ASUO President Maddy Melton joined other members of the Eugene Citizens for Housing Standards at City Hall on Monday to push for the creation of a rental housing program to defend low-income renters against unsafe living conditions.
During a press conference outside the City Council chambers, ECHS members urged the City Council to create local housing standards based on existing state law and to create a citywide program to enforce those standards.
“For over 20 years now the city of Eugene has been without housing standards to protect its citizens,” Melton said. “We are asking the council to prioritize this issue — the issue of rental housing in our community — and implement housing standards and a rental housing program in Eugene. We are not asking for additional laws, just local enforcement of current laws.”
Melton said the housing code should address the structural integrity, weatherproofing, heating and plumbing of rental units to protect the more than 54,000 renters in the city. Eugene is the largest city in Oregon without local housing standards, she said.
Melton said the Whiteaker community is about 85 percent rental units, 30 percent of which were found to be substandard to state law.
ECHS member and Lane Community College student David Hansen described a specific case of low-grade housing. He said Whiteaker neighborhood resident Jeremy Shorter’s home had problems ranging from cracks in the ceiling to water damage that caused the ceiling above the shower to collapse.
“Not only was there a laundry list of problems, but these were problems that his landlord had been doing nothing about — had known about, but essentially refused to do anything about,” Hansen said.
Lane County Law and Advocacy Center lawyer John VanLandingham said the Oregon Landlord-Tenant Act provides for housing standards, but that without a local enforcement mechanism it’s too difficult to ensure those standards are met. VanLandingham, who specializes in landlord-tenant law, said tenants have four choices when they are living in substandard housing: move out, sue the landlord, withhold their rent and take it to court, or make the repairs themselves and try to recover the costs later. All of those options are either too expensive or not effective, he added.
“First, simply giving your termination and saying you’re leaving is not going to get a repair,” VanLandingham said. “Not when a landlord has a market in which tenants are fighting to get to rental units.”
Melton said the system ECHS is proposing would be similar to the current system in Corvallis. If a renter had a complaint, he or she would contact the rental agency. If the landlord doesn’t make the repairs within 10 days, the landlord, tenant and a city assessor would examine the property in dispute. The city assessor would have the power to set a deadline for the repairs to be completed if violations were found. If the landlord doesn’t complete the repairs by that deadline, the city would levy a $250 fine for every violation every day until the repairs are completed.
In the 2002-03 fiscal year, the Corvallis housing standards office received 423 complaints. One-quarter of those came from students, Melton said.
The city agency would be a self-sufficient entity charged with investigating claims of housing standard violations. An $8-per-unit tax would pay for the agency, Melton said.
City Council President Bonny Bettman said landlords could pass on the unit tax to renters, but renters are suffering from poor standards right now. Her ward used to include University neighborhoods, and when she went door to door talking to neighbors, she was surprised by how many people felt “helplessness and powerlessness” about their living situations. She said the City Council will have a work session on May 24 to discuss housing standards, and she praised the council for making the issue a priority.
Jon Sanford, leasing manager with Chase Village Apartments, said that if the City Council adopts the proposed housing standards, the fee will probably be passed on to the tenants, but he said he thought it was great tenants “are looking for that extra support.”
Sanford said small rental companies probably have more problems with tenants than large companies because the larger companies are more susceptible to negative word-of-mouth and need to keep their customers happy, he said.
“I feel like probably in the house rental area, there’s a higher percentage of management companies maybe not doing everything they should be doing for their tenants,” Sanford said.
Duck’s Village Leasing Manager Cathy Engebretson said she can understand students wanting to enforce local housing standards because she has heard of houses with leaky roofs and bad heating, among other things.
“We try to obviously not have those kinds of problems here,” Engebretson said. “We have management here right on site, so we don’t usually have issues with those more vital things … It does seem like there must be someone out there that’s a little slow in getting repairs done. You would definitely think that wanting to keep tenants and wanting to stay in business should keep that from happening.”