by Laura Glesby The New Haven independent
The city will soon be able to revoke the landlord licenses of property owners who retaliate against their tenants for reporting unsafe living conditions.
The Board of Alders unanimously passed that update to the city’s landlord license law on Tuesday night.
The ordinance amendment is now awaiting a final signature from the mayor before officially becoming law.
The update is the final leg of a procedural overhaul within the city’s housing and blight code enforcement agency, the Livable City Initiative (LCI), shepherded by department director Liam Brennan over the past year.
Brennan and Assistant Corporation Counsel Sinclair Williams proposed a series of legislative changes to increase fines against landlords who violate health and safety codes, streamline the process of communicating and enforcing those fines, and revive a system to shut down unsafe hotels and rooming houses.
As tenant activism calling out derelict living conditions across the city has surged in recent years, the legislative updates amount to a sweeping effort to heighten the consequences for landlords who violate city codes.
The landlord license update passed on Tuesday followed a yearlong effort to notify all landlords of a pre-existing yet largely unenforced city law requiring them to obtain a residential business license for every apartment building in order to legally rent out housing units.
The license enables LCI to conduct annual inspections of the property, regardless of whether a tenant has called in a complaint.
“We often find housing code violations” during those peremptory inspections, Brennan said after Tuesday’s alder meeting, adding that the licensing inspections are a way of protecting tenants in unsafe homes who may not feel comfortable or may not know how to file a complaint with the city.
The landlord license inspections entail checking for safety provisions that can make the difference between life or death. Last October, after landlord Jianchao Xu did not show up for multiple scheduled inspections of 516 Elm St. in order to secure the legally mandated landlord license, the property caught fire — a blaze that took the life of 32-year-old tenant Kenneth Mims. The cause of the fire has not yet been determined.
Under the new law passed by alders, the consequences of renting out a building without a license (as Xu did in the case of 516 Elm St.) would increase from a one-time fine of $2,000 per rental unit to a daily accruing fine of $2,000 per rental unit. The law makes it so that “if you operate without [a license], that’s a huge deal” — even for landlords who have the funds to write off a one-time fine from the city.
The law also empowers LCI to revoke a residential business license from a landlord who is found to have retaliated against a tenant who has filed a housing complaint with the city.
Specifically, per the ordinance, LCI can revoke a landlord’s license if they file an eviction, deny a lease renewal, raise rent, restrict previously available “services,” or harass a tenant in response to that tenant’s submission of a complaint to LCI or the Fair Rent Commission.
Per the ordinance, if a landlord takes one of those actions within six months of a tenant’s complaint, the burden is placed on the landlord to prove that retaliation was not a factor.
An initial draft of the ordinance amendment left it up to LCI staffers to investigate and determine whether such retaliation had occurred.
The final version of the ordinance, however, would refer retaliation complaints to the Fair Rent Commission — a committee of both landlords and tenants that already has the power to look into retaliation complaints. In other words, LCI will be able to revoke landlord licenses if the Fair Rent Commission decides that retaliation has occurred.
Once a license is revoked, said Brennan, “we would have to send a notice” to the landlord — who would have an opportunity to appeal the revocation to a hearing officer and potentially escalate their case to court.
According to Brennan, a landlord whose license has been revoked due to retaliation would face the fine associated with renting sans a license — which, as of the ordinance update, will accrue daily — until that landlord can provide the city with “good faith evidence” that they have ceased the retaliation.
The ordinance does not directly entail shutting down a rental unit embroiled in a retaliation action, said Brennan. “The consequences are not that the tenant is expelled, evicted, the property is condemned. The consequences are that the landlord accrues fines.”
Asked about critiques that LCI’s landlord licensing and code violation fine overhauls are too harsh on landlords, Brennan responded that the provisions are not meant to punish landlords who are acting in good faith.
“There are plenty of landlords” who cooperate with city regulations, Brennan said, and LCI is willing to cooperate with landlords who are seeking to comply. “If we make mistakes,” Brennan said, “we will undo them.”
With respect to LCI’s new power to revoke licenses from retaliatory landlords, “what we ideally want is to never use this” provision, Brennan said. The ordinance sends a message that “you should not be retaliating against your residents for them availing themselves of their rights.”
Laura Glesby File Photo
LCI Neighborhood Specialist Rosaly Rosario, Assistant Corporation Counsel Sinclair Williams, and Director Liam Brennan at an alder committee hearing about the legislation.