Hurt at a Friend's Apartment Complex? Ohio Landlords Owe Guests the Same Safety Duties as Tenants (Mann v. Northgate)

Published February 20, 2014 · Ohio Supreme Court

Picture a teenager leaving a friend's second-floor apartment at eleven at night. The hallway lights are burned out, the stairwell is black, and she feels her way down two flights with a hand on the wall. At the bottom she expects one more step that is not there, stumbles forward, and goes through a glass panel beside the exit door. When her family sues, the landlord's answer is the one Dayton-area apartment owners have used for years: she was only a guest, not a tenant, and the dark was obvious, so she should have been more careful.

On February 12, 2014, the Ohio Supreme Court unanimously rejected both halves of that defense. Mann v. Northgate Investors, L.L.C., 138 Ohio St.3d 175, 2014-Ohio-455, holds that a landlord owes a tenant's guest the same statutory duty to keep common areas safe that it owes the tenant, and that a violation of that duty is negligence per se, which takes the "open and obvious" defense off the table.

The facts

Lauren Mann was sixteen when she visited a friend at the Northgate Apartments in June 2007. She arrived around noon and left around eleven at night. The common hallway and stairway were dark because the light fixtures did not work. She made it down both flights, but after the last step, thinking there might be another, she pitched forward through a glass panel next to the exit door and was injured.

The landlord won summary judgment in the trial court. The judge reasoned that Ohio's Landlord-Tenant Act governs only landlords and tenants, so a guest was owed only the ordinary duty of care, and that darkness is an open and obvious hazard that cancels even that duty. The Tenth District Court of Appeals reversed, and because another appellate district had gone the other way, the Supreme Court took the case to settle the question.

The statute at the center of the case

R.C. 5321.04(A) lists what every residential landlord in Ohio must do. Three of those duties matter most in injury cases. Division (A)(1) requires compliance with building, housing, health, and safety codes that materially affect health and safety. Division (A)(2) requires the landlord to make repairs and do whatever is reasonably necessary to keep the premises fit and habitable. Division (A)(3) requires the landlord to "keep all common areas of the premises in a safe and sanitary condition."

For decades the Supreme Court has held that violating (A)(1) or (A)(2) is negligence per se. The Court said so again in Robinson v. Bates, 112 Ohio St.3d 17, 2006-Ohio-6362, where a tenant was hurt on an exposed concrete footer in her driveway and the Court held that the open-and-obvious doctrine "does not dissolve the statutory duty to repair." What Mann decided was whether (A)(3), the common-area duty, works the same way, and whether a guest can rely on it.

What the Court held

Guests get the same protection as tenants. The Court traced a line of its own decisions back to 1911 for the proposition that a landlord's duties run not only to the tenant but to everyone lawfully on the property with the tenant's permission. A guest, the Court said, essentially stands in the tenant's shoes. The Court also pointed to R.C. 5321.12, which allows "any party" to recover damages for breach of a duty the Act imposes. It made no difference that Lauren was in a common stairway rather than inside her friend's apartment; the statute's common-area duty is precisely about the stairways, hallways, and parking areas the landlord controls.

Violating the common-area duty is negligence per se. In Ohio, a safety statute can work one of three ways. It may be merely evidence of negligence that the jury weighs; it may create negligence per se, where the violation itself proves the breach of duty; or, rarely, it may impose strict liability with no excuses. The Court held that (A)(3) is written with enough specificity to be negligence per se, just like (A)(1) and (A)(2). The duty to keep common areas safe is, in the Court's words, "fixed and absolute, the same under all circumstances," and applies to every landlord.

No open-and-obvious defense. This is the part that changes cases. When a landlord is negligent per se under R.C. 5321.04, the Court held, the landlord "may not rely upon the open-and-obvious doctrine to escape liability." The syllabus states that a violation of (A)(3) "obviates the open-and-obvious-danger doctrine." The landlord cannot argue that the guest should have seen the broken railing, the ice on the walk, or the darkness in the stairwell. The legislature already decided those conditions are the landlord's responsibility.

What the injured guest still has to prove

Mann is a strong decision for injured people, but it is not a free pass, and an honest explanation has to say so. Negligence per se establishes that the landlord breached a duty. The injured person must still prove two more things.

First, notice. Under the Court's long-standing rule, the landlord must have known about the defective condition, received notice of it, or been the subject of reasonable but unsuccessful attempts to notify it. Burned-out stairwell lights that tenants complained about for weeks meet that test; a bulb that failed an hour before the fall may not. This is why the first thing we do in an apartment case is gather work orders, maintenance logs, tenant complaints, and photographs showing how long the condition existed.

Second, proximate cause. The violation has to be the reason for the injury. The landlord in Mann argued that Lauren could not show what caused her fall; the appellate court found enough evidence to send that question to a jury, and the Supreme Court sent the case back for trial.

Why this matters in Dayton

Apartment-complex injuries are a steady part of our practice: falls on unlit stairs, collapsing railings, ice that was never treated in a parking lot, broken sidewalk slabs between buildings. In nearly every one, the first letter from the landlord's insurer says the hazard was open and obvious. After Mann, that letter is wrong whenever the hazard is in a common area the landlord was required to keep safe.

It also matters who was hurt. Before this decision, landlords argued that a visiting relative, a babysitter, a delivery driver, or a teenager's friend was owed less than the tenant. The Supreme Court has now said that argument fails. We saw a similar refusal to let a landlord off the hook in the Cleveland apartment-fire case we discussed in this post on punitive damages against a landlord, and our earlier post on a Dayton dark-stairway fall shows how local courts have treated lighting hazards. For hazards that are not in a rented property's common areas, the open-and-obvious doctrine still has force, and our post on investigating around the open-and-obvious defense explains how we approach those.

What this means for you

If you were hurt in a hallway, stairwell, parking lot, laundry room, or walkway at an Ohio apartment complex, whether you lived there or were visiting, the landlord owed you a statutory duty to keep that area safe. A violation is negligence as a matter of law, and "you should have seen it" is no longer an answer. What will decide your case is proof of how long the hazard existed, whether the landlord knew, and exactly how it caused your injury. That evidence disappears quickly as lights get replaced and railings get fixed, which is why our premises liability work starts with an immediate investigation.