10,000 Students as a Political Force on Rentals

The Western Front editorial board released this week an opinion piece entitled "Rental Licensing Is a Student Issue".  [Click here to read the editorial in its entirety.]  Two former editorial boards also wrote of their support for rental licensing in 2011 and 2012. See these editorials by clicking here.  The present board of this student newspaper said:

"The complaint-based system doesn’t work. Tenants cannot be expected to have adequate knowledge of the building codes or the legal know-how to hold their landlords accountable. Without requiring rental licensing and mandatory inspections, there is nothing prompting landlords to keep their properties in safe and livable condition."

Students ought to know, partly from their experiences in renting in a town with a no-holds-barred rental market and partly from the the results of several student initiated surveys, one in 2011 and the other this past week.   [These surveys can be found by clicking here and here.] 

The editorial went on:  "The rental licensing issue is a student issue. Knowing the duration of their stay will be brief and lacking a broad range of experiences to draw from, students are likely to grit their teeth and suffer through shoddy rental conditions. We deserve better."

Yes, students do deserve better and they are waking up to the fact that they have strength in numbers.  Each year around April they take part in a 17,000 unit rental  goat rope during which many of the 10,000 student renters play the part of the goat being roped into squalor by the city's landlords for the ensuing academic year. 

Stephanie Kirk, a student journalist at the Western Front, also wrote this week a separate piece entitled "Students Remain Oblivious to Renter Rights".  [Her piece can be found by clicking here].  The article highlights the results of the latest survey of students that demonstrate the shabby conditions under which students live and the often shabby way in which they are treated. 

By virtue of their numbers and the already established interest groups on campus, students are in an excellent position to organize and to bring pressure on City Hall to create a program that will clean up rentals making them safe and healthy places to live. Councilman Jack Weiss is leading the Planning Committee of the City Council forward in creating an ordinance to ensure the health and safety of all renters in Bellingham.  He ought to have our support because he knows very well, too, that that all renters deserve better.

Off-Campus Rentals & Student Life Survey

Heather Rees, a student at Western Washington University, recently published the results of a survey she created and conducted on student experiences with rentals, living off-campus, safety, parties and community resources.  You can read the entire document, entitled Off-Campus Student Life Survey by clicking here.

For the purpose of this blog entry, I will confine my comments to that part of the survey in which you will find student experiences with rental housing - more specifically health and safety problems.  Almost 10,000 students at WWU rent on the open market in Bellingham where there exists 17,000 +/- rental units.  The survey was able to capture data from 1,024 students among 3, 571 who received an email solicitation to participate.  That is a response rate of 29%.  The 1024 responses also represent about 10% of all students living off campus.  These are hefty percentages in survey land.

The disturbing factor with respect to these rentals is the percentage of tenants who report health and safety violations in their dwelling unit.  To a great degree the results of the Rees survey support the findings of another student survey done in 2011 by the Viking Community Builders and the Western Democrats.  You can read my blog entry on that survey by clicking here and following the imbedded links.  Click on the image at left for a chart of results of the 2011 survey and compare it with a similar chart taken from the Rees project also pictured on the left below.

Extrapolating from the percentages of health and safety problems found in the Rees survey and applying them to the number of rental units in Bellingham, one can calculate that nearly 11,000 of the city's rental units (17,000 X 65%)  may not yet have the required carbon monoxide alarms.   One might expect to find 5,000 units with mold; 4,400 with inadequate heating; 3,400 with vermin, 3,000 with deficient or dangerous electrical components; and about 1,600 with inadequate or simply no hot water at all.

Ms. Rees is not the only student who is taking action on the poor state of rentals in Bellingham.  The Associated Students (AS) of WWU has been active in getting students to attend the Planning Committee meetings during which rental health and safety is the topic of discussion.  With the urging of AS, student leaders and renters have been speaking during the public comment period at city council meetings.  Student Rachel Cochran, the coordinator of the AS Legal Information Center, has created a Facebook page entitled the Legal Information Center (click here to see that site). The Center provides student renters with advice on renting and direction for obtaining legal advice.

