Mayoral Forum Focus: Slumlords

Out-of-town slumlords didn’t win any votes at the latest Democratic mayoral candidate forum.

But they did inspire campaign pitches from candidates looking to leverage policy expertise, ethical leadership, and boundary-pushing ideas to both protect renters and seize (or maintain) control of City Hall.

That housing debate was at the center of Wednesday night’s wide-ranging second Democratic mayoral candidate forum, which over 150 people turned out to watch in person in the Celentano School cafeteria at 400 Canner St. on Prospect Hill.

The four candidates vying for the Democratic nomination for mayor, Mayor Toni Harp, former East Rock/Cedar Hill Alder Justin Elicker, local philanthropist Wendy Hamilton, and affordable housing advocate Urn Pendragon, laid out their visions for how to root out and rein in landlords who endanger tenants through poor maintenance and persistent health and building code violations.

Inspired by recent renter-related disasters and debates around a lethal fire at an illegal Hill rooming house, the city’s apparent retrenchment in its childhood lead poisoning protocols, and the threat of steep rent increases in rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods, the candidates also discussed what protections tenants should and would see coming out of City Hall under their respective administrations.

The forum, which was organized by Newhallville and Prospect Hill alders and Democratic Town Committee co-chairs, covered a broad range of topics including how to increase quality employment opportunities, how to balance the schools budget, and how to stem the flow of police officers to high-paying jobs in the suburbs. Each candidate’s responses to a question about slumlords and tenant rights got at the core of both the style and substance of each campaign’s pitch. (Go to the bottom of this article to watch the full candidate forum on Facebook Live.)

“As mayor,” Newhallville Alder Kim Edwards asked each candidate, ​“how would you regulate absentee landlords, slumlords, and the agencies that provide oversight?”

Harp, as she did throughout the night, stayed specific and focused on nuts-and-bolts policy proposals for improving the safety and quality of life in the city.

Elicker presented a wide-ranging, sharp critique of what he identified as the current administration’s failures to serve all city residents equally, and then promised to prioritize ethical leadership if he were to win the mayor’s office.

And Hamilton and Pendragon pushed the envelope with often far-reaching, sometimes entertaining, proposals aimed at the root causes of some of the city’s most persistent structural problems.

“We Can Do More. We Can Do Better”

At the core of Elicker’s critique of the Harp administration’s approach to tenant protections and landlord regulations was that the laws in place aren’t being enforced and the programs in place aren’t effective enough.

“They’re not effective,” Elicker said about the city landlord licensing rules, which rely on only four Livable City Initiative (LCI) inspectors to cover roughly 25,000 residential units in the city.

“This is life and death, folks,” he said. Two people died in a fire at the 150 West St. illegal rooming house in the Hill earlier this month, he said, ​“because we’re not properly inspecting apartments around the city.” LCI files on the house showed that the building’s previous landlord from Yonkers, N.Y. persistently dodged city inspection requests, and that he may have crammed 16 people into a house with apparently no functioning smoke detectors without city notice.

Steeper fines and better enforcement of those fines would help pay for more housing code inspectors, which would lead to fewer missed renter hotspots like 150 West, Elicker argued.

Elicker then moved on to a class action lawsuit that a legal aid attorney recently filed against the city about the mayor and the health department’s alleged off-the-books change in what level of child lead poisoning should actually warrant city intervention, regardless of current city law.

“There are hundreds of children who are being exposed to lead,” Elicker continued, ​“and the city is actually going backwards on enforcement of lead and not enforcing lead to the highest standards that are set in city law.”

He cited the three separate state judges who ruled over the past year that the city was not living up to its current regulations requiring the protection of lead-poisoned children.

“This is an ethical question about leadership,” he said. ​“Children are permanently impacted by high lead content in their blood. If we’re not investing in the inspection of lead for the future of our children, what kind of city are we. We can do more, we can do better, and we all deserve better.”

Outing LLCs

For her turn, Mayor Harp offered a lengthy, detailed list of policies currently in place to protect tenants, and ones she said she aims to put in place if re-elected to a fourth term.

She first identified the landlord licensing program, which LCI is currently looking to revamp to criminally prosecute consistent bad actors and reward landlords who take care of their properties.

“That has been somewhat effective,” she said. ​“Certainly we do need more LCI inspectors.”

But, trying to keep taxes low, she said, the city has decided to forego new inspector hires and focus instead on building out a centralized repository of building-by-building housing condition data accessible to city employees in LCI, the health department, the fire department, and the building department, through recently licensed software called Municity. That way, she said, ​“when one person from the city goes to a residence, we have one record that they all share.”

Harp said that her administration is beginning to compile a list of all out-of-state, absentee landlords and ​“have our inspectors keep an eye on them to make sure that their property is up to code, and that it meets our fire laws, and make sure that we really bear down on that particular population.”

The city is also working on creating a master list of all limited liability company (LLC) names under which many absentee landlords in the city legally hold their properties, Harp said. ​“We are going to get to the bottom of those LLCs, how they change, how they shift from one group to another. Oftentimes, it’s the same person. So we are working to get to the bottom of that so that we can actually deal with the people who actually own the properties.”

Third Strike: Eminent Domain

Pendragon prefaced her response by warning that many in the audience might be astounded by her proposal for how to identify, regulate, and punish slumlords.

First, she said, the city should step up its fines against landlords for first-time violations of housing, health, and building code regulations. Those landlords should have 60 to 180 days to make the necessary improvements, she said, before the city enforces those fines.

After a second infraction, she said, the city should move to criminally prosecute those landlords if they don’t make the necessary fixes in 60 to 180 days.

After a third infraction, she said, the city should exercise eminent domain and take control of the repeat offender’s property altogether.

“The city itself takes ownership of them,” she said. ​“We then give the properties to LCI. We then put them into inclusionary zoning housing stock for redevelopment [whereby a certain percentage of units would be set aside at ​‘affordable’ rents.] This is one way for us to be able to send a clear message to absentee landlords and slumlords that we will not put up with this anymore in the city. By taking the properties and developing them for the advantage of the people instead of them and their pockets allows us to be able to grow the city and give good, new affordable housing to those that are in need.”

In her response, Hamilton took a break from her many promises over the course of the evening to pressure Yale into contributing upwards of $250 million to city coffers every year. (“Would you rather step on some Yale toes, or keep their foot on your neck?”). She said she would ease up on small landlords and focus all of the city’s regulatory might on the ​“big guys.”

“There are a lot of people from out of town who see us as prey,” she said. ​“We’re a gold mine for them. They’re gonna continue to raise their rents.”

“I would like the rents to go down,” she continued. ​“This isn’t exactly New Canaan or Greenwich, Connecticut. Our rents are crazy. Landlords need rent to pay for maintenance and to make a profit. I understand. But $2,000 for a studio is greedy. That’s an obscene rent.”

Click on the Facebook Live video below to watch Wednesday night’s full candidate forum.