ACLU condemns controversial new landlord laws in Florissant, MO (Ferguson neighbor city)

[Big Dumb Patriot]

[quote]Florissant on Monday night joined a growing list of cities that are making criminal activity at a rental property grounds for eviction for residents and penalties for owners.

The police-supported crime-free housing program is one of thousands in the U.S., Canada and Australia that are meant to reduce crime by shutting out criminal activity and nuisances from rental properties.

But the programs are controversial, with opponents calling them a vehicle for collecting revenue and saying they excessively penalize landlords and tenants, disproportionately affect minorities and could end up harming tenants who are victims of crimes.[/quote]

[url]http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/florissant-targets-crime-by-tightening-rules-on-landlords/article_468e7299-ecce-54ef-9147-00dba4d6aad9.html[/url]

[quote]Statement from the ACLU of Missouri on Florissant City Council Bill No. 9226:

It is deeply troubling that the Florissant City Council is considering strengthening a nuisance law that incentivizes landlords to evict crime victims, undermines law enforcement and public safety, is discriminatory and may wrongfully exclude refugees and other immigrants. Similar nuisance laws that have passed have had a negative effect on their communities.

Victims of crime might hesitate to seek help from law enforcement if they know that that officers must notify their landlord of alleged nuisance conduct and this could lead to an eviction.
This bill would likely embolden abusers, present a financial burden to domestic violence victims through fines and present another legal burden to victims.

The bill is also discriminatory and may wrongfully exclude refugees and immigrants. These proposed requirements for evicting a tenant will likely result in more tenants of color being evicted. The bill also requires that homeowners must send “a copy of a Federal or State issued identification of the owner of record of such residential property” prior to permitting any occupancy.

The bill lacks necessary due process protections because landlords should be given discretion to best determine who is able to become a tenant. Encouraging landlords to perform blanket background checks will likely have a discriminatory impact on communities of color that are arrested, convicted and incarcerated at rates disproportionate to their share of the general population.

This bill is problematic because it punishes landlords for nuisances. Currently, rental property owners have the right to evict their tenant if the tenant is engaging in illegal use of the premises according to MO Statute 441.020.

The ACLU of Missouri urges the Council to reject bill No. 9226. The ACLU will be monitoring the council's vote and any enforcement of the provisions if the bill passes. [/quote]

[url]https://www.aclu-mo.org/newsviews/2016/10/10/aclu-missouri-statement-against-florissant-public-nuisance-b[/url]

Here are the specifics of the bill in a nutshell:

[quote]Implementation of the bill will actually be quite simple. Current leases will not be affected, but the city of Florissant will refuse to issue any new occupancy permits for rental properties unless the property owner, or property manager, has completed the Crime Free Housing Bill and holds an active license. The annual licensing fee is also being raised from $15/property to $50/property. Since landlords were already previously required to hold licenses, the framework for issuing, revoking, and checking licenses is already in place. CFB 2996 simply adds several new restrictions, regulations, fees, and conditions to holding a rental license.[/quote]

[quote]
[B]Rental property owners will be held personally liable for criminal activity or "public nuisances [such as] tall grass, loud music, and garbage" conducted by tenants. Disciplinary action includes forced eviction of tenants and the suspension or revocation of rental licenses for property owners.

If tenants become delinquent in paying utility bills, landlords will be required to assume payments to keep utility services operational or have their licenses suspended or revoked.

