Are We Making Progress? Rental Licensing Recap.

[Note:  A version of this blog entry below was sent to the Planning Committee of the City Council and to the Mayor] 

I am concerned about the pace with which the rental health and safety measure is progressing.  Council member Jack Weiss, more than any other person in recent years, has advanced the debate on this important issue.  Interest in the topic has been high over the last few months since he has been conducting the Planning Committee sessions and allowing the public to chime in.  One of the largest interest groups, the students at WWU, has been especially active as the committee has witnessed.  They, among renters, have the most to lose if there is no measure to clean up the horror show that is our rental situation.  We need go no further than the rental surveys of  several WWU organizations to realize that there are disasters waiting to happen.  We have narrowly missed student deaths over the past two years in five fires in which over a dozen students have lost their housing. 

Associate Student leader Patrick Stickney spoke a note of caution earlier this year when he urged the Planning Committee to take action on an ordinance before May.  After that time, students finish the trimester and, for all intents and purposes, do not return until late September.  So the discussion on rental health and safety now continues, in effect,  without the spokespersons for a group of 10,000 renters.  This undermines the public process and deprives the city council and the city staff of valuable input.  Meanwhile, the landlords and their paid lobbyists can continue unabated their efforts to influence. 

Having been a budget manager for the last 10 years or so of my federal career, I well understand the concerns of the Mayor and her attempts to put the city’s fiscal house in order by establishing and sticking by budget priorities.  At the same time, the city ought to be able to contend with priority issues that gain importance even after budget decisions have been made.  Surely such priority issues encompass threats to health and safety.  I find it difficult to yield to calls for other items of a budgetary nature when rental health and safety has been on the radar for more than a decade and at a time when $1,500,000 of general fund money goes yearly to supporting a museum department.   I love museums.  I have visited them all over the world but I would trade any one of them for a human life or the well-being of tens of thousands of renters. 

I am also concerned that too much is being made of the “stats” provided by the Planning Department at the last Planning Ccommittee work session.  [Click here to view the video at 92.40 on the counter] These were actually no stats at all.  No specific numbers were given.  Only a generalized characterization of the complaints over the last several years was made.  Compounding this lack of specifics was the application of percentages to numbers that were not provided, such as how many of these complaints concerned rentals.  The response was 15% but 15% of what?  To draw any sort of conclusions from the presentation from Planning is not helpful in the least, especially since as  Council member Weiss pointed out so clearly, there are already two surveys extant [here and here]  that plainly arrive at the same conclusions which are that we have a serious problem with conditions of rentals in this town.

All the talk of making it easier for students or renters to contact the city or an ombudsman or a campus entity still does not solve the issue of fear of retaliation, ignorance of dangerous conditions, or downright indifference (even indifferent renters deserve to be in a safe place and certainly their neighbors deserve not to be placed in danger).   Similarly, building a program on an ineffective system that is already in place is problematic and only serves to delay the implementation of a demonstrably effective program undertaken in hundreds of cities. Complaint driven systems do not work (I again pointed the committee to the CDC report [click here] that actually studied the problem.). 

The endless iterations of discussion of this issue over the past decade have not changed any of the facts.  We still are dealing with a recalcitrant landlord population that fights tooth and nail any suggestion of inspection of their self-professed well-cared-for rental units.   They speak of their desire to see “bad landlords” shut down but offer no viable means to do so.  Even their professional organizations whose representatives constantly assure us that their industry is safe but for the few “bad apples” have not sanctioned a single landlord or brought any “bad apple” to the attention of the city.  Once and for all the rental industry is a business and businesses are regulated for the health and safety of the population that they serve and from whom they extract a significant amount of money.  All businesses in town are subject to some sort of control from some statutory entity even if it is the location of the fire doors. 

A mandatory inspection program that involves ALL Bellingham rentals solves the issues around reporting and education.  Other cities do inspection regimes successfully and certainly we can do similarly with the approximately $400,000+ the registrations fees are likely to bring in.  I invite the Planning Committee, the Mayor and the other members of the City Council to read my November 2010 email [reproduced below] to this same Planning Committee of which Council members Weiss and Lilliquist were members at the time.  We continue to turn ‘round and ‘round the same mulberry bush which is that of a vigorous program of mandatory inspections.  I cannot fathom the continued resistance to inspecting all properties especially if the fees will cover the cost.  

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From: richard conoboy  

Sent: Monday, November 01, 2010 12:07 PM
To: 'Seth Fleetwood'; 'jweiss@cob.org'; 'tbornemann@cob.org'; 'MLilliquist@cob.org'
Subject: Thoughts on Rental Licensing Worksession of the Planning/Neighborhoods and Community Development Committee

Dear Committee Members,

There seemed to be several discernible areas of discussion at your 27 Oct  work session on rental licensing in Council chambers.  I would like to comment on each.

