A tenant can become a tenant nuisance for many reasons. Tenants can make too much noise. Tenant may be conducting illegal activity on the premises, be causing problems with the neighbors or be destroying property. When a tenant becomes a nuisance, they interfere with of the rights sof others. From blasting music all night long, to holding weeknight parties, a disorderly tenant nuisance can be difficult to evict.
Under California Civil Code Section 3479, a nuisance is: “anything which is injurious to health, including, but not limited to, the illegal sale of controlled substances, or is indecent or offensive to the senses, or an obstruction to the free use of property, so as to interfere with the comfortable enjoyment of life or property, or unlawfully obstructs the free passage or use, in the customary manner, of any navigable lake, or river, bay, stream, canal, or basin, or any public park, square, street, or highway, is a nuisance.”
In truth, in most big cities, nuisance evictions are not nearly as quick as they look. First, an eviction based on a tenant that’s so noisy and disruptive that it’s a huge problem to other tenants needs to be proved, and this is extremely hard to do, not for legal reasons, but for practical ones. To be able to go to trial, these tenants need to be subpoenaed to appear at trial, and trial essentially never happens when it’s scheduled to happen. Severe resource shortages have led the courts to cut back essential staff, and as a result, you can expect at least one reset of trial, and more if the tenant is smart enough to request a jury trial. Getting two or three neighbors to attend multiple days of trial is often not realistic, particularly when you can count one at least one day being eaten up with last-minute settlement efforts. Consider also how tenants who’ve been dragged into court on someone else’s case will think of the landlord in the future.
