Lease

“ Enough appears in the terms of the instrument called the lease to show that both the lessee and lessors treated the buildings 'during the process of erection' as the property of the plaintiffs, and to show beyond controversy that the buildings when completed vested in the plaintiffs as their absolute property, subject only to the right of the builder to occupy and use the same, just as in the ordinary case where the owners of property agree to lease the same to be used by the lessee for a stipulated rent. ”

“ A bad tenant slips through a lease. For a good tenant it is, we maintain, an insufficient reward; if at the present usually prevailing rental (about £1 per acre) the bulk of future improvements, supposing that they are to be really improvements, devolves upon him. And we have lively recollections, which make us inimical to leases, of an aged relative of our own having been obliged a short time before her death to quit a house in which she had spent most of her life, because her lease had expired, and the house was sold over her head. ”

“ The legal relationship of landlord and tenant is constituted by a lease, or an agreement for a lease, by assignment, by attornment and by estoppel. And first of a lease and an agreement for a lease. All kinds of interests and Leases. property, whether corporeal, such as lands or buildings, or incorporeal, such as rights of common or of way, may be let. The Benefices Act 1898, however, now prohibits the grant of a lease of an advowson. Titles of honour, offices of trust or relating to the administration of justice, and pensions granted by the crown for military services are also inalienable. ”

“ The owner grants a lease for a long period of time, usually ninety-nine years, for a ground rent, which is notoriously below the true economic rent of the land, subject to the condition that the leaseholder must erect upon the land and keep in good repair certain buildings, which on expiry of the lease will become the property of the ground owner. ”

“ In the first place, the real incidence of the burden is determined in the long run only. The tenant of agricultural land may indeed enter into a lease like the tenant of urban land; and, like him, he may be unable to modify the terms of his lease so as to throw on the landlord the weight of any fresh burden, which may, contrary to his reasonable expectations, be levied. ”

“ But as to the nature and effect of a lease for years, at a certain rent which the lessee agrees to pay, and containing no express covenant on the part of the lessor, the two systems differ materially. The common law regards such a lease as the grant of an estate for years which the lessee takes a title in, and is bound to pay the stipulated rent for, notwithstanding any injr y by flood, fire, or external violence, at least unless the injury is such a destruction of the land as to amount to an eviction ”

“ LEASES.—A lease is an instrument in writing, by which one person grants to another the occupation and use of lands or tenements for a term of years for a consideration, the lessor granting the lease, and the lessee accepting it with all its conditions. A lessor may grant the lease for any term less than his own interest. A tenant for life in an estate can only grant a lease for his own life. ”

“ This, however, is as unreasonable as that a tenant should complain that in paying rent he is not on an equality with the proprietor in fee. The sale of crown lands is merely the transference of a beneficial lease. ”

“ The lease contained a covenant that, if the tenant should default in the payment of rent, or abandon the premises, or if they should become vacant, the tenant become insolvent, or make an assignment for the benefit of creditors, or if bankruptcy proceedings should be instituted by or against the tenant, the landlord might without notice re-enter the premises ”

“ Mary arranged with the owner, a Bayport man, to lease this house and land at a small rental for three years. In the lease was included consent to the making of necessary alterations and repairs and the privilege of purchasing, at a price therein named, at the end of the three years, should the tenant wish to do so. ”

“ Clearly the property of the landlord; for in consideration of their being made, improved, kept up, and given up by the tenant at the end of the term, the landlord gave to the latter a lease of the premises for 31 years, at a proportionate rent.
We have taken some pains to prove this, not for the sake of being hard upon tenants in any way, but merely to show, that supposing past "improvements," which are not "improvements," will have in future to be destroyed, those who have made them agreeably to the conditions of such leases have no just claims respecting them. ”

“ What person in his senses would erect a substantial factory or a large concern of any kind upon a comparatively short lease? Men embark upon such enterprises in order that, as year follows year, their property may become more valuable, not that year by year it may become less so by the growing nearness of the time when it will pass to the landlord, who has never contributed a penny or a thought to the success of the concern, the building containing which, at the expiration of the lease, he can call his own. ”

“ And it shall be lawful for the aforesaid Richard, Catharine, William and John, or any of them to introduce at their pleasure new tenants on all those demesne lands aforesaid, now in the hands of the tenants there, whenever the aforesaid reversion shall have fallen in.
[257] The most interesting clauses in the lease are (a) that which relates to the leasing of the stock of the manor ("Stock and land lease") ; (b) the last, which shows how the practice of leasing a manor to one large farmer replaced the earlier practice of leasing parts of it to numerous small tenants. [Pg 246]
6. ”

“ Then make another lease renting all your remaining property rights to your friend Mr. Van Meter of this city. Have this second lease for a similar term and of similar provisions to the first, and the entire compensation for it likewise paid in advance. Then you have but to record the instruments, employ an attorney, and sit down in the shadow of your house. The hair on your head will have thinned vastly before the litigation over your complicated affairs terminates in a final decree of sale.” Rufus Alshire leaned forward listening eagerly. ”

“ It is important for lessee, and lessor, also, that the latter does not exceed his powers. A lease granted by a tenant for life before he is properly in possession, is void in law; for, although a court of equity, according to Lord St. Leonards, will, "by force of its own jurisdiction, support a bonâ fide lease, granted under a power which is merely erroneous in form or ceremonies," and the 12 & 13 Vict. ”

