Opinion: As the rent strike on Almaden Street gains traction, it’s essential to focus on the underlying details affecting many renters: unregulated and infrequent maintenance of rental properties.
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The Almaden Street rent strike began in June after Eugene resident Candice King refused to pay rent due to unmaintained property and a denied request to buy the property from R&R Properties. Although the strike has received vast attention, the root cause –– unmaintained property codes –– remains a problem in many parts of the United States.
King listed excessive mold, outdated appliances and insufficient heating as the primary maintenance issues that drove her to stop paying rent. She also alleged that the refrigerator would stop working and that the stove would often shock her.
“I’d like to live here, not in these conditions,” King said. “I’d like to own this place so that we could do awesome stuff with it.”
King had initially offered to buy the property and improve the conditions herself, but her request was denied by the property manager, Sharon Prager, at R&R Properties.
According to the recent City of Eugene Rental Housing Code, rental properties must have “a permanently installed heating source able to provide a room temperature of 68°F” and “all appliances that the landlord furnishes must be in good working order and shall be maintained by the landlord.”
So, under the City of Eugene code, all of King’s maintenance complaints have valid legal claims.
King has since stopped paying rent in hopes of pressuring Prager to sell the property to her. On Aug. 1, two more tenants on the lot owned by Prager joined the strike to fiscally pressure Prager into selling the property in hopes of creating the Almaden Living Cooperative.
In a written statement received by the Emerald, the Eugene Rent Strike group described the situation as “pressuring the landlord to sell her property to tenants who will care for it much better than she does.”
King also stated at the beginning of her campaign that her main goal is a livable standard for the community and to ensure that there will be continued maintenance to uphold those standards.
“We have a vision for these homes, that they are owned by the people who live in them and held in a community land trust that will care for the structures and the people in them for many decades to come,” King said.
Lack of maintenance should be viewed as a much more pervasive issue across the country and we need better surveying conducted by third-party sources to force property managers to comply with local codes.
Code violations are surveyed locally, with many cities and counties passing ordinances requiring regular inspections; however, with the rise of house rentals and rapid urban growth, cities are often short-staffed and overwhelmed.
Cities and counties must begin investing in programs that work with tenants to check property maintenance. Government subsidized housing should also have routine inspections in order to stay updated with codes and maintain a uniform standard of living conditions.
Currently, the City of Eugene provides a hotline for tenant code complaints and ensures municipal action for code violations within ten days unless the violation endangers essential services.
The US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) requires that public housing and multifamily housing properties are inspected every one to three years and the better the inspection score is, the less often the housing is inspected. These inspections are called Real Estate Assessment Center (REAC) physical inspections.
However, the problem becomes the workforce needed to conduct such comprehensive inspections, and this can often be left up to the tenants to schedule inspections themselves. The current time range provided on the City of Eugene’s website states that reviews can be scheduled from 7:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., which are common working hours for many households.
The accessibility to these resources is just as crucial as the staffing needed to execute HUD’s plan to conduct physical inspections. There needs to be a change in how cities work with landlords and tenants in addressing property code violations and inspections because the current system leaves many people in subpar living conditions.