Moldy walls, backed up drains and a broken heating system are just a few of the problems Rebecca Palmer has encountered in three years of renting a house just south of campus on Emerald Drive.
“A lot of stuff was wrong with the house before we moved in,” Palmer said. “It was supposed to be fixed shortly after we moved in, but never was.”
Despite the disrepair, Palmer and her three roommates are satisfied with the house because of its convenient location and low cost. She said a professional inspection of the property might prompt their landlord to make improvements and could have alerted them to problems ahead of time.
“A lot of students are moving into their own places for the first time, so they don't know what to look out for,” Palmer said.
Students scouting out off-campus living arrangements for next year may soon be getting a little help from the city in making sure their places are up to par.
The Lawrence Association of Neighborhoods (LAN) is proposing that the city expand its rental registration program to include multi-family units like apartment complexes, duplexes and student-rented homes. Landlords would pay an annual $25 fee per rental to have the inside of each rental inspected for neglect and safety hazards every three years.
“Many times the property is not livable, but the landlords still rent at an exorbitant rent,” said LAN president Gwen Klingenberg. “The price of rental property in the community is above the average scale. Renting sub-standard housing at all let alone at unacceptable rents should be a concern to all students.”
Klingenberg said landlords’ charging high rent for low-quality housing is a problem throughout Lawrence, but that it is most apparent in areas near campus like the Oread neighborhood. Located just east of campus, homes in Oread can be rented to students at high prices and without proper upkeep because of the properties’ location.
Lawrence has had rental registration for all single-family units since February 2002. A single-family unit is a detached dwelling in an area zoned for no more than 11 living units per one acre space. Multi-family units include apartment complexes, duplexes and other housing structures in areas zoned for 12 to 32 units per acre.
“I don’t think it makes much sense to have it for single-family rentals and not multi-family,” said LAN member Candice Davis, citing a report by Neighborhood Resources Director Victor Torres. The report said about 85 to 90 percent of maintenance complaints phoned in to the department came from multi-family units.
In January, Davis sent a letter to City Manager Dave Corliss suggesting that the city expand its rental registration program to include all rental units.
“The goal of the program is to keep properties at some minimal standard and to protect tenants,” Davis said. “Just inspecting the outside of multi-family rentals isn’t enough.”
All rental units are currently inspected for external damage by the fire department and gas company. In multi-family units, responsibility then falls on the renter to report any internal disrepair to Neighborhood Resources.
Brian Jimenez, code enforcement manager for the city of Lawrence, said the city’s high number of student renters called for required internal inspections of all rental property.
“When you’re dealing with a college town, it’s a unique situation,” Jimenez said. “Typically you have a different tenant every year and people may not call us for an inspection because they’re moving on, so then it will be the next person’s problem. If it’s the right location or rent, there will still be someone to rent it.”
Jimenez said expanding the rental registration program would be a positive step for both tenants and landlords.
“We have a lot of absentee landlords in this town,” Jimenez said. “Landlords will benefit from it because it creates a system that holds every landlord to the same standards.”
Landlord James Dunn rents several of his properties to KU students, and said that forgoing some maintenance allowed him to offer his rentals at lower prices for students.
“If the rents are fixed and all other things like property tax are increased, the only thing to cut back on is maintenance,” Dunn said. “Students are willing to compromise a lot of things for cheap rent.”
Dunn said he would have to raise tenants’ rent to cover the $25 registration fee if the city commission approved multi-family rental registration. Dunn was opposed to the forced inspections because they would violate tenants’ privacy. He said the current procedure for inspecting the inside of rentals adequately protected tenants.
“It’s been working for many years now,” Dunn said. “The onus is on the resident to want the property inspected. Society has to trust that an individual can tell if there’s a problem.”
Davis said relying on a tenant to report poor maintenance was ineffective and unfair to the tenant.
“It puts the person who’s complaining in an adversarial relationship with the landlord,” Davis said. “It could affect the person’s deposit and their stay there.”
To accommodate tenants’ privacy, Davis said that inspections could be conducted before tenants moved in or after they moved out.
Lawrence’s expanded rental registration program would model the Unified Government of Wyandotte County’s rental inspection program. The county has four inspectors who manage about 16,500 properties. Single-family units are inspected every five years and multi-family units are inspected every three years. The extensiveness of inspections is based on the number of rental units per acre. Each unit is inspected if an acre has fewer than five units. If an acre has five to 10 units, 50 percent are inspected, and 25 percent of the units are inspected if more than 10 units are on one acre.
According to a report by Neighborhood Resources Director Victor Torres, Lawrence has 12,375 multi-family rental units in Lawrence. The required $25 fee for each unit would generate $309,375 to go toward 4,125 multi-family unit inspections per year. If properties are inspected 100 percent, the city would hire four inspectors, and if properties are inspected on a percentage basis like Wyandotte County, the city would hire three inspectors. Davis said that overall, the expanded rental registration program would pay for itself.
LAN hoped to have the expansion of the program on the city commission agenda by March 27, which is the last meeting of the current commission before elections on April 3.
“They can’t implement it tomorrow, but we’d like to see some agreement that this is the direction they want to go,” Davis said. “A landlord has a business, and it should be held to certain standards just like any other business.”