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A new Athens housing committee will focus on rental code enforcement and landlord accountability
By: David Forster
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ATHENS, Ohio (WOUB) — Athens City Councilmember Solveig Spjeldnes likes to share a story about a rental one of her sons lived in while attending Ohio University.
The first time he opened the door, he saw part of the ceiling and roof in a pile on the floor in front of him.
“He looked up and saw birds. That’s how bad it was,” Spjeldnes said.
“Some of the places my other son lived in had holes in the walls,” she said. “Birds flew in … squirrels came in. This shouldn’t happen.”
It shouldn’t. But it did, and it still does.
Part of the problem may be that the city’s code enforcement officers are simply not able to get around to inspecting every rental once a year, which is supposed to happen.
Last year, 73 percent of the city’s 5,825 registered rental units were inspected.
“In other words, renters had a one in four chance of living in a place that might not be code compliant,” Spjeldnes said.
This is why Spjeldnes pushed for the creation of a special housing committee that will look into ways to get all rental units inspected each year and otherwise hold negligent landlords more accountable.
The committee has its work cut out for it. The city’s revenue is not keeping pace with expenses, leaving it with little or no additional funding for code enforcement staff. A severe housing shortage will tempt some landlords to operate under the table, and renters may be reluctant to complain given the lack of housing options. And cracking down on substandard rentals could take some of the worst, and likely most affordable, units off the market, pushing low-income tenants into a desperate search for housing and possibly leaving them homeless.
The city is proactive, but there are still issues
About 75 percent of the housing in Athens is rentals, more than double the national average. This is largely because of the demand for student housing.
The city takes a proactive approach to try and keep these rentals up to code. Landlords are required to get a permit for each rental. Each unit is supposed to be inspected every year and inspectors work their way through a checklist on each visit. If a unit fails inspection, the landlord is expected to address the issue and a reinspection is supposed to be done.
Most communities in Athens County have no inspection process for rentals. Many have no code inspectors or even building codes to enforce.
The city of Athens is also a relative bubble of prosperity compared with the rest of the county.
But the city still has issues with substandard rental housing.
“I think often people are surprised when I say there’s a large amount of people who are really living in the margins and who are getting exploited” in the city, said Caitlyn McDaniel, an attorney with Legal Aid of Southeast and Central Ohio who does a lot of work with low-income tenants.
“I’ve had multiple tenants living in properties in the city just in the past month who had some of the most horrible conditions that I’ve seen in Athens,” she said. “I’m talking like walls and windows that were open to the outside, weren’t properly sealed. Like pests, vermin. I mean, some of the worst, horrible conditions that I’ve ever seen. You look at these properties and you’re like, no human should have to live here.”
It’s possible some or even most of these rentals are not getting inspected at all because the landlord hasn’t registered them with the city, so they’re not on code enforcement’s radar.
The numbers don’t add up
But even the registered rentals do not all get inspected every year. Just how many units the city’s four code inspectors get around to each year varies significantly. Only once in the past dozen years was every rental inspected, according to annual reports from the code enforcement office.
A couple of years were close to 100 percent, but in other years the number was much closer to last year’s 73 percent.
Ultimately, it’s a math problem, a product of the number of inspectors, units to inspect and work hours in a year. Inspectors cannot simply show up unannounced. They have to schedule each inspection in advance, which takes time. Sometimes no one is home to let the inspector in, so the inspection has to be rescheduled.
Then on top of the inspections are all the reinspections of units that did not pass. Most of these failures are related to issues with smoke alarms and fire extinguishers. Last year, reinspections accounted for 24 percent of the total number of inspections, which is a typical number.
And on top of this are the other responsibilities the code enforcement officers have, which include inspecting food trucks, enforcing codes having to do with overgrown or trashy yards, and helping investigate requests for code variances that come before the city’s Board of Zoning Appeals.
This suggests what the city needs is at least one more code enforcement officer. But this brings up another math problem: The city cannot afford it, said Mayor Steve Patterson.
City employees are paid out of income tax revenue. And right now, and for the past couple of years, this revenue is falling behind expenses. The city put a relatively small income tax increase on the ballot in May, but it was voted down.
“Where is the revenue going to come from to hire more code enforcement officers?” Patterson said. “When I look at my revenue versus expenses, things aren’t getting easier, especially with the income tax increase not going forward.”
It’s reached a point where the city may not even be in a position to replace people who leave or retire, he said.
Some of the worst units are under the radar
But even more inspectors won’t solve the problem of landlords renting substandard units without a permit. Unless someone files a complaint or otherwise brings this to the city’s attention, code enforcement may not become aware of it.
Tenants may be reluctant to complain for fear they will be evicted by the landlord or forced to move because of an enforcement action. Many low-income tenants are on month-to-month leases and can be evicted at any time with no reason given.
Patterson said he was surprised to hear that legal aid attorneys are dealing with clients living in seriously substandard and unregistered rental housing in Athens.
“That to me sounds like something that this group should be working on,” Patterson said of the new housing committee.
He’d like the committee to look into ways to better identify and report landlords renting under the table. He’s also interested in ways to make sure tenants are not displaced or left with no place to live because significant work needs to be done on a rental that was not up to code.
Displacement is a big concern for McDaniel. As much as she’d like to see all landlords operating with a permit and all rental units inspected, she worries more stringent enforcement may result in some rentals going off the market.
This could be devastating for low-income renters given the tight rental market in Athens and the surrounding area and the relatively high rents, McDaniel said. She wants to hold landlords accountable but doesn’t want to leave tenants potentially homeless.
Sometimes, she said, “I feel like I’m fighting for you to stay in this horrible place because I don’t know where else you’re going to go. And I imagine a lot of other agencies might feel the same.”
McDaniel mentioned a tenant whose rental was condemned by the city because it was unfit for habitation.
“And they had to go to a different property owned by the same landlord that kind of, in my opinion, was worse,” she said. “And it was just because it was open and that was the only option they had. And they wanted to keep their kids in the school that they were in, and there was nowhere else.”
A balance of carrot and stick
This points to a broader issue, which is the overall shortage of housing of all kinds and at all price points. It’s a national problem and the reasons for it are multifaceted and not easily solved. The result is fewer options, higher prices, and renters and buyers who are more desperate and vulnerable.
“I think what we’re seeing are landlords getting more and more brazen renting places out that they might not have previously because they see that there’s the demand to be filled,” McDaniel said.
Spjeldnes acknowledges the city’s budget may not allow for more inspectors and is also aware of the issues more strict enforcement can bring. She’d like the committee to consider another option that she hopes would incentivize landlords to keep their units in good standing.
What she envisions is an online database of rentals that looks something like Zillow. And in addition to basic information about the units, the listing would include the inspection history for each rental so prospective tenants could see for themselves what issues have been flagged and how they were resolved.
“The goal is let’s make the good landlords shine, and let’s rein in some of the landlords who aren’t doing what they should be doing, and make that more beneficial for them to do the right thing,” Spjeldnes said.
McDaniel says she likes the idea but wonders whether it will incentivize the landlords who are the biggest problem.
“They know that in our current housing situation, there are always going to be people who are in a crisis and who are desperate and who will take whatever they can get, even if it is horrible conditions, even if it’s unsanitary and unsafe,” she said.
“I think there should be a combination of carrot and stick, and I’m not sure that either is particularly strong right now,” McDaniel said. “I’d like to explore with the committee if there is a way to do both.”