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Only city in state to regulate 2s & 3s
The big question for Somerville two- and three-family homeowners is: Do you want to be stuck under condo conversion regulation that is optional and that significantly lowers the value of your property when you decide to sell it? If you act strongly, you can convince the Board of Aldermen to end all condo conversion regulation on two- and three-family properties. To act strongly, a great number of Somerville property owners need to call, email or write a letter to their Aldermen – AND show up at public hearings and Aldermen meetings. At the end of the article below is contact information for all the Aldermen (including clickable links to email them) and hearing and meeting dates as they become available. See end of article for contact information for the Aldermen and important dates.
Will you fight for your property’s value? With questionable authority, Somerville Mayor Joseph Curtatone and other city officials are pushing a redrafted condo conversion ordinance that would continue to regulate Somerville’s two- and three-family properties. No other municipality in the state regulates these properties. State law only regulates four-unit and larger buildings. Regulating condo conversion in two- and three-family properties imposes unnecessary financial burdens on these properties and significantly lowers their sales value when their owners decide to sell – say, at retirement.
READ MORE and view contact information for Aldermen
Anti-landlord bill on "victims of domestic violence" dies in committee Victory for SPOA and all small property owners Urgent action needed now! September 2008. It's unbelievable. A bill imposing severe burdens on landlords in the name of protecting victims of domestic violence passed in the Senate and went to the House of Representatives for a vote. SPOA launched a campaign against it, and the bill was allowed to “die in committee.” In other words, the leadership of the House agreed that the bill should not move forward for debate. Under the bill (S.2574), private landlords would have been required to ignore loud fights and property damage if any one of the tenants claimed to be a "victim of domestic violence." The loud fights or property damage or any other behavior that would motivate a landlord to evict must be related to domestic violence to get this protection from eviction. But it's obvious that tenants will use the excuse of domestic violence, even when it's not true, to stop an eviction.
What is activity related to domestic violence? So let's be specific. . The husband is beating up on his wife at midnight, knocking her about, bruising her, throwing a chair that dents the wall. All related to domestic violence. Landlords, ignore it. Can't evict. . The boyfriend, not a tenant, stalks his girlfriend-tenant, busting the outer front door lock to get in, pounding on the tenant's apartment door, then breaking through. It's related to domestic violence. Landlords, ignore it. Can't evict. . The husband and wife are in a loud, heated verbal fight at 2 a.m. when a neighbor-tenant knocks on the door and yells at them to stop fighting and be quiet. The husband opens the door, yells at the neighbor and throws a plate at her as she runs down the hall. The plate wasn't thrown at the wife, but it nevertheless intimidates her. It's related to domestic violence. Landlords, ignore it. Can't evict.
False accusations of domestic violence Perhaps the worst part of S.2574 is that it will not be confined to true victims of domestic violence. It will spread its effects broadly throughout the tenant population. Already there is a serious problem with false accusations of violence in domestic disputes that are made by one partner in order to get a restraining order against the other partner as a tactical maneuver (for more information, go to www.mediaradar.com). S.2574 would have only increased the opportunities for this same type of false accusations, but under this bill the false accusations would be used against small property owners as well as domestic partners. S.2574 says all that a "victim" needs to do is sign an affidavit that says they are a victim of domestic violence as defined in the law. No description of the alleged acts or events is required. By making false accusations under S.2574, tenants can block their eviction, force owners to rent to them, or break their lease and get their last month's rent and security deposit refunded. This is far too much power to put into the hands of tenants.
Can't choose our own tenants The chief consequence of this bill, if it passes, is that it would take away our ability to choose our own tenants. Not only could we not evict victims of domestic violence, we would be obligated to rent to them in the first place and required to renew the lease or tenancy agreement. In other words, we would be stuck providing housing for victims of domestic violence or anyone who claims to be a victim of domestic violence. A further risk is that the loud fights and aggressive behavior in one apartment could frighten or bother our other tenants, who could be driven out by the victims. We could end up with all our good tenants moving out. We could even be sued by our other tenants for disturbance of their quiet enjoyment of their apartments, and be helpless to protect ourselves against this liability.
"Feel good" legislation Domestic violence is a growing field, with tax dollars going to pay for advocates and battered women's shelters. Like tenants whose owners are going through foreclosure, victims of domestic violence will bring out a strong sympathy vote, no matter what the actual legislation says. Fortunately, SPOA acted strongly, our members and other property owners called their state representatives, and the message got through that this was a bad bill.
Click here to read the entire text of the victims of domestic violence bill
Note: There is a huge typographical
error in the opening sentence of the bill. It refers to the
"dairy farming industry." That shows you how sloppy the work has
been on this bill.