“ When land is taken by a farmer [Pg 93] under a lease for thirty years or more, it becomes almost like his own property, because, in the earlier part of his term, he can make great improvements with the aid of his capital, and yet be sure of getting the value back before the lease comes to an end. In the eastern parts of England and Scotland, where the farms are largest and best managed, these long leases are the usual mode of letting land. ”

“ The leases were on the same form, and each bound the lessee to erect on its leasehold a described housing project, and to maintain and operate it throughout the life of the lease. Each lease contemplated and provided that the lessee would raise the money necessary to construct the project by an F.H.A. insured mortgage loan on its leasehold and the improvements, to be serviced and amortized by the lessee out of its rents from the housing units, which were to be rented at such rates and to such military and civilian personnel as the Commanding Officer of the air base might designate. ”

“ Newcome; and you will also find a covenant in the same lease, by which your interest in the property is to cease in a few days."
"Wa-a-l, now, I don't understand leases in that way. Surely it was never intended a man should erect mills, to lose all right in 'em at the end of five-and-twenty years."
"That will depend on the bargain made at the time. Some persons erect mills and houses that have no rights in them at all. They are paid for their work as they build." ”

“ I may even add that I have seen a number of these leases, and my tenants may feel certain that I will never sign anything like them. It seems to me that the essential point of a lease is that it should be bilateral—that the two parties should be bound for the same time. Each runs some risk. If the years are good the landlord does not [Pg 93] benefit by the rise, but if they are bad he does not suffer from the fall. ”

“ I told him I thought it was rather an exorbitant price for the property; that I did not consider the building worth any such money,-to which he responded that they were going to make a very good lease. They would take it for ten years,-a ten years' lease on the premises, at a rental of $6,000 a year. ”

“ As for the possession of the farm, which we are to suppose is a desirable thing for the tenant, he of the long lease is clearly most independent, since the other may be ejected at the end of each five years. ”

“ When a lease is about to expire a difficult question sometimes arises, what can the tenant take away with him? Of course he can remove all his furniture and the things that can be separated without injury to the premises, but during his tenancy, he may have added things possessing a more permanent nature, called fixtures, these he cannot remove. ”

“ The proprietors were usually agreeable to granting a long lease at a nominal rent to any likely and energetic man who was willing to undertake reclamations and take his chance of recouping himself for outlays before his lease expired. ”

“ Our tenants are121 not afraid of the bastinado, but they are terrified at the rise of rent. This is the state of things amongst the tenant-farmers, farming without leases.12 In England leases are the exception, and not the rule. But even where you have leases in England—where you have leases or agreements—I doubt whether they are not in many cases worse tenures than where there is no lease at all; the clauses being of such an obsolete and preposterous character as to defy any man to carry on the business of farming under them profitably. ”

“ A landlord leases his sites in the first instance to builders, for periods of great length. When the building leases fall in, and the houses become the landlord's direct property, it is almost invariably an object with him to lease them for periods, shorter indeed than the original building lease, but always of considerable length. As long as houses are in the hands of a building lessee, or his representatives, the ground landlord can derive no profit from them beyond the rent reserved in the lease, and can exercise no control over them outside the covenants contained in that document. ”

“ This man treated all these branches of the subject, as if the tenants had acquired certain mysterious interests by time and occupation, overlooking the fact that the one party got just as good a title as the other by this process; the lease being the instrument between them, that was getting to be venerable. If one party grew old as a tenant, so did the other as a landlord. I thought that this lecturer would have been glad to confine himself to the Manor leases, that being the particular branch of the subject he had been accustomed to treat ”

“ The periodical leases, renewable after fifteen years, seem to be considered by most as of little value; they afford no security for fixed property in the soil, as a grant on one of these leases is liable to be resumed by government, ‘with all buildings thereon,’ should the leaseholder or his heirs not choose to comply with the terms of the new lease. ”

“ To any one who has not got saddled with the vampire notion that ninety-nine years' leases are part of the original scheme of Creation, it is at once a monstrous absurdity and intolerable injustice that, when a man builds a house on another man's land, for the use of which he pays a yearly ground-rent representing at the date of the lease not merely the full annual value of the land on which the house is built, but double, sometimes treble [9] its annual value, the person to whom the ground-rent is paid should step in and take away the house from the children of the builder. ”

“ The Revised Civil Code of Louisiana affirms the same general principles. A lease is defined to be a contract by which 'one party gives to the other the enjoyment of a thing' at a fixed price. Article 2669, (2639.) 'He who grants a lease is called the owner or lessor. He to whom the lease is made is called the lessee or tenant.' Article 2677, (2647.) 'The lessor is bound, from the very nature of the contract, and without any clause to that effect, (1) to deliver the thing leased to the lessee; (2) to maintain the thing in a condition such as to serve for the use for which it is hired ”

“ A salient element in such a reorganization is the discharge of all demands of whatsoever sort, executory and contingent, presently due or to mature in the future. Of such claims not the least important are those for rent to accrue under a lease, or for damages or indemnity payable because of the termination of a leasehold. ”

“ A person who leases land for a term of years, even if by indenture or without a writing, may have a court remedy as do tenants of freehold for any expulsion by the lessor which is contrary to the lease, covenant, or agreement. ”