Rental property owners who have their licenses suspended or revoked may only appeal the decision to the Director of Public works (the same entity responsible for revoking the license) following a $200 inspection of each held property to ensure the offending issues have been corrected.[/b]
[/quote]

I am a local real estate professional, and have spent the last couple of days poring over the new bill and communicating with other local experts to try to determine its impacts on the city. Florissant is a neighbor city to Ferguson, sharing a main road, and there is quite a bit of controversy surrounding a bill that places such extreme pressure on landlords to reject tenancy to people with even mild criminal records, especially given the Department of Justice's investigation into the Ferguson criminal justice system literally [I]across the street[/I]. At the time of the investigation, over 76% of Ferguson's residents had arrest warrants, the vast majority of which were revealed to have been the result of predatory policing and a for-profit local justice system. CFB 2996 places intense pressure on landlord to refuse tenancy to people with criminal records, meaning that a huge population of Florissant and Ferguson's citizens will now struggle to find adequate low-income housing. It's one thing for a landlord to overlook a minor discrepancy in a rental applicants' background check if the only thing being gambled is a potentially bad tenant causing headaches and lost money for the landlord, but it's another thing entirely if a single bad tenant can revoke a landlord's right to rent [I]any[/I] of his properties within the city, forcing him or her to pay steep fees for "compliance inspections."

The Saint Louis Association of Realtors has also condemned the bill, arguing that it is little more than a dishonest revenue vehicle made in protest of decreasing rates of homeownership, and warning that it will have severe and long-term impacts on the city's economic health.

To put this into perspective, one mid-level investor in single family homes, owning 20+ properties, would have to pay $200/door to have each of those properties individually inspected for compliance by the Department of Public Works if [I]even one person[/I] from just [I]one[/I] of those properties is charged with being a public nuisance (tall grass, loud music, trash in yard) or commits a crime as minimal as a [I]Class A Misdemeanor.[/I] Even more concerning, this doesn't apply specifically to tenants, or to crimes related to the property. The bill specifically mentions that landlords are held to the same standards for [I]guests[/I] of the tenant, and for crimes occurring [I]anywhere in the city.[/I] So, while the landlord can face a license suspension over grass that grows too tall, something the landlord arguably has a certain level of control over, it also means that if an otherwise model tenant throws a Christmas party, and somebody leaving that party gets pulled over and charged with DUI, the [B]landlord[/B] will lose his or her rental license for something that he or she, realistically, has [B]zero[/B] ability to prevent. The landlord would be forced to pay $200 in individual inspection fees for every single property that he or she owns to begin the appeals process. For my example investor, that amounts to over [B]$4000[/B] in initial fees, and he would then have to wait through an appeal process that could last [I]months[/I] and cost that landlord thousands more as his properties sit vacant due to his inability to legally rent them out until the process is completed.

Furthermore, the forced eviction requirements pushed down by the city must still go through the local court systems, resulting in untold lost revenue for property owners as they wait for the process to complete and the tenants to be evicted. That means that even landlords who are in full and willful compliance with enforcing the standards of the ordinance to the best of their abilities could lose thousands of dollars for any eviction-worthy offense to court fees and lost rent.

This is an [B]incredibly[/B] shortsighted measure, in my professional opinion.

[Download]

I like the idea of being able to throw out tenants that use the property for crime but it seems this covers far more than that.

[CMX]

Now tenants can basically get free utilities unless the landlord wants to lose all his rentals.
What a great idea!

[proboardslol]

[QUOTE=download;51219522]I like the idea of being able to throw out tenants that use the property for crime but it seems this covers far more than that.[/QUOTE]

I agree; crime should be grounds for eviction, and if a landlord is knowingly allowing crime to occur, he should be held responsible, but he shouldn't be if he's unaware of what people are doing in their homes

[Big Dumb Patriot]

[QUOTE=download;51219522]I like the idea of being able to throw out tenants that use the property for crime but it seems this covers far more than that.[/QUOTE]

Crime is already grounds for eviction, but now it's [I]also[/I] grounds for the landlord to lose his rental license. That's bonkers. No landlord [I]wants[/I] to go through an eviction, because evictions are very costly, take a long time, and often provoke the tenant into damaging the property. So, landlords were already screening applicants and running background checks for any serious red flags. However, with their [I]entire rental portfolio[/I] now on the line if single bad tenant pops up, the screening process will have to become [B]extreme[/B] -- and even then there is only so much that a landlord can realistically do to comply with this.