Just-cause eviction
goes Bill calls for rent control during foreclosures and eviction control A big step towards STATEWIDE rent control Tenant advocates have failed many times in Boston to get rent control back. Now they are using another alleged “crisis” and a new strategy to install rent control in pieces. That’s what “just-cause eviction” is – a bit of rent control coming back. For several weeks, attention focused on the Boston City Council, which was considering a home-rule petition to get rent control and just-cause eviction during foreclosures. At the last minute, the Boston petition was pulled from Council consideration. Meanwhile, Senator Dianne Wilkerson from Boston recently filed three foreclosure bills at the State House, one of which is a just-cause eviction bill (Senate Bill No. S.2664) that is virtually identical to the Boston home-rule petition. Wilkerson’s bills would have statewide application. Mini-rent control We call this “mini-rent control” because the bill would apply rent control only to tenants living in foreclosed properties for up to two years. But the advocates are getting their foot in the door. The two years will be extended. The rent control will be expanded to more and more groups of “at risk” tenants. The tenant advocates’ goal is to allow tenants to stay in foreclosed properties when the old owner moves out and the bank takes over. So this bill (S.2664) would force banks to keep the old owner’s tenants by freezing the rent and imposing eviction control. Just-cause eviction means that landlords (the banks here) cannot evict tenants unless they PROVE to a court that they have a just cause, that is, that the tenant has violated one of a short itemized list of just-cause violations. For example, not paying the rent, causing significant damage, disturbing other tenants’ quiet enjoyment, and being convicted of using the apartment illegally are such violations. Failure to pay a rent INCREASE is NOT one of these violations. Tenants get to stay at their old rent. That makes just-cause eviction a RENT FREEZE, which is exactly the same thing as RENT CONTROL. As long as the tenants pay the old rent and behave half-way decently, they cannot be evicted. The courts will be the rent control boards (until the law is extended). The old rent control systems thrown out of Boston, Cambridge and Brookline by Question 9 all had just-cause eviction as part of their systems. Rent control always has just-cause eviction. Just-cause eviction always has a rent control feature. The two things are inseparable. What else
is wrong with just-cause eviction Turning foreclosing banks into rent-control landlords is a very bad idea. They are not set up to do property management. They will hate the task. It will cost them huge amounts of money. OUTCOME: They will stop lending in Massachusetts, a disaster for sales of properties. It will aggravate the foreclosure crisis. It will harm the state’s economy. Keeping tenants in foreclosed properties makes the properties less desirable to sell. New owners want vacant properties. They want to do whatever repairs or renovations they wish. New owners do not want to have to evict what will likely turn out to be very difficult tenants to evict. For all these reasons, either the value of foreclosed properties will drop significantly, or the properties won’t sell at all. The foreclosure crisis is made worse. The free rent trick will flourish in foreclosed properties with tenants living in them because the properties will be in very bad shape. After all, the owners lacked funds even to pay their mortgages, so their properties were neglected for a long time. It’s perfect for the free rent trick. OUTCOME: No rent coming in and tenants demanding repairs from banks that can’t get out of it. Contact your state legislators We need to contact our state legislators by phone, email and letters. We must contact them in large numbers. Refer to Senate Bill No. S.2664. State your objections in your own words. Use the information in this article. Contact the co-chairs of the Judiciary Committee and your own state senator and state representative. Below is the contact information for the Judiciary co-chairs and a link to website to find out who your state legislators are and their contact information. Four phone calls or four emails (or both) from every SPOA member is what we are asking. This is a critical vote. Your actions count! Our state legislators are counting the number of letters they get and their quality. PLEASE TAKE A FEW MINUTES NOW TO CALL OR EMAIL OR DO BOTH. Judiciary
Co-Chairs: To find out who your state senator and representative are and their contact information, enter your street address at this website: www.wheredoivotema.com. You are looking for “Senate in General Court” and “Rep in General Court.” Click here for the entire text of
S.2664, the just-cause eviction bill.
Boston
City Council's student No more than four students per apartment
Students will
invade new neighborhoods Action Alert! below April 2008 The Boston City Council wants no more than four students in an apartment. Without consulting landlords and with only 10 minutes of debate, the Council moved quickly last December to seal a behind-closed-doors deal with District 8 Councilor Michael Ross, voting unanimously to petition the Boston Zoning Commission to limit the number of college-level students that can occupy a Boston apartment to a maximum of four students. The public hearing on the petition was December 11, 2007, and the unanimous Council vote was the very next day, December 12. After a tumultuous hearing in which students and landlords clashed with neighborhood groups from student-occupied areas of the city, the Boston Zoning Commission dismissed the public and in a secret meeting voted unanimously in favor of the zoning amendment. The outcome had already been decided before the hearing. The new student occupancy limit could have far-reaching impacts on the city and would give Boston’s Inspectional Services Department (ISD) one more powerful tool to invade multi-family properties and interfere with tenancies. Boston’s landlords can expect a crackdown on student occupancies.
