The Emporia Gazette

November 20, 2009

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When it comes to rental housing, there aren’t many neutrals.

A new policy on Emporia rental standards, which includes landlord licensing and regular inspections, is due to be discussed by the city commission on Oct. 10. The idea is to try to find a way to crack down on the more neglectful landlords without piling too much on the good ones.

Whether that’s been achieved may depend on who you ask.

Enforce the rules

Shirley Eubanks has nothing against livable housing. Every item on the city’s list of standards makes sense to her — working heat, safe wiring, a ceiling without holes in it and all the rest.

What doesn’t make sense, in her eyes, is having the city lay down the law on good and bad landlords alike.

“I’m sure all of my houses would pass all of that,” said Eubanks, a landlord since 1980 who works through Prudential. “But I think the houses that are in disrepair should be closed and they should be corrected. Action needs to be taken against those landlords, but it’s my opinion still that the laws are in effect to do that.”

Ethel Carter, a 12-year-landlord, would agree. She rents out 80 apartments, inspects them twice a year and carefully screens her tenants. And from her perspective, it makes more sense to enforce the old system than to put in a new one.

“They choose not to enforce it,” she said. “It’s hard. It takes effort to find out who’s in violation But why would they want to target the good ones when the bad ones are the ones that need taking care of?”

“It’s wrong to punish the whole class for one child’s misbehavior,” agreed landlord James Scott. “I believe they are sincere. And I believe that they want to clean up Emporia. But have you heard about how ‘You’ll catch more flies with honey than with a flyswatter?’ That’s what they’re trying to do. They’re very sincere, but tunneled in their vision.”

All that licensing fees will do, Carter said, is raise the rent when the cost gets passed down. She also said that she’s disturbed at the “secretiveness” of the Human Relations Commission that created the draft rules. The commission worked on the proposal most of the summer but Carter only found out about it in August. At a September meeting, she said, some members of the commission were reluctant to share details of the proposal because it hadn’t been passed by the city commission yet.

“They asked me, ‘Don’t you want to see better options in Emporia?’”Carter said. “I said of course. But this isn’t the way.”

For Scott, the fee is “a tax without being called a tax.” The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development also sets standards, he noted, but they pay the landlords, not the other way around.

“I think all the good landlords want good housing and safe housing,” Eubanks said. “But this is not the way to go about doing it.”

Raising the bar

Steve Ihde is in an interesting position when it comes to the new standards. He’s a member of the Human Relations Commission. He’s also a landlord.

“In a way, I’m maybe the ultimate middleman,” Ihde joked. “I could write a book: ‘How to Lose Friends and Irritate People.’”

Unlike some landlords, Ihde sees mostly advantages to the proposed rental standards. By improving Emporia’s housing stock, he said, the city can become more attractive to new arrivals in business and the university and maybe raise overall property values. A regular system of inspections could even protect the landlord, he said, by verifying the condition of the property, thus making it clear when a tenant has been neglectful or destructive.

“Maybe one of the large benefits to a landlord is a fair playing field,” he said. “Two houses could look very similar. Two apartments could look very similar. The average tenant is not a property inspector, they don’t know what they don’t see. You could have one landlord that maintains the infrastructure and one that dresses it up cosmetically. ... A tenant coming in may be willing to pay the same level of rent for both, and that is not a fair playing field to the better landlord.”

On a per-month basis, Ihde said, the costs were pretty nominal — sometimes as low as one or two dollars a month for a particular property. As a tenant or a landlord, he said, the slight extra cost would be worth it to guarantee good housing, accountability and a fair playing field.

“It’s so easy to get wrapped up in the short-term and not see the vision,” he said. “Say I have a property and over 10 years, I’m going to pay $150 and we really improve our housing stock. Is there much chance that the property won’t be worth at least $150 more 10 years from now? That’s a chance I’ll gladly take.”

Members of the commission, he said, discussed the policy among themselves and individually looked for information in the community in putting it together. And it’s still just a draft, he noted, saying there would be plenty more opportunities for public comment once the policy comes before the city commission for consideration.

“I believe there is more support for a fair program than you will hear,” Ihde said. “What do you call it, a silent majority?”

‘A watchful eye’

Craig Reinehr doesn’t deal much with renters in the usual sense. He heads up Emporia State University’s residential life program, overseeing the dorms and the campus-run apartments. But even though about 1,000 students live in those areas, that still leaves a majority of the student body off-campus. A number of students leave campus housing in their freshman year and only a handful come back as juniors.

But even from the sidelines, he knows some of what a student renter may fall into.

“There are a few rentals out there that are sub-standard,” he said. “But once you’re in a lease, you’re stuck and it may not be the best or the healthiest place for them.”

Reinehr has no problem with housing standards. After all, ESU has to meet its own set of rules, overseen by state authorities. Putting rentals on a similar basis, he said, would make it easier for students to compare the values of off-campus and on-campus housing and reassure them that no matter where they go, certain factors will still be accounted for.

“They’ll know going in that there is a minimum set of requirements and that they’re not going to get something that’s worse than this,” Reinehr said. “It’s not so much ‘buyer beware.’”

“We’re under a watchful eye,” he said. “I think all rentals should be that way. And if the city’s doing that, it’s probably a good thing for the students.”

The tenants’ view

Gail Coburn would just as soon not have a “watchful eye.” To her, that violates one of her basic rights as a tenant.

“There’s an inherent right to privacy, to decide when you’ll allow someone to come in your home” said Coburn, a care team manager for community support services at the Mental Health Center who rents her home. “Even once — if you don’t them to do it and you’re compelled, that’s a violation of your rights.”

Coburn is quite aware that there are bad landlords. She’s even had to deal with a couple that tried to take advantage of her clients, claiming falsely that they damaged things. But that needs better enforcement of existing laws, she said, not new ones.

Like some of the landlords, she noted that increased costs to the landlord would mean increased costs to the tenant and that the new system could discourage people from coming to the community.

“It seems to me that something like that would make Emporia a less attractive area for businessmen to own property,” she said. “It’s just one more thing, one more rule.”

“One more rule” would be just fine with Natalia Barb. As a freshman college student whose first apartment had rickety stairs (“I don’t even go down them unless I feel like having an adventure”), faulty appliances and a mushroom growing out of her carpet, she’s more than ready to see some tougher standards in town. And if it means she has to let in an inspector, so be it.

“I don’t mind,” said Barb. “I usually keep the place pretty clean. I don’t mind strangers coming in and looking at my room.”

What really offends her, she said, is that Emporia’s poorer citizens can be treated so badly with little chance of reprisal. In a recent letter to The Gazette, she noted that many Emporians were “living under the power of slumlords in conditions reminiscent of lower Mexico City, because they are destitute and poor.”

The new standards, she said, might offer some hope of change.

The one thing she does find difficult in the new standards, like many, is the additional cost that the tenant could wind up fielding. At the same time, she knows that bad landlords have to be held accountable somehow.

“It’s just a hard situation, I think,” she said. “I kind of wish people would feel they had responsibility.”

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