The "H" Word; Is Your Tenant A Hoarder? - A Two Part Blog Series

Part Two

The Issue
In our industry, whether or not someone has this mental illness is not the issue; what landlords need to worry about is the potential for harm when someone accumulates a large amount of clutter in his or her rental unit.

If another tenant or neighbour complains and accuses one of your tenants of being a hoarder, how should you respond?  Your first step is to do a routine inspection of the rental unit. Once inside, answer two questions; a) would emergency responders be able to get into and move around in the rental unit, and/or does the clutter represent a fire hazard, and b) is there the potential for (or are there already) sanitary, hygiene and/or insect or rodent infestation issues?

If the door to the unit won't fully open without the assistance of someone on the other side, or there is no way to move from room to room once inside, then the tenant is jeopardizing his or her own safety and potentially the safety of other occupants of the property. As an example, a 79-year-old woman died in a fire at her Washington row house when her hoarding held back firefighters from reaching her in time.

If the rental unit could not be considered to meet reasonable health, cleanliness and sanitary standards, this is a breach of both a material term of the tenancy agreement and the Residential Tenancy Act by the tenant. A rental unit in this condition could also lead to a pest infestation, putting the interests of other occupants at risk as their units could also become infested - especially if the amount of possessions in the infested rental unit is such that a pest control operator could not successfully apply treatments.

In the end, the issue is not whether or not your tenant is a capital-H hoarder or has or doesn’t have a mental illness; what you need to establish is whether or not there is potential for the quiet enjoyment or safety of the tenant and other residents to be affected.

-- Carly Ludwar

The "H" Word; Is Your Tenant A Hoarder? - A Two Part Blog Series

Part One

The subject of ongoing curiosity, at least two reality TV shows, and the character of Oscar the Grouch, hoarders are again in the spotlight after a recent article in the Globe and Mail about a BC landlord who evicted a hoarding tenant.

Members often call into the office, identifying their tenants as hoarders. But, unless that landlord's day job is to diagnose mental illnesses, how does s/he know that the tenant has this disorder?    The term "hoarder" has become yet another word that is now commonplace in our industry, such as "renoviction" and "slumlord." So how do you assess whether or not your tenant is a real life hoarder, or a simple, every-day collector of stuff?

The Definition

While there is no clear definition of compulsive hoarding in diagnostic criteria, the most suitable description would be "the excessive acquisition of possessions (and failure to use or discard them), even if the items are worthless, hazardous, or unsanitary." There is emerging evidence from mental health professionals that compulsive hoarding is, in fact, a mental illness. Having said that, it would still be difficult to establish whether your tenant could actually have this mental illness, or simply has a large amount of possessions. Dr. Front, a Smith College psychology professor, made a good observation: "When the accumulation of stuff interferes with their ability to live, or causes significant distress; that's the breaking point between hoarding as a [chosen] behavior, and hoarding as a disorder."

Quoted in the above article, Dr. Frost describes several varieties of hoarders: there’s the info junkie who stockpiles documents, the guilt-ridden collector who hates to waste anything, and another who feels an intense, emotional attachment to possessions. Objects are of great value to hoarders - even when they appear to be junk, and they fear losing a part of themselves along with a discarded item.

--Carly Ludwar