As someone who’s always rented properties over the years, I’ve come across my fair share of nightmare landlords. Horror stories about shitty property managers who have unrealistic expectations and make their tenants’ lives a living hell certainly aren’t in short supply. However, sometimes their requirements aren’t necessarily cruel, they’re just f**king weird.
According to The New York Times, a Brooklyn landlord has two gorgeous one-bedroom apartments available for rent in a brick townhouse in Fort Greene for $4,500 and $5,700 per month. It seems a pretty sweet deal given the current rental market in NYC. However, there’s just one problem: You can’t cook meat or fish if you live there.
The broker for the apartment, Andrea Kelly, explained why the landlord refuses to allow non-vegetarians in the building. “It’s not vegetarian-only, but the owner lives in the building and doesn’t want the smell of cooking meat drifting upstairs,” she explained.
That’s great that the landlord chooses not to eat or cook meat, but why should someone in another apartment that they’re paying rent for have to abide by that same approach? As it turns out, it’s not actually illegal. Unless you had some kind of bizarre medical condition in which you had to eat meat and had documentation to prove that, you couldn’t fight it.
The wild thing here is that I bet that apartment is no longer on the market. There’s such huge competition for property in the city that people would be willing to go to pretty much any lengths to grab a great place while it’s available. And hey, there are plenty of vegetarians out there or people who aren’t that attached to meat and would be willing to forgo cooking it at home if it meant bagging a good apartment.
That being said, if the vegan landlord is nuts enough to put this condition in the lease, what else are they going to have a problem with? Sounds like a nightmare in the making to me!
