Then the landlords should have no problem suing and receiving treble damages, rendering this practice unprofitable.

If you're dealing with a larger property manager, they might. If you're dealing with a small-time landlord, it may be difficult for them to deal with the legal fees to get to that point. I'm guessing most would just eat the cost - once.

In either case the leases and the vetting process become that much worse for everyone else. Maybe the landlord starts doing random inspections to check for this. Basically everyone else's life gets a little worse. Tragedy of the commons, this is why we can't have nice things, etc etc.

The law doesn't hand out treble damages like candy. Please explain the legal basis under which landlords are going to magically receive these for civil breach of contract claims.

The comment above me literally cited the relevant piece of the code under which treble damages could be pursued. If leasing an apartment is as reprehensible as so many people here seem to think, then landlords should have no trouble convincing a judge that the person doing so entered into a contract in bad faith.

> The comment above me literally cited the relevant piece of the code under which treble damages could be pursued.

I see. So you're not a real lawyer, you just pretend to be one on HN.

Not once did I ever claim to be a lawyer.

You could have fooled me with all of your seemingly confident talk about treble damages, which in reality is incredibly ill-informed.

First, I'm not responsible for your assumptions. If you're taking legal advice from strangers on an Internet forum, then as your absolutely-not-a-lawyer I advise you not to do that.

Second, I didn't bring up treble damages, the comment I was replying to did. I was simply drawing a logical conclusion based on the information they provided.