Reading the two studies I mentioned above will provide the WWU administration, the Mayor and the  City Council not only with information on the state of our rentals (health and safety) but a student's perspective on the lack of information about their own rights.  There is also the exploitation by landlords of that lack of knowledge.  Some then line their pockets by not performing maintenance, by refusal to return security deposits, and by threatening to "black list" students who are vocal in their complaints.

As the Planning Committee of the City Council continues its discussion of licensing rentals and inspecting them for health and safety issues, you can voice your support for legislation that will improve the condition of Bellingham's rental stock.  This has to be done soon and before a renter is killed.  We have dodged several bullets in that regard over the past two years during which five rentals burned.  To refresh your memory you can read about those five fires by clicking here.

Write to the Mayor at:  klinville@cob.org.   Write to City Council members at ccmail@cob.org.  Landlords have acted with nearly absolute immunity for decades.  It is now time to level the playing field by demanding accountability from the landlords and sanctions if they fail to maintain their rental units. 

Geneva Rental Home Fire

Although this rental is not in Bellingham, it is within the Urban Growth Area which will eventually become part of Bellingham.  At that time, rentals in Geneva will become Bellingham's problem.  There is a lesson to be learned from this rental fire. (You can read the Bellingham Herald article here.)  Chimneys are a source of danger for rentals not only from the possibility of a fire from creosote buildup but also from poor drawing that can spread carbon monoxide throughout the dwelling unit.   Leaky chimney linings can also allow material (such as wood and insulation) abutting the chimney to catch fire.  With over 25,000 such fires each year, the danger presented by chimney blazes cannot be ignored.

Carbon monoxide detectors are now required in rental homes in the state of Washington.  It appears that this particular fire was discovered when one of the renters was awakened by a smoke alarm.   Mere smoke alarms will not detect carbon monoxide which kills silently while a renter sleeps.  Carbon monoxide detectors must also be located low enough to perform correctly as the gas tends to sink towards the floor.  Ceiling mounted detectors are not very useful. You can read more about the requirement for carbon monoxide detectors in my 30 Jan 2013 blog entry entitled Carbon Monoxide Alarms Now Required in Rentals.  Click here to read that entry.

So as the discussion continues on rental health and safety, the City Council should add chimneys to the list of items for the eventual ordinance on rental inspections.

 

WWU Student Escapes Rental Fire

We now have another rental fire in Bellingham that can be enshrined with the rental fires (several nearly fatal) in the last year or two on Grant St.. Ellis St., 24th St., and E. Maple St.  You can read about each of these fires by clicking on the street names above.  The Bellingham Herald article on this most recent fire can be read by clicking here. This blaze was in Sunnyland at 2338 Humboldt St. in a 113 year old rental owned by Melvin and Barbara Davidson of Bellingham  according to Whatcom County property records.  The Davidsons apparently own about a half a dozen rental properties in the city.  The renter,  Kyler Frydenlund, is a student at Western Washington University.  About 13 WWU students have been displaced due to rental fires in the last several years.  Several  of these students barely escaped death or serious injury. 

The problem, as with most of the recent rental fires, has been preliminarily identified by the Bellingham Fire Department as electric in origin, possibly due to old wiring (knob and tube) exacerbated by a rat infestation.  Knob and tube wiring was basically phased out in the 1930s.  There are many hazards associated with this wiring about which you can read by clicking here.  In this case, we may have witnessed an confluence of two important health and safety issues; bad, outdated wiring and vermin, like rats, who love to chew on things. 

Councilman Jack Weiss, Chairman of the Planning Committee of the City Council, has been working steadily over the last several months to bring to bring to the full council a measure that would create a rental registration and inspection program to Bellingham.  This latest fire ought to "build a fire" under the Council to ensure that all of Bellingham's rentals are free of health and safety hazards. 

Council Planning Committee Continues Rental Health and Safety Discussion

The Planning Committee of the Bellingham City Council will continue its discussion of the health and safety issues with respect to rental housing on Monday, 25 February at 10:30am in council chambers at city hall.  The topic for this meeting will be the creation of a list of conditions that could be subject of an inspection of a rental unit.  You can view some of the documents that will feed the discussion by clicking here, here and here. 

