You found the perfect apartment in a great safe neighborhood. It is close to work and shopping and you love the amenities. But there is a big problem with this great new place. The neighbors upstairs are ridiculously noisy.
They hold parties until all hours of the night several nights a week. You are having trouble sleeping with all that racket, and the sleep deprivation is beginning to affect your work. It is also adversely affecting your health and diminishing your overall quality of life. You have asked the neighbors to be quiet and even called your landlord on several occasions asking him to take care of the noisy neighbors. But the problem still persists.
It is important that you understand your rights as a tenant, including your right to quiet enjoyment of your apartment and your right to seek damages.
Massachusetts law is clear that a landlord who leases a home or apartment has entered into something called a covenant of quiet enjoyment with the tenant. Simply stated, this means a tenant has the right to the reasonable use of a leased home, including the right to maintain possession of the leased premises in peace.
Landlords have been found to violate the covenant of quiet enjoyment, for example, for purposefully failing to provide services like heat, for renovating or repairing the premises where the construction interfered with the tenant’s use of the premises, and for causing or allowing so much noise or other activity that the value of the unit was rendered substantially diminished.
Generally speaking, in order to assert that the landlord has breached the covenant of quiet enjoyment, the tenant must show that there is some fault on the part of the landlord that amounts to negligent behavior or at least unreasonable conduct. It is important to show that the landlord knew or should have known about the problem and unreasonably failed to act. This usually means that the landlord must be notified about the problem and given a reasonable chance to have it fixed.
It is also important to understand that since quiet enjoyment is a right afforded to tenants under the law, lease terms cannot take the rights away. Terms of a lease that state the tenant has waived the covenant of quiet enjoyment have been found to be unenforceable.
If the landlord breaches this covenant of quiet enjoyment, the tenant may be able to recover actual and consequential damages. These could include being reimbursed for any improvements the tenant had to make so the premises could remain habitable or the cost of moving to another place. The tenant may even be able to obtain injunctive relief where the court orders the landlord to stop whatever the activity is that is interfering with the tenant’s use of the property.
The best way to explore what your alternatives are when you suspect that your landlord is in breach of the covenant of quiet enjoyment is to consult with an experienced Boston tenant lawyer. We encourage you to contact an attorney at (617) 848-4572 or schedule an appointment online today.
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