home sweet home

After months and months of looking for an apartment, we finally signed a lease for a lease today (and not a moment too soon I might add). The process was pretty painless. I do, however, need to brush up on my landlord/tenant law. It has obviously been quite some time since my 1L property class. But I faintly remember something about landlords needing to give some sort of notice before inspecting apartments and something else about the required notice time before being able to evict a tenant. Granted, I do not plan on being evicted (ever in my life) but it just doesn't seem right that one is able to make up any rule desired and force tenants to live in such a manner. For example (this has nothing to do with our landlord) I have seen several apartment listings in the Prorem area that will not rent an apartment to someone with kids. I can understand how a landlord can regulate whether or not people are allowed to have pets in an apartment, but children??? Seriously? While I understand that many small children write on walls and spill things on carpets, they are still human beings that need a roof over their heads. The way I see it, we have security deposits so that if things like this do happen and the tenant doesn't get it taken care of, then the landlord has the right to keep the money in order to fix the apartment. Maybe I'm overreacting. I've never owned any sort of real estate so I don't know what it is like to try to maintain an apartment. But I do know that no child could do anywhere near the amount of damage some single friends of mine have done to a certain apartment that shall remain nameless (lets just say that hammocks, rockbands, and guys in their early to mid-twenties can do a lot more damage than any non-toxic crayon scribbling on a wall)