The best way to preserve affordable rental property is not to wait until a building is boarded and condemned and then try to resuscitate it. By this time many buildings are beyond hope.
The best way to preserve affordable rental property is to make sure that, year-by-year, proper maintenance is done to the building so houses don't become so degraded that the only economic solution is to raze, Minneapolis has a powerful but under-utilized tool to help ensure proper maintenance of rental property: rental property licensing (RPL) THE PROBLEM A leading cause of deteriorating housing is sponge landlords. When housing values drop below a certain level in a neighborhood, sponge landlords find it financially profitable to buy a property, wring every penny they can in rent out of it they can, put the absolute minimum amount of money into it to keep it in circulation, and when the necessary repair costs get too high, throw the property away. It used to be that when an inspector wrote an order on a house, some landlords could choose simply to pay the fines, rather than do the repairs. With Rental Property Licensing, the sponge landlord can really get hurt financially if he doesn't do the repairs: he can lose his license, which means losing the income of his property, which could easily be more than a thousand dollars a unit. Suddenly it is strongly in his economic self-interest to do the repairs. GETTING RPL PASSED The Jordan Area Community Council led the campaign to get RPL passed. It's Dirty Thirty Campaign to get problem absentee landord properties picked by blocks cleaned up worked on two types of problem properties: Properties with relatively moderate needs, such as a new coat of paint. And properties which had deteriorated so severely that they were already condemed and boarded. Most of these eventually came down. D30 did not work well on a third class of properties: those with significant and severe maintenance problems but which were still salvageable. Often, the landlord paid the fine rather than do the maintenance Our conclusion: the city did not have the teeth to force landlords to maintain their property. JACC researched what other cities did to get their landlords to maintain their properties. The research found that Duluth had something called rental property licensing. A rusty Ford Esort packed with neighborhood volunteers wheezed its way north to Duluth The impact of RPL was visible and striking. in Duluth, larger apartment buildings were covered, but duplexes were not. As we drove around, many of the duplexes looked worn and dilapidated, while the larger buildings, at least on the outside, looked in good shape. Further research showed that councilmember Tony Scallon had several years earlier tried unsuccessfully to get a RPL ordinance passed in Minneapolis. He agreed to resubmit RPL Jordan volunteers fanned out to other neighborhoods around the city, armed with stacks of postcards saying "I want Rental Property Licensing" to send to councilmembers. We had both neighborhood organizations and block club calling in for the cards, and couldn't print them fast enough. Hit with a blizzard of orange postcards, the Minneapolis city council passed RPL. MAKING RPL WORK EFFECTIVELY JACC never had the chance to make good use of RPL.. Shortly after the ordinance was passed, Jordan was one of the first six eggs pulled out of the NRP basket, and we were off to the races. But RPL is still on the books, waiting to be used effectively. Block clubs and neighborhood organizations hold the key to making good use of RPL. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. You need to tell your elected officials and your inspector "the building at XXXX Morgan has x, y, and z code violations, and if necessary we want you to use RPL to get the landlord to do proper maintenance". And track what happens. And getting that regular maintenance is the key to preserving affordable housing. Jay Clark Cooper _______________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A Civil City Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest option, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
