Councilor Tito Jackson to hold hearing on corporate landlords

Boston City Councilor Tito Jackson has ordered a hearing to discuss the role of corporate landlords and investors in displacement and community instability. The city council hearing, set for Oct. 20, comes amid outcry by tenants and housing activists about steep rent hikes, evictions and other actions by a large Boston realtor acquiring properties in Boston neighborhoods.

“The foreclosure crisis and the surge of residential housing conversion by corporate landlords backed by investors are causing displacement and community instability,” the order reads. It names Brighton-based City Realty Group as a corporate buyer that has raised rents to unreasonable amounts and neglected repairs of uninhabitable conditions.

City Realty has been buying many properties, often at auction, and not treading lightly on existing tenants, Jackson told the Banner in an interview.

“Their business practices are questionable, at best, in terms of the manner in which they treat tenants and raise rents,” he said.

Jackson and community organizers at City Life/Vida Urbana, a Boston nonprofit tenant advocacy group, say they have heard many tales of dramatic rent increases when City Realty acquires a property, and in some cases, other complaints such as harassment, neglect of residential property, disrespectful treatment and even theft.

“From what I have heard from tenants, they are very aggressive,” Jackson said. “This is unacceptable. We are not going to stand by and allow a for-profit organization to push people around and have business practices that really skirt the line.”

He said he believes representatives of City Realty will come to the Oct. 20 hearing.

A phone call to City Realty elicited a promise of an e-mailed response, but as of press time, the company had supplied no comment.

Jackson estimates that City Realty owns at least 150 units in District 7, which includes Roxbury and parts of Dorchester, Fenway and the South End, and has also bought property in many other neighborhoods. And residential tenants are not the only ones feeling the sting. In April, City Realty purchased a foreclosed commercial building in Jamaica Plain’s Egleston Square (formerly in Jackson’s district, now in District 6) that houses several longstanding small businesses, whose owners now say they may be forced out. On Sept. 16, those business tenants banded together to hold a protest near the building, located at the corner of Washington and Boylston Streets.

According to Maria Christina Blanco, an organizer with City Life, City Realty has “a business plan predicated on displacement,” and is willing to over-bid families trying to buy their foreclosed homes back from the bank.

Though City Realty stands out for its reported negative practices, they are not the only realty companies buying up local properties, creating new alarm among housing advocates.

“Through predatory loans and then foreclosures, in essence the banks have sucked the savings out of people’s homes, and transferred the land and housing from the community to the corporate sector,” Blanco said. “Owner-occupancy is on the decline…and City Realty and other companies are growing their percentage of ownership of our city to a new level.”

City Life has taken up the campaign, working with tenants to know their rights and, with the help of legal aid lawyers, to stand up to the corporate landlords in court. Blanco and her colleagues focus on the goal of returning housing control to communities, and see room for optimism.

“We think of these as big companies, with 500-plus properties,” Blanco said, “but they’re not Wall Street big—and this gives us some hope that we can shift the balance of power.”

Angry tenants of City Realty properties crowded a recent meeting of the Jamaica Plain Neighborhood Council, at which City Realty was scheduled to present a redevelopment proposal for a property in Forest Hills. The presentation was canceled at the last minute, but the protesters were given time to air their grievances before the council and urge them not to approve any project by City Realty.

Some who could not attend sent written statements, which Blanco shared with the Banner.

“My current rent is more than half my monthly income,” wrote one Bay Village tenant who is fighting eviction by City Realty. Since his building was purchased by City Realty in April, his neighbors have moved out after rent increases “from $1,100 to $1,300 to $1,600 to $1,900” per month, he wrote.

A Chelsea tenant wrote, “It’s another court battle every single year for me to stay in the apartment that I started renting long before City Realty came into the picture…. Every year they want rent increases of 40% or more. Where is this additional money supposed to come from? We are humble working people. All we want is a place we can live in peace.”

At the end of that meeting, the JPNC voted to withhold approval of the zoning variances sought by City Realty for the project. That “no” vote will be conveyed to the city’s Zoning Board of Appeals to consider at their hearing on the proposal, currently scheduled for Oct. 21.

Jackson said his office has been working to connect distressed tenants to legal representation. He sees the upcoming hearing as a chance to publicize to city officials and others the scope of what’s happening to vulnerable people in Boston neighborhoods.

“I am not someone who is averse to a landlord making a profit,” he said, “but doubling people’s rents is, to me, not the type of business practice that works; discarding tenants’ private property, that’s not the type of practice I find acceptable. They need to have the light shined upon them.”