They tear up apartments when they’re left home alone. Neighbors complain about their foul odors and late-night barking. But the leaseholders refuse to add them to the lease because having them there is against policy.
We’re not talking about dogs. Women online are complaining about the worst pet a tenant could have: an “unleased boyfriend” who terrorizes their luxury apartment building.
“Why do y’all let them out into the wild without a leash on?” Kathrell “Kash” Hicks said in a TikTok as she aired her frustrations with this subset of men.
The demographic has been called the “downfall of every great apartment complex” by women posting videos of their experiences. “Unleased men” are defined by very specific traits – they usually can’t get an apartment of their own due to poor credit history or criminal offenses, so they instead live rent-free in their partner’s home and break nearly every rule: They smoke in the apartment, walk dogs without leashes, steal packages, park their cars in other residents’ assigned spots and instigate shouting matches with the actual leaseholder. Property managers see this issue often and know how to address it — but it usually ends with an eviction on the leaseholder’s rental record.
Hicks said she vented on social media after her latest run-in with an unleased man in her building. A resident’s boyfriend came to her door and accused her of parking her car in his usual spot. Although the vehicle belonged to another woman, Hicks saw that the man’s friends had blocked the vehicle in the lot and harassed the owner until she moved her car. The men weren’t aware that building management had emailed tenants a week prior stating the parking was no longer assigned. Suffice it to say, Hicks is exploring her quickest path to homeownership.
On TikTok, Diamond Ritter said that as a former property manager in Atlanta, the toughest residents she had to deal with were those not on the lease. She said “the sky’s the limit” in terms of destruction she’s seen once a tenant allows an unauthorized occupant to take up residence in their unit.
Squatters, who stake out vacant units, can be quickly evicted, Ritter said, but the havoc that an unleased man causes ultimately hurts the leaseholder the most. Unless the renter removes the boyfriend themselves, property managers will have to evict everyone living in the unit for nonpayment of rent or other violations, permanently tarnishing the renter’s reputation.
Ritter’s advice: “If they cannot be put on your lease, they shouldn’t be living with you.”
Cultural analyst Cecilia Regina puts unleased men in the same category as boyfriends who crash in women’s dorm rooms, men who use their girlfriend’s accounts to deliver food on DoorDash and stay-at-home sons, all of whom mooch off of whoever’s willing to mother them.
“They’re resentful a lot of times that the woman has access that they don’t have, and they definitely want to destroy it for her,” she said. “They want to make it so that she’s on their level.”
Plenty of commenters online agreed, adding that women often agree to bring their man into their space as a way to keep them.
“The women that allow this – it’s controlling & predatory on her part b/c she knows that man needs to a place to stay & a car to drive, so she’ll use it as a way to try to “control” that man. These are women that know deep down, if that man had his own place, and his own stuff – he would never choose her. It’s her way of “keeping” a man. And with the unleased men, they know that woman’s self esteem is so low, she’ll do anything to keep a man, so he uses that to prey on & “control” her! Two sides of the same coin!” wrote someone on TikTok.
Although some women see nothing wrong with giving their partner a place to lay their head, Kathrell “Kash” Hicks told her followers that this is one trend she’ll happily miss, saying in a TikTok, “We don’t want to hear nothing from nobody who don’t pay bills.”
