Smoking Related Fires
LANDLORDS
and
PROPERTY MANAGERS
KNOW YOUR RIGHTS AND LIABILITIES
Confirm everything here with your attorney. We are not lawyers, and are not giving legal advice, but merely describing from the generic material we have read, the current situation in California regarding rights and liabilities of apartment-building landlords and property managers if they choose to allow smoking in their buildings.
- Smokers do not have a Constitutional right to smoke.
- Therefore landlords are not obligated to rent to smokers or allow smoking in their buildings.
- In California, approximately 87% of adults and all children are nonsmokers.
- Experience shows there is no difficulty in keeping apartment buildings filled by disallowing smoking, and that nonsmokers will often pay a higher rent to live in a nonsmoking building.
- Every year smokers cause a substantial number of fires in apartment buildings in California, some of which cause property damage, burns, smoke-inhalation, and death to innocent persons.
- Information about these fires and their destruction is publicly available and, as such, is known or deemed to be known by landlords and property managers.
- Therefore, if landlords or property managers allow smoking in their buildings, they do so knowing they are creating an unjustifiable increased risk of fire, injury, death, and damage to innocent persons.
- Landlords, who invite people into their buildings for profit or any legal purpose, cannot shift this risk of fire, injury, death, and damage to the invitees.
- Therefore, if a smoking-related fire occurs in an apartment building that you own or property manage and it causes injury, death, or damage to innocent persons, you will most likely be sued, and most likely lose.
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provided above, please
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