Impacts on city
The ostensible purpose of the Council’s action is to control student impacts on local neighborhoods, including loud, late-night parties, excessive, strewn-about trash, and high rents. But City Councilors appear not to have considered carefully the impact of reducing the number of students per apartment in this college- and university-intensive city. ‘Back door’ rent control and devaluation. By limiting the occupants per apartment, the effect will be to limit the rents collectible from apartments now typically occupied by students. Students can only afford so much rent for housing, so the occupancy cap is a rent cap – or rent control, without saying so! That limit on rents will reduce the assessed value of those properties and reduce the property tax revenue the city receives. To compensate for that revenue loss, the tax burden will shift to non-student-occupied properties throughout the city. And the parties will continue. Displacement and high rents. By setting a maximum of four students, the basic effect will be to spread the extra students wider throughout the city. That will displace local families and households and bring premium rents to more units in more areas of the city. Coming along with the students as they spread out will be the same problems already complained of: loud, late-night parties, strewn-about trash, disorderly conduct and high rents, which will displace long-term residents. The City Council will have furthered institutional expansion of the colleges and universities without solving the problems. Student behavior will not change under this limit. The parties will continue. Housing shortage and higher rents. The occupancy restriction will force students to occupy more housing, which will reduce the total available housing in the city, creating a housing shortage. Rents in general will rise, especially in areas adjacent to student-occupied areas as displaced families and other households also spread out. And the parties will continue. College and university concerns. Reducing the number of occupants will increase the rents paid by individual students, even as the overall rent per unit declines. Students, parents, and the educational institutions will not be happy about that. And the parties will continue.
Real solutions
Enforcement – real enforcement – is the primary solution. There already are laws on the books that prohibit noise over certain levels both day and night, litter and improperly stored trash, and disorderly conduct. Enforcement of these laws needs to be ramped up substantially and targeted directly at students, including arrest of offenders. The colleges and universities all have student codes of conduct that cover off-campus behavior, with academic sanctions including expulsion. These need more enforcement also. Finally, a surety bond could be required of off-campus students. It is a sum of money, say, $10,000, paid by all the students in one apartment, from which the cost of city enforcement is reimbursed after one or two warnings. With each roommate’s money at stake, this last approach, we are told, is very effective.
Roommates are legal
The Council’s petition restricting student occupancies comes in response to a consent decree negotiated by Greater Boston Legal Services in the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts in 2005, which specifically allows for roommate situations of any size in Boston so long as the property owner is not contracting individually with each roommate and so long as square footage requirements of the state sanitary code are met. Those requirements are 150 square feet for the first person and 100 square feet for each additional person. Until this consent decree, Boston’s ISD and the Boston Licensing Board were interpreting the state lodging house statute as prohibiting any occupancy with four or more persons unrelated to each other unless it is licensed and conforms to building code requirements for lodging houses. Enforcement of this interpretation was extremely lax and uneven. Click here for Boston ISD Rooming House brochure Legal problems
The Council’s petition to the Boston Zoning Commission has some serious legal problems, including constitutional questions. Students are being targeted as a separate group. Young professionals just out of school may have just as many parties as students and possibly more by some accounts. Targeting students raises a question of equal protection of the law. Is it fair to target them, or is a legislative body like the City Council required to enact general laws applicable to broad categories of people? It might be legal to restrict all occupancies of unrelated persons, but not just students. (The consent degree mentioned above, however, would prohibit this option.) Then the question is: How are students to be identified? Does a public official have the right to approach a person and ask for their occupation or its equivalent? Being a student is not illegal. Such questioning might constitute unreasonable search and seizure or, in other words, invasion of privacy.
Boston Council defeats collective bargaining proposal in 8-to-5 vote Fifth defeat of a tenant initiative relating to rents. Will they ever stop trying? Click here to read revised “voluntary collective bargaining” proposal Click here to read original “compulsory collective bargaining” proposal. Last updated October 31, 2007 In an 8-to5-vote on August 8, the Boston City Council defeated a landlord-tenant collective bargaining proposal that was drafted by a Harvard professor and tenant organizers at tax- and charity-funded City Life/Vida Urbana in Jamaica Plain, a radical tenant organizing group. Councilors Sam Yoon and Felix Arroyo sponsored the legislation. This was the fifth effort over the past six years to try to bring some form of rent control back to Boston, each one defeated by an 8-to-5 vote of the Council. One wonders if tenant advocates will try again. We suspect so. During the debate leading up to the vote, SPOA emphasized that even the allegedly “modest” collective bargaining proposal that was produced in the end – requiring owners to meet with tenants twice a year for up to six hours each meeting, with no further requirements – was a major step towards full-blown compulsory collective bargaining, which would amount to rent control in the end. This argument, which finally prevailed, was made to some 26,000 Boston property owners in mass mailings sent out by SPOA-ACT, the lobbying arm of SPOA. These owners flooded City Councilors’ offices with phone calls, email messages and letters. One councilor said the feedback from constituents was 90% against the collective bargaining proposal. Here below is our statement of what’s wrong with collective bargaining.