I have asked Council Member Weiss, who chairs the committee, to also add the problem of mold to the lists.  Also, under the category of electrical systems, I suggested the inclusion of the hidden problem of aluminum wiring.  This topic arose after a fire in a duplex unit on 24th St. in early 2012.  The unit was found to have aluminum wiring.  See the story at my blog entry here.  Former Fire Chief Boyd told me at the time that aluminum wiring scares him to death.  Many homes build in the 1970s were wired with aluminum and some of these homes are now rentals.  Renters are sitting on a powder keg.

A Window into Rental Conditions

A short while ago, I connected with a young man (whom I will call Warren) whose job it is to clean apartments and other rentals at the end of lease periods.  Warren offered a window into the type of health and safety issues one finds in such rentals.  His accounts are all the more disturbing in that this cleaning company has standards that tend to make problem landlords, looking for a cheap deal, go elsewhere for their cleaning services.  What Warren sees then are mostly the "good" rentals.

Topping the list of the problems is mold.  For a good number of us who are not sensitive to mold spores, the presence of mold may just be a nuisance or an eyesore.  However, mold may also indicate a persistent problem with plumbing or general humidity which could eventually be destructive to plaster, drywall and flooring.  For some unfortunate few, mold is a chronic irritant to the lungs and may produce more serious problems.  The Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America* has this to say about mold:  
 

"Mold spores can deposit on the lining of the nose and cause hay fever symptoms. They also can reach the lungs, to cause asthma or another serious illness called allergic bronchopulmonary aspergillosis. Sometimes the reaction is immediate, and sometimes the reaction is delayed. Symptoms often worsen in a damp or moldy room such as a basement; this may suggest mold allergy."

Also related to mold and, moreover to filth, is rotten carpeting.  Warren described to me an instance where a landlord, who has about 8 rental units in Bellingham, pulled carpeting from a dumpster to save money and had it installed in a rental unit.  He then asked Warren to clean the carpet which, of course, was dirty with stains of unknown origin from its stay in the dumpster or its previous use in a dwelling unit.  The only upside was that the dumpster carpet was less filthy than the carpet that had previously been in the unit.  Warren also indicated that common areas in apartments are often the site of the most filth since renters only pass through these places and often ignore the problems.  He was once called in to clean a common area hall carpet on which someone had vomited a week before.  Nobody had complained for days while the residents used the hallway as usual.

Since Warren and his colleagues use electrical equipment to clean various parts of rentals, the ability of the system to handle the load is important.  It is not unusual for the circuit breakers to trip while these cleanups are in progress.  These incidents indicate an outdated electrical system.  Such systems can easily be the cause of electrical fires.  Four WWU students were burned out of their home in 2011.  They had repeatedly reported to the landlord that the circuit breakers were tripping.  Renters are more and more apt to bring with them a host of electronic devices such as televisions, computers, printers, game consoles and DVD players, not to mention telephones that need charging regularly.  Other tenants buy electric space-heaters to deal with heating systems that work poorly thus putting tremendous demands on the electrical system.

The lack of three-pronged (grounded) plugs is also a problem for Warren and his fellow workers, so each truck is equipped with plug adapters which, in effect, defeat the purpose of the three prong grounding.  Worse yet,  Warren noted, is the lack of the proper ground fault interrupters in the bathrooms and kitchens.  More commonly known as GFIs, these plugs are designed to sense a change in current in the hot and neutral wires.  This type of plug will trip a breaker within the device and stop the current flow.  This is especially handy when it is a person who becomes involved in the current flow - commonly known as electrocution.  A typical GFI plug for the kitchen or bathroom costs less than $20 and can be installed in minutes.

Warren has also run into situations in which a toilet has overflowed at one point with the water travelling through the floor and into another unit.  This, of course, contaminates everything that has been soaked with this "black water"  (what we call sewage).  Repairs (mostly cosmetic) have then been made to the flooring around the toilet without further repairing or removing other contaminated material such as drywall or insulation.  

