Rep. Ellen Read, D-Newmarket, learned about being forced to abandon an apartment as a teenager in Tennessee when an abusive boyfriend held her captive for three days and hit her with a car. After being stalked for 16 years, she only felt really released from him when he committed suicide in 2016, the year she was first elected to the NH House of Representatives.
On Jan. 25, she told her story for the first time to fellow lawmakers while testifying before the House Judiciary Committee on a bill she is sponsoring — House Bill 261, which would allow those living in rental housing to break a lease if they can provide documentation that they are being abused or stalked.
There is a law that allows tenants to leave an apartment in federally funded housing without documentation and simply signing an affidavit. Indeed, two representatives from the NH Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence suggested that the committee amend the bill to align it with that law.
The coalition has to deal with housing for thousands of victims each year, many of whom have to break their lease, and often they don’t have time to get a court order for protection or pick up a police report before they have to flee, said Rachel Duffy, the organization’s housing and economic justice manager.
But there is a difference between public and private housing, said Rep. Bob Lynn, R-Windham, the committee’s chair, noting that in the former it’s the public swallowing the cost. “It’s another thing for the landlord to bear that cost who is presumably not at all at fault.”
HB 261 would also allow those who suddenly become disabled to break their lease if that disability prevents them from enjoying their property.
Landlords quibbled with the word “enjoying,” which they said implies that a tenant could break a lease if they no longer could stand the color of the bathroom paint. They also said that the disability documentation was not as strict as required in the first part of the bill, which David Cline, a landlord and treasurer of the Apartment Association of New Hampshire, praised.
“We want real standards that we can hang our hats on,” he said. (The bill requires a note from a medical provider to document the disability.)
“Tenants do take the law and abuse it,” said Nick Norman, a lobbyist for AANH. “You don’t want to set up a system that is so lax that they can terminate their lease at will.”
He added that most landlords work with tenants who become disabled and can’t make the rent, and “I can’t imagine any landlord who would say, ‘I want you to stay in a violent situation.’” But Brandon Lemay, a tenant activist from Manchester, said that those testifying are “mom-and-pop landlords that know the tenants and look them in the eye. We have an increasing number of corporate landlords who follow the lease, follow the law. There is not much leeway.”
— BOB SANDERS
