[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.
--------------------------------------------------------
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