As part of their services, Warren and his colleagues also haul junk from rentals, usually from unused basements where material has been gather dust for years.  Some areas, he has found, have been contaminated with cat urine which has a distinctive odor.  The problem is not so much one for the renters but for those who have to eventually clean these areas as they are exposed (if not wearing proper protective gear) not only to dust and animal urine but also fecal matter from mice and rats.  Dried fecal matter can become airborne and when breathed in can be the transmission vector for many diseases, among which is the Hantavirus that can be fatal in humans.  Nonetheless, renters need be alert for rodent infestations.  I reported on one such infestation, of an especially egregious nature, in the York Neighborhood in 2011.

As the summer ends and the August/September turnover of leases (mostly students) begins, Warren is called in for his cleaning services.  His experience is that landlords, not wishing to lose a day of rent, will schedule the move-out and move-in within a single 24 hour period.  New renters often sleep in their U-Haul trucks parked in the driveway of the rental so that they can move in on a moment's notice. This allows little time for cleaning crews to do a good job and practically no time for the incoming renters to adequately inspect the unit, even if they knew in the first place what they were looking for in the way of health and safety problems.  

I invite my readers to take a second look at the survey of rental conditions conducted by several WWU campus groups in  2011.  The results confirm the experience of Warren and his fellow workers.


*Blue type indicates clickable links.
 

Carbon Monoxide Alarms Now Required in Rentals

An alert student journalist at the Western Front recently wrote an article on a Washington State requirement to install carbon monoxide monitors in residential properties.  Daniel Miller, who is interested in issues regarding rental conditions, wrote that as of January 1st of this year all residential properties must have one of these detectors in each  dwelling unit.  Single family dwellings that were owner-occupied before 2009 are excepted.  You can read Daniel's article by clicking here.

The requirement has been on the books for some time now, however, it appears that not everyone is aware of the mandate.  You can read the relevant portion of the Revised Code of Washington (19.27.530) by clicking here.  The intent of the legislation was expressed in a footnote to the law's text:

"The legislature recognizes that carbon monoxide poses a serious threat. According to national statistics from the centers for disease control, carbon monoxide kills more than five hundred people and accounts for an estimated twenty thousand emergency department visits annually. Specifically, Washington state has experienced the dire effects of carbon monoxide poisoning. In the storms that struck Washington in December 2006, it was estimated that over one thousand people in the state were seen at hospital emergency rooms with symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning, and eight people reportedly died of carbon monoxide exposure. It is the intent of the legislature to implement policies to prevent similar tragedies from occurring in the future."

One wonders how many of Bellingham's 17,000+ rentals have been furnished with these alarms.  The onus is on the landlord to provide these appliances, however, the tenant is required to ensure that the batteries in the devices are operational.  Again, ignorance of the requirement on the part of both the tenant and the landlord could have fatal consequences.  An effective rental health and safety ordinance in the city of Bellingham can go a long way towards ensuring this and other codes are followed in our rentals. 

City Council Planning Committee to Discuss Rental Health and Safety Options

On January 28th at 10:30 am, the Planning Committee of the Bellingham City Council will take up the topic of rental health and safety.  The committee is scheduled to receive a briefing, in the form of an overview, on the subject by the council's Policy Analyst, Mark Gardner.  You can read the agenda bill item by clicking here.  Attached to the agenda bill is an excellent study, entitled Options for a Rental Housing Licensing and Quality Inspection Program,  prepared by Mark Gardner several years ago at a time that the council was considering action on rental licensing and inspections.  No action was taken as a result of the study, however, the study remains an excellent source of information on rental licensing and inspection programs in general.  A discussion on rental health and safety will follow the briefing.

Council Member Jack Weiss has been offering a draft plan for a rental health and safety measure for several months.  He has been meeting with stakeholders on both sides of the issues and has presented his plan to various neighborhood associations.  It is not clear at this time whether Councilman Weiss will ask the committee to consider this draft proposal.  In any event, since the topic of rental health and safety is the only agenda item for the committee, the members will have more than one hour for discussion.

The latest version (click here to read that draft) Councilman Weiss’ proposal to establish a program to ensure the health and safety of renters has changed since I reported on his initial draft in late October.  You can read my blog entry on that version by clicking here.  Gone is any reference to changing or eliminating the so-called “rule of three” which limits the number of unrelated people in a rental unit in areas zoned single-family.  This prohibition has nothing to do with the safety and health of renters but does have some impact on the zoning and density issue.  Councilman Weiss may bring this issue to the attention of council later this year in the context of zoning and density.

