Housing activists call for legislative fix for rising rents

City Life/Vida Urbana Executive Director Lisa Owens Pinto testifies during a hearing on rent protections at City Hall.

A City Council hearing on residential displacement last week drew a wide collection of activists and residents who voiced their concerns about a rapidly changing city that they say threatens to push them out of neighborhoods they have long called home.

“If we don’t stop displacement now, soon Chinatown will only have a name,” said Henry Yee, one of the co-chairs of the Chinatown Residents Association, via translator. He has lived in the area for 49 years.

Most of the panelists proposed ideas that focused on increasing tenants’ legal rights or combatting rising rents through public tools funded through new tax initiatives. They proposed a wide range of policy considerations, including an update to the city’s Inclusionary Development Policy — which determines the percent of a new private development that has to be set aside for affordable housing — and ‘just cause’ eviction legislation, which requires a landlord to provide a specific reason as grounds for eviction.

However, testimony from a representative of the Small Property Owners Association followed by a discussion on implementation also highlighted the range of opinions on the matter and the limitations that even well-intentioned ideas may have.

IDP and ‘Just Cause’

Advocates called for a variety of updates to the IDP, including a new bar of 25 percent affordable housing for new developments (whether on- or off-site), a definition of ‘affordable’ that includes a larger share of people with low and moderate incomes, and a larger required ‘buy-out’ for developers who want to bypass the requirements by paying a fee.

Tenant groups also called for ‘just cause’ eviction legislation. Current Massachusetts law allows landlords to pursue eviction in court for either ‘at-fault’ reasons like non-payment of rent or ‘no-fault’ cases in which a specific reason is not given. Housing advocates say that ‘no-fault’ evictions help drive rapid rent increases because landlords will often empty out their property before selling, since tenant-free properties sell higher on the market.

Affordable housing advocates point out that they want to target the new legislation at large landlords.

“Most small property owners would be exempt from Just Cause Eviction,” Lisa Owens-Pinto of City Life/Vida Urbana told the Banner by email. She specified that owner-occupants would be excluded, as well as those who owned less than a certain number of properties, although she said advocates are still working to determine that threshold number.

“The intention is to focus on corporate landlords who are buying up housing as a purely speculative investment,” she said.

By contrast, Skip Schloming of The Small Property Owners Association called for a general reduction of regulations on landlords. He argued the private market “has the potential to supply a great deal of lower-rent housing if the costs of providing rental housing were not artificially pushed up by a host of government regulations.”

Other landlords have argued that ‘just cause’ legislation could prohibit them from selling their properties for the best price, especially after putting much time and money into their buildings. Still others have claimed such proposals can backfire and increase housing discrimination by causing landlords to seek out only tenants with perfect credit and employment histories because they fear long and costly eviction processes if something goes wrong.

Implementation challenges

Other testimony highlighted the difficulties in the implementation stage. Harry Smith of Dudley Neighbors Incorporated called for the wider user of Community Land Trusts to increase the stock of affordable housing. He told how DNI acquired vacant land through eminent domain powers granted by the Boston Redevelopment Authority and then leased those plots to private and nonprofit developers to build affordable housing.

Chief of Economic Development John Barros noted that while the Walsh administration is friendly to the idea of land trusts, there is a need to update the concept for the current times, as vacant lots in the city are fewer and more expensive. “In a hot market,” he said, “how are we going to provide the capital to buy the land that might be for sale?”

As a partial answer to that question, housing advocates have called for a variety of revenue-raising schemes, including the local adoption of a Community Preservation Act that would allow Boston to add surcharges to property tax bills to help pay for affordable housing. The CPA is a statewide law, but it can only be enacted within a given municipality if it is adopted by voters in a ballot election. Walsh’s housing plan calls for an evaluation of the CPA to determine its feasibility and level of public support.

Other testimony on transit-oriented development shed light on the issue of unintended consequences. Gail Latimore of the Codman Square Neighborhood Development Corporation described the work many had put into getting train stops on the Fairmount commuter line running through Dorchester, Roxbury and Hyde Park. Now, however, she said data shows that two areas right next to the stations are especially susceptible to residential displacement in the next few years.

“How ironic that we fought to get affordable trains in our neighborhoods and now folks are being priced out,” Latimore said. She added later, however, “We’re at this point victims of our own success, but we’re not giving up.”

Advocacy groups in attendance did not suggest rent control. Darnell Johnson of Right to the City Boston told the Banner that advocates are “trying to gradually get back to rent control” but that such a policy change would require a longer and more detailed public discussion.

Positive response from officials

Officials from the mayor’s cabinet responded positively to many of the suggestions from advocates. Barros said he thought the issue of rents affected not just residents, but also small businesses.

“Affordable housing is central to Boston’s economic future — Mayor Walsh has prioritized it,” he told the Banner before the hearing. “Businesses are impacted by the cost of living of their employees … We’ve lost some businesses [and] a big part of that is the cost of living.”

The hearing brought special attention to Mayor Walsh’s housing plan, which he introduced in October 2014. Housing Chief Sheila Dillon spoke about the plan, which calls for 53,000 new housing units by the year 2030. That total includes 6,500 new units of low-income housing and 20,000 new units of middle class housing (defined as household incomes between $50,000 and $125,000). It calls for another 5,000 units geared toward seniors — through a mix of public and private initiatives — and another 4,000 to create a vacancy rate to help stabilize the recent spike in housing prices.

Dillon signified a willingness on the part of the city to further discuss and explore advocates’ proposals.

“It’s a bit fluid — I’m hopeful we can move on some of the advocates’ recommendations very, very soon,” Dillon said in reference to an updated IDP and a local CPA law. When asked about her stance on ‘just cause’ eviction, Dillon replied that while she couldn’t comment on the issue because she was still learning about it, she was “very intrigued by that [and] looking forward to sitting down with advocates in the very near future to understand how that might work in Boston.”

The hearing, which was called by Councilor Tito Jackson, was a follow-up to an October hearing he convened on a similar issue. Councilors Yancey, Pressley, O’Malley, Zakim and Baker were in attendance.