License rentals but retain a complaint based system.   That is essentially what Bellingham has at this moment absent the licenses.  The city is not flooded with complaints for the simple reason that complaint based systems do not work.  I have already sent to the Council a copy of a Centers for Disease Control (CDC) study that determined that tenant complaint based systems are ineffectual.  I have attached the study again for your information.  It is not entirely clear why the Council  and your committee want to revisit this issue each time they meet.  Again, I will quote the first paragraph of the CDC paper:

“Code enforcement systems that operate solely in response to tenant complaints, although the prevailing norm nationwide, are highly ineffective and have limited impact.  This approach fosters the decline of rental housing conditions since tenants may not know how to register complaints or may be reluctant to complain out of fear of retaliation by the landlord.  In contrast to sole reliance on complaint-based approaches, proactive, periodic inspection programs can advance primary prevention more meaningfully. “

I might add that neither the landlord nor the tenant is aware of many life threatening conditions. 

Which brings me to…

Education as an approach:  I am interested in the methodology that the Council might employ to educate the tenants of 17,000 rental units.  Even if there were an efficient and inexpensive method to reach all of these people at least once, what level of expertise on the condition of properties might one impart to this highly varied group?   (Not only that, each year Western Washington University alone deposits about 4,000 new renters into our neighborhoods as the freshman class leaves the dorms.)  This educational approach is no more than a close corollary of the complaint based system for it depends entirely on the tenant to move forward on a complaint after finding (with every limited knowledge and skills)  a hazardous condition.  I refer you again to the CDC report.  As for educating landlords, the same condition applies.  How does one educate a property owner sufficiently to identify serious or hidden defects in a rental unit?  Nevertheless, the self-described  “rental industry” claims that there are only a few bad apples, although the manner in which they have come to this conclusion is not evident not having had any training.  If they have some information about these bad apples, let them come forward and save everyone the time and effort to inspect all these properties.  Do the landlords even have a list of all the rental properties in town?   If they do not have a list, then the city would have to create and maintain a list, if only for the purpose of “educating” them, let alone finding the properties with appalling conditions – all those bad apples that the “rental industry” tells us about. 

NB.  One might also, while we are at it, ask that the city approach the Health Department to demand that it stop the health and safety inspections of restaurants.  Instead the Health Department can establish a website where a checklist for restaurants will be posted so that diners can carry out their own inspections before having a meal.  Would not that inspire confidence in our eateries?  We can also get rid of several FTEs of food inspectors for additional savings for Whatcom County.  J

Which brings me to…

Identifying rental properties:  As some say, this should not be rocket science.  The County Assessor maintains a comprehensive data base of all property owners and their holdings.  For those properties for which the mailing address differs from the property address, one can rightly assume that the property is rented.  Thus identified, to be exempt,  the property owner would have to demonstrate that he or she is, in fact, living at the property.   Stiff fines for misrepresentation or failure to register a rental would discourage scofflaws. Of course, creating the data base implies resources.

Which brings me to…

Identifying start-up costs:   Anything short of a licensing and inspection program is essentially ineffective, so I will not dwell on the costs of any lesser measures.  It is preferable that the Council do nothing at all rather than adopt a program that places a thin veneer over the issue that gives the appearance of having done something substantial for the health and safety of our renters.  Again, I would refer the committee and the Council to the City of Pasco where they have already have done all this preparatory work and whose code enforcement officer has already indicated to me his willingness to assist us.  The fact that we are facing tough budget times is no reason to be timid before a health and safety issue.  The cost for the portion of an FTE needed to establish the data base of landlords probably could have been covered by the price of the new truck that was recently bought for the Neighborhood Compliance Officer.  The city might also look to volunteers to assist in scrubbing the Whatcom Assessor’s property records to establish a Bellingham rental data base for licensing purposes.  I would volunteer and might easily find several others to join me in the project.

Looking for meaning in data on complaints to date:  Some on the committee seek to find meaning in the statistics on property related complaints filed over the past several years.  The assumption is that these complaints are indicative of the problem so that lack of complaints equals lack of problem.  More confusing is that the reporting on complaints mixes all sorts of property issues such as lack of permits and violations of various and unrelated city codes.  The number of complaints about dangerous conditions in rentals is, therefore, extremely small in number but given the inability of renters to recognize dangerous situations and their reticence in making a complaint to the city, this is not surprising.   Having only a handful of complaints each year on a rental stock of 17,000 units should be a surprise to all.  That either means that we have a pristine rental market or, as the CDC report says: complaint based systems do not work and we have a hidden problem.  You chose the most plausible.   As the celebrated scientist Carl Sagan once declared, “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”  The Council would do well not to draw conclusions from this gloubi boulga of limited statistics. 

Regards, 

Dick Conoboy

Planning Committee of the City Council to Hold Discussion on Rental Health and Safety on WWU Campus

The Planning and Community Development Committee of the Bellingham City Council will hold a meeting on the campus of Western Washington University on the topic of rental licensing and inspections on May 30th.  You can read the details by clicking on the flyer at left.  WWU students are working diligently on many fronts to bring rental health and safety issues to the attention of the student body and to have the City Council pass an ordinance to register and inspect all rentals.  Nearly 10,000 students live off-campus, mostly in rentals. 

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.