A few weeks ago I attended a York Neighborhood meeting where Councilman Weiss presented the revised draft of his rental health and safety measure. After he spoke, he took questions from the residents of the neighborhood and from  some neighborhood landlords.  Many of the landlords' fears still arise from the lack of detail in proposals to date.  This is quite natural until one has the language of an actual ordinance.  

For example, people have concerns about historic preservation and the effect of inspections on the appearance of the home.  This derives from lack of info regarding the kinds of safety codes that will be enforced.  As soon as possible the council ought to produce a strawman/sample checklist, based on that of Pasco or some other jurisdiction.  (You can read more about the Pasco checklist here) This should allay some fears that an inspection program will occasion wholesale remodeling of rental units or run contrary to historic preservation goals.

There is a continuing theme in the discussion about rental health and safety to the effect that 98-99% of landlords are good landlords or that there are only a few bad landlords.  Much of this comes from the landlords themselves. As you know, I have challenged this assumption on many occasions in this blog simply because there is no empirical evidence that these statements are true.  I have heard mentioned that the basis for this assumption is that the city receives few complaints, as if this were an accurate measure. Studies have shown that complaint-based systems (such as we have in Bellingham now) do not work for a variety of reasons.  Any action taken on the basis of data from a complaint-based system is destined to fail due to the inherent problem of under-reporting.  People do not complain due to ignorance, fear of retaliation or other perceived negatives.

I have been working on this issue for years now and I have yet to hear, from landlords or opponents of licensing and inspection, any reference to a study that supports the contention that all but a few landlords are good and their properties are, therefore, safe or that there is some methodology for weeding out the bad landlords and their properties in a targetted manner.  I confess that many or even most landlords may be well-intentioned but that does not translate into safe rentals.  Not only must landlords be well-intentioned but also they must be knowledgeable. 

The actual data that I have discovered and reported in my blog indicate that wherever inspection programs have been initiated, 10%, 15%, 30% or up to 50% of the units are found to have life-threatening health and safety issues. But percentages cloud the issue.  15% (which is about the level of unsafe rentals found in Pasco during their initial inspection round) sounds like a low percentage but when the number of units that may actually be affected is calculated we are talking about more than 2,500 bad rentals (again based on Bellingham’s rental stock of 17,000+ units).  Since many of these rentals have multiple occupants, the math suggests the number of renters affected could be minimally 4,000 to 5,000. Such projections are the reason for which we must have a very active inspection/verification program.  Randomized programs may not fit the bill and may produce a false sense of security in having "done something".

With nearly $400,000 in annual fees accruing from licensing/registration, we should be able to perform such inspections with ease.  The $400,000 is based upon a yearly, per unit fee of $24, however, this number is not written in stone.  We should first look to the purpose and structure of a desired rental inspection ordinance and then calculate the overall cost to execute that program.  Dividing a cost estimate by the number of rental units will then provide a per unit fee structure.  Pasco inspectors were able to look at 8-10 units per day.  We should easily have sufficient capacity with two inspectors and an administrative assistant to keep records.  This is hardly the “huge” bureaucracy that some landlords fear and we can always readjust depending on the actual number of problem rentals that are discovered.  All this must be cost estimated by the city's financial officer. 

Another seemingly rational comment from opponents is that not only rentals should be inspected but also owner-occupied homes/units.  The argument is a red herring. The reality is that rentals are offered to the public for money, whereas owner-occupied homes are maintained by the owner to his/her own level of comfort with the risks that may be posed to the family.  Health inspectors do not poke about your home kitchen but spend much time inspecting restaurant kitchens that serve the public.  These inspection costs are borne by the restaurant owners.

There were also several comments regarding the fines for non-compliance proposed in the draft.  Councilman Weiss correctly pointed out that the proposed fines conform to the recent legislation on rental licensing and inspection passed in Olympia a short time ago. (You can read about that legislation by clicking here.) In any event, all should know that any proposed ordinance must be reviewed by the city attorney to ensure conformity with existing law.

I plan to attend the committee meeting scheduled for 28 Jan at 10:30am and urge everyone on this email list to do the same.