Yes, landlords can choose to pay for landscaping, soundproofing, and utilities to attempt to prevent or mitigate the effects of "public nuisance" tenants. This is prohibitively expensive, and will push the [I]vast[/I] majority of rental properties into the red for the duration of the lease, as most rental units already operate on fairly thin margins, but it's still probably less costly than an eviction, and [I]certainly[/I] less costly than the appeal process for a license suspension or revocation.

However, what can a landlord possibly do to prevent a tenant from going out and committing a minor crime? Or throwing a party and irritating a neighbor? Or, even more fucking absurd, to prevent a [I]tenant's guest[/I] from going out and committing a minor crime anywhere else in the city? A background and reference check isn't a crystal ball.

[elix]

So basically if I walk onto a rental property I'm not even involved with and jack offin the yard in broad daylight I fuck over the [I]landlord[/I] for every single property they own across town?

Yeah this won't have any unintended consequences at all.

[Sableye]

wtf who wrote this bill.

it isnt good for tenants which lets face it, they dont care about, but its also terrible for the owners who would now have a legal responsibility to prevent bad tenants from taking over. that is one slippery ass slope there

[Big Dumb Patriot]

[QUOTE=Sableye;51219618]wtf who wrote this bill.

it isnt good for tenants which lets face it, they dont care about, but its also terrible for the owners who would now have a legal responsibility to prevent bad tenants from taking over. that is one slippery ass slope there[/QUOTE]

This bill is a thinly veiled money grab. It is written in the name of law and order, but the architecture of it tells a completely different story. The imposed standards are impossible to comply with without violations, as the violating circumstances are largely outside of the landlord's personal control. They were designed to be failed so that exorbitant "compliance inspection" fees could be charged, because tax revenue from home-ownership has decreased as a result of declining rates of home-ownership.

The (hopefully) unintended consequences of this are many, however. As mentioned in the article and OP, low-income families, especially minorities, will be disproportionately impacted by this, making it much more difficult to find adequate housing, likely forcing a significant migration into even lower-income areas. The impacts of this for Florissant minorities could be comparable, to a certain extent, to redlining in the civil rights era -- only less deliberate.

For more strictly economic concerns, the significant increase in expense for investors will result in dramatically lower profit margins on rental properties, resulting in increased rental rates to the highest points that the market will bear. Since rental rates can only be increased so much, and since good tenants are in such short supply, the simple truth of this is that most rental properties simply won't have functional cashflow. I foresee entire investment portfolios being sold at steep losses in response to this legislation.

Any future real estate investment within Florissant will have to have [I]much[/I] higher potential profit margins, meaning that the difference between purchase price and rental rates will have to be much wider than the current acceptable standards. This will eliminate the workability of a huge swathe of properties, leading to marked increase in distressed, abandoned, and bank-owned properties within Florissant neighborhoods, diminishing the property values of all surrounding homes. This is going to hit [B]especially[/B] hard in the upcoming national market shift, which is expected to last 4-6 years. During any such shift, the number of distressed, abandoned, and bank-owned properties spikes, and with investors being shunned by the Florissant city council, this influx of vacant, eyesore properties will sit unclaimed unless they meet an increasingly narrow set of financial criteria.

[Zephyrs]

[QUOTE=Cmx;51219530]Now tenants can basically get free utilities unless the landlord wants to lose all his rentals.
What a great idea![/QUOTE]

How do you figure?

Utilities are in the name of the tenant, especially in single family homes and most duplex/triplex units.

[elix]

[QUOTE=Zephyrs;51219855]How do you figure?

Utilities are in the name of the tenant, especially in single family homes and most duplex/triplex units.[/QUOTE]

Because this law makes it that if the tenant is delinquent in their utilities, it becomes the landlord's problem, and if the landlord doesn't keep utilities current, they lose their license to rent [I]any[/I] property and have to pay out the dick in compliance fees to be reinstated.

[Zephyrs]

Somehow I skipped right over that sentence.

That's utter bullshit. Very obvious that the city can't be fucked to go through the legal hassle of disconnecting utilities.