Re: The Merano (Parcels 1B & 1C) | Bulfinch Triangle | West End
Wouldn't it be in the landlord's best interest to legally obligate all residents living in the premises to the terms of the lease by having everyone execute the lease? That way if one tenant disappears, stops paying, causes damage etc. legal recourse can be sought against not only the one tenant on the lease but everyone living in the unit.
I'm repeating a bit from what others have said, but:
In regulated affordable housing units, all leases stipulate that each adult in the household is obliged, under threat of eviction in the case of non-compliance, to notify the landlord of ANY change to household composition and/or income. Someone leaves or arrives? That changes the household size and can have all sorts of domino effects, even if the moving person is not employed (such as a newborn baby, or a teenager who goes to live with the other parent). And if an employed person either arrives or departs, that changes household income, the entire household has to get put through the qualifying calculation afresh (obviously more of a risk of non-qualifying if an employed person arrives as compared to when one leaves).
Every management agent in affordable housing has to be quite ruthless in enforcing this. We all know of market-rate situations like what JeffDowntown describes, where one tenant stays and others cycle through. Still happens all the time in smaller unregulated rental buildings. Aside from the headaches it can cause on the household qualification side, this can be a nightmare on other fronts: career criminals use this sort of arrangement all the time, sometimes because they know they're in the system and know they can't pass a background check.
Exactly how this gets handled by the management agent can vary slightly by different affordable programs. I'm not familiar with what program this property's under, so I'm speaking generally. But the take-home message is: every way you can think of to cheat has been thought of by any competent affordable housing manager, and they're also aware of tons of other ways to cheat that you haven't thought of. This doesn't mean they catch all cheaters: it means they've thought of all the ways there are to cheat and know the warning signals.
All this does NOT mean groups of single people cannot ever rent a three-bedroom regulated affordable unit together. Sometimes there might be a set-aside on a percentage of large units to go to large families: then roommate shares are prohibited, clearly. And affordable managers find the shared roommate situation a hassle, and generally aren't enthusiastic. However, if that's who shows up in droves, which might be the case in this building, they can make it work. The entire group of roommates counts as one household, and their collective income is what has to be below the threshold when they sign the lease.
Given the known reality that roommates come and roommates go, any competent manager will read the pertinent parts of the lease out loud that describe how critical it is to re-certify if someone new comes, and every single roommate will sign the lease and will have it made clear that the eviction threat pertains to everyone in the unit - no blaming it on just one person. The Riot Act will also be read to them. On the gentler side, the managers will tell them to just bring proposed new roommates in for a pre-qualification before the departing roommate is gone, etc - it can all be dealt with in advance, so that if a proposed new roommate takes them over the limit, they can start over.
It's not common for there to be unrelated roommate situations in affordable housing units, but it's not unheard of. Handled correctly, it is absolutely legal in most units of most programs. (ETA: You'll even see pairs of widows go in as roommates in senior properties that have the occasional two-bedroom units instead of the more typical one-bedroom units.)
Market-rate landlords are sometimes much more slack in how they handle this, as are some roommates; it seems more common as you go down the size scale and down the quality scale. As fattony noted peviously, this is crazy and stupid all around. The horror stories abound, for roommates and for landlords.
