree to the rather restrictive (er, fascist) terms.
If you're caught violating them, the rent goes up, retroactively, and
you will be thrown out.

Tenant agrees not to call, or allow to be called, services such as 900
or 976 numbers (I wish I had seen the actual lease to see the
definition used - it's not "sex lines") from the property.  Completion
of dialing the area code or exchange once violates the lease.  This
covers, by specific example, land lines, cellular phones, guest's
cellular phones, car phones -- regardless of who owns the car,
cordless phone base stations, cordless phone handsets, and pay phones.
Phone patches via radio also count.  Phones off the property don't
count, unless the call is going through something on the property.

Again by specific example, if you get a ride home and the driver uses
his cellular phone to call 976-TIME before his car is all the way off
the property, you're out on your ear -- if you get caught.  The tenant
agrees to fink on himself at his own expense.  If you take your
cordless phone over to your neighbor's and a third neighbor calls a
900 number on it, all three of you are out.

Tenant agrees not to accept, or allow to be accepted, collect calls,
to any phone on the property.

Tenant agrees not to make calls outside the United States except to
one country which tenant may designate when signing the lease (and may
change on the first Monday in July only, in person only), from any
phone on the property.

Sounds like the landlord runs a PBX and is having trouble with fraud?
Nope.  The only telecom the landlord provides is one "pay" phone
supposedly rigged to permit you to dial 911 only, and if you ask for
permission to install land-lines, you can use what's there for
demarc-to-apartment wiring (there seems to be one giant demarc for the
whole building) as-is (most everyone has one line; many have had two
at one point; one guy has a lot) or have someone install it, but if
you ask for X lines, you'd better leave with wiring working for X
lines or the landlord will charge you for it.  If you order phone
service, you deal with the phone company directly.

There has been a small amount of trouble with installers, mostly the
local phone company, stealing multidropped demarc-to-apartment pairs
that were in use.  One guy almost got lynched by the tenants for
trying to install his own line and killing service for half the
building -- by drilling a hole in a sewer line which drenched the
patchboard.  The laundry room, on the other side of the basement,
never smelled the same again.

It sounds like the writer of the lease thinks that by providing
demarc-to-apartment wiring, the landlord might get stuck with the
bills, especially if the not-so-creditworthy college students vanished
or couldn't pay.  Any truth to this?

The lease is even more paranoid about drugs -- no drugs on the
property without a prescription from a doctor.  Aspirin, alcohol,
cigarettes, *MATCHES*, insulin, syringes, beer, cigars, cigarette
wrapping papers, gasoline in non-approved containers, and all
non-prescription drugs are drugs.  Drugs in cars (or taxis, or the
city bus service) picking up or dropping off the tenant or his guests
are the fault of the tenant.  Ever try to get a WRITTEN prescription
from a doctor for aspirin?

The landlord claims the right to audit people's phone bills in the
lease (at their expense).  None of the current tenants have heard of
this being done.  The landlord claims the right of access to police
reports of any happenings on the property, and apparently has it -- if
the police are called about a loud party and someone is drunk, the
host gets booted.  Someone got booted for having cigarettes after a
fire apparently caused by smoking in bed.  Nobody can recall the phone
rules being enforced.  Apparently way back in history the landlord
required all the other tenants to help him move an expelled tenant out
with three minutes warning, consisting of the fire alarm -- a procedure
which usually took less than half an hour, and generally happened
around midnight, and the expelled tenant agreed to reimburse the
landlord for the cost of damaging the tenant's property in the lease.

The landlord claims the right to enter the apartments at any time, but
nobody seems to think that right is used to search.  Maintenance and
spraying for bugs are common, and nobody's been thrown out for just
leaving cigarettes or beer out in the open.

Oh, yes, tenants aren't allowed to make copies of the copyrighted
lease or take it off the property.  And they have to return their copy
of the lease to get their deposit back.


Gordon L. Burditt     sneaky.lonestar.org!gordon


[Moderator's Note: That sounds like the weirdest, most repressive
place to live I have ever heard about. I think if the landlord were
sued, most of those lease provisions would be invalidated. To the
point of this forum, he certainly has no right to dictate where a
tenant may call on the telephone unless he can demonstrate that he is
financially responsible for the phone bills. If I were living there, I
think I would deliberatly make such calls, then invite his inspection
of the bill so he could commence a suit for eviction if he wished,
with a counter-suit from myself to defend against at the same time. 
I think the tenants as a Class could have the lease invalidated in
court, or certainly large chunks of it.  You'd think the free market
would have driven this guy out of business long ago, but perhaps there
is a law in New York saying one must reside in his apartment complex.
This would probably be the same kind of law which requires people in
Chicago to do their banking at First Chicago.  PAT]