If the accommodation becomes legally “indecent”, the owner, if he is not able to make the accommodation decent, can break the lease and evict the tenant, admitted the Court of Cassation.
In the event that accommodation becomes legally indecent, the landlord can break the lease and evict the tenant if he is not able to make the accommodation decent. This is, in summary, the judgment rendered on January 11 by the Court of Cassation.
This is the misfortune suffered by a tenant, living for more than twenty years in a former maid’s room that suddenly became indecent accommodation when a 2002 decree required that all accommodation have a surface area of more than nine square meters.
For the owner, the mishap resulted in the obligation to repay the rent, since it had been collected for indecent accommodation, within the limit of the limitation period of five years.
In the case judged by the Court of Cassation, the owner had the right to break the lease, to evict the tenant and to obtain from him, until his departure, untitled occupancy compensation, corresponding to the rental value of the accommodation, because it was not possible for him to remedy the indecency of the accommodation which concerned the dimensions and volume of the premises, the room having only 7.3 square meters of surface area.
On the other hand, this owner, according to the judges, would have been obliged to remedy the indecency through work, if that had been possible.
Housing: without repeated problems, no eviction of the tenant
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