SUMMARY of IMPACTS on property owners In general, the bottom line for all Boston property owners is either you will have less control of your property, especially in setting rents, OR you will have higher property taxes to offset the devaluation of rent-controlled properties.
SPECIFIC IMPACTS: Controlled owners: Below-market rents; no money for repairs; devalued properties; hard-to-evict tenants Non-controlled owners: Higher property taxes to offset devaluation of controlled properties The city’s tax base: Will steadily shrink as the number of controlled properties steadily expands.
ADDITIONAL IMPACTS in the special case of CONDO OWNERS: The rent-controlled condos will affect owner-occupied condos as well as the condo association as a whole. Rent-controlled condos will be starved for cash. These units will deteriorate over time. Their owners will be forced to resist all special assessments for common-area improvements, leading to physical decline of the whole building. Troublesome rent-controlled tenants will be hard to evict, further eroding the quality of condo life. The problems for condo managers will escalate, pushing up their fees.
Advocates’ goal is rent control The advocates proposing this almost-voluntary “collective bargaining” say it’s not rent control. But they are the same advocates who have tried and failed to bring rent control back to Boston over and over again in recent years. We know their goal is rent control. This proposal goes a long way toward their goal. It sets up a city bureaucracy. The city itself gets involved in organizing tenants and supervising meetings. These meetings, up to six hours long, are compulsory for landlords, backed by the denial of building permits and the threat of rent strikes as punishment. Just to avoid these meetings, landlords will think twice about raising rents.
As now drafted, this proposal puts
intense psychological pressure on landlords to keep rents low.
But let’s be very clear, this present proposal has the full
bureaucratic and punishment structure of rent control and lacks
only further landlord obligations. It can be easily turned into
the complete compulsory “collective bargaining” system
that these same advocates proposed just months ago. Moreover,
the present proposal gives advocates critical help from the city
in organizing tenants. Tenants are already free to organize
spontaneously in response to a negligent landlord. This proposal
injects new organizing power that will be used at the City
Council to turn this proposal into the compulsory system that
advocates want. Compulsory “collective bargaining” IS rent control Compulsory “collective bargaining” is tenants organized into groups assisted by the city to push their landlords into long-term contracts for below-market rents with the ultimate threat of rent strikes and severe penalties. Affected landlords must meet with tenant groups and must bargain collectively “in good faith” about every rent increase. If they must bargain, that means they must be willing to lower their rents – the only question is by how much. That’s rent control.
If agreement can’t be reached, a third
party finally decides the outcome of this time-consuming,
compulsory collective bargaining. Who could that be? The city of
Boston’s Rental Housing Resource Center, Boston’s former rent
control board, now returning to its original function. There’s
no way this will not be rent control! Rent control will affect YOU – lower rents or higher taxes
If compulsory collective bargaining
controls you directly, it will mean lower rents, no money for
repairs or improvements, hard-to-evict tenants, and your
property generally devalued. If it does not control you
directly, then it will push DOWN the property values of those it
does control and push UP your property taxes. If “collective
bargaining” does not control you now, it may well control you in
the future – because historically rent control always expands. Lowering property values in Boston
The passage of “voluntary collective
bargaining” alone will push for lower rents and start the
process of devaluation. When voluntary collective bargaining
becomes compulsory and tenants negotiate for still lower rents,
property values will drop more and more. As the collective
bargaining process spreads to more buildings and to smaller
owners, ever larger segments of Boston’s rental housing market
will be devalued. As buildings are deprived of money needed to
fix them up, they will start falling apart and lose more value.
Whole neighborhoods will be hurt by these deteriorating
properties sitting in them. Shifting the tax burden to non-controlled owners When growing numbers of properties are devalued, the tax revenue they produce falls and Boston’s property tax base shrinks. Then the property tax burden will shift to owners of non-controlled properties. Their property taxes will rise to make up for the lost revenue! There is no magical way to create lower rents without having an impact somewhere else. In the end, everyone pays for rent control. Click here to read the revised “voluntary collective bargaining” proposal and the original compulsory “collective bargaining” proposal.
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SPOA's Rent Control Victories
Besides the 1994 statewide referendum outlawing rent control in Massachusetts, SPOA has racked up recent major victories against efforts to bring rent control back. Read about them here.
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Water Submetering
Bill Passes |
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Worse yet: just-cause eviction & back-door rent control. Read More. |
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