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Date: 8/2/2022
AMHERST – The Community Resources Committee (CRC) of the Town Council hosted a three-hour community forum on July 25 to field comments, questions and concerns about the CRC’s task of developing and presenting the council with a new residential rental bylaw.
CRC Chair Mandi Jo Hanneke established leading questions to guide the three-hour discussion in segments before opening for any additional comments. The questions included asking the public about what a property owner should be required to do in order to obtain a permit to rent properties, what inspections should look for and how often they should be, what an equitable fee structure looks like and what an equitable incentive system looks like.
“The council has asked the Community Resources Committee to look at the bylaw, the work that those council sponsors have done, and draft a recommendation to bring back to the council by the end of December,” Hanneke said. “This referral to CRC happened in March so we are a little over three months into that referral, we’ve done a little bit of work and this is one of our first community forums to really hear from the residents as to what issues there may be, what ideas they have on how to fix and create rental housing and ensure that rental housing is safe and healthy and then address some of the issues that the current rental permitting bylaw that is now 10 years old has shown over those last 10 years.”
Hanneke said they are looking to change from the current system that is based on self-inspection and is entirely complaint driven. She asserted that the lack of enforcement provisions undermines the town’s ability to ensure that housing is safe, well-maintained and compliant with building and zoning codes.
The remainder of the meeting was dominated by two-to-three-minute segments of commentary from tenants and landlords while being fed the outlined questions from Hanneke. University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass) graduate student Mark Murdy said he has heard of rent being raised by as much as 50 percent this year and noted the scarce housing in Amherst while the limited new housing is “wildly unaffordable.”
“Obviously the thing that I think sets landlords aside from the renters is that they can make a down payment and then renters and the landlords seem to pick up that burden together in order to make sure that the landlords get their mortgages paid off,” Murdy said. “It can be pretty difficult for us to see what exactly goes into rising rent prices. I think it would be great if there was some sort of transparency between how much we’re contributing to paying off the mortgage, how much we’re contributing to paying off the taxes.”
The next speaker identified themselves as a former renter and current homeowner in the town. They said one of the primary issues is identifying the landlords that take great care of their properties versus the ones that pay no attention to it, and called for that element to be considered in their applications for subsequent properties or rental agreements in the new bylaw.
“I don’t know what the town can do to keep certain landlords from gouging, but I really want to echo the thoughts of the prior speaker who was much more judicious with his words than I am,” they said. “I’m sure that there is some of that going on and I don’t know how to fix that.”
On the matter of inspections, Alex Kent said he wanted to see inspections triggered automatically by nuisance house violations. He predicted that would help encourage and incentivize landlords to maintain their properties better and also ensured that their renters respected the right of quiet enjoyment of the neighbors.
One resident that also rents out one property said the town should rely on the extensive state requirements for sanitary code and complaint-triggered inspections. They were met with another speaker saying that the living conditions in their six years has featured “consistently disgusting apartments” with mold and other unsanitary conditions.
Resident Sophia Marks advocated for inspections to not only be complaint-triggered, saying she wanted more protections in place for tenants who make complaints and then are retaliated against by their landlords
“I think this is a really important issue that we’re not talking about enough, but I’ve heard a lot anecdotally,” Marks said. “I have many colleagues who have made complaints and then been either passive-aggressively or downright aggressively retaliated against by their landlords and just have no position of power to do anything about that.”
The aforementioned resident with one rented property suggested charging a percentage-based fee for each unit rented out by landlords with more properties.
“A lot of units that are rented by large investors pay one fee for 10, 20, 30 units, the same one that I pay for one unit,” they said. “If the fees were based on a percentage of the rents charged, it would be fair to those people that charge very little rent because it would be maybe a 5 percent of the one month’s rent to a cheaper unit and it would be 5 percent of a very expensive unit. This way people that are gouging would pay more, and people that are more reasonable would pay less and everybody would pay a fee for each unit.”
Again, Murdy called for transparency and looking into the profit margins of some of the corporate landlords like Kamins. Murdy said he doesn’t believe that a company like Kamins, which he said “charges a one-month equivalent of a finder’s fee whenever you go through them” is going to be hurt by having to pay fees for each unit.
“I do believe that they’re going to try and put that onto renters, but there has to be a method for managing that,” Murdy said. “For example, looking at their profit margins versus rent hikes, because if it’s clear from their finances that they’re extorting renters in order to maintain their profit margins then we as renters deserve to know that.”
James Cabral, a full-time landlord renting to students and families, said he has lived off and on in the Pioneer Valley for 60 years and pushed the blame toward UMass.
“What I observe is a crushing demand for housing in Amherst for undergrads in particular and all the problems that stem from that are what we’re talking about tonight,” Cabral said. “It’s not landlords that cause the problem, it’s UMass. They’re benefitting from the way they can have more and more students without actually building dorms for them. Yes, some landlords are gouging […] I’m not proud of some of my colleagues and some of the things that I see, but I do see that there’s kind of a death spiral that Amherst has slipped into where landlords need to charge a pretty good rent because there is a lot of damage, there is a lot of problems renting to the undergrads. The undergrads know they’re being overcharged so they’re kind of upset about that and they don’t treat the properties well, they misbehave, and it spirals up.”
When Hanneke asked for opinions on prospective penalties, some landlords reminded listeners that some penalties are already in place while multiple tenants called for clearer, easier-to-find renter’s rights in lease papers.
“There are punishments for landlords for mishandling security deposits, it’s all searchable and it’s easy to find,” one landlord said. “The law is complicated, and you can’t expect a landlord to put in laymen’s terms something that is very, very legally binding so you have to present the full language unless the town provides a document that needs to be handled. You will know what you want to know, if you want that information it is easy to find.”
One response to that landlord included a tenant who said, “First of all, landlords use lawyers to draw up the actual lease so that’s just nonsense. Second of all, the town of Amherst can draft up a standard document just to give everybody that’s leasing in Amherst an idea of what the rights are, and realistically I think the only reason you’d be against that is if you would directly benefit from people not knowing what their rights are. I think that this needs to happen for clarity and people to know what they can do about getting taken advantage of by their landlords.”
Links to a full recording of the forum, the current and updated working draft for the new residential rental bylaw and more information is available at https://www.amherstma.gov/3476/Community-Resources-Committee.