An ordinance that was continued at Monday night's City Council Ordinance Committee meeting could improve housing for Brown students living off-campus. The ordinance mandates annual inspections of Providence rental units.
It will most likely penalize negligent or absentee landlords - but could also result in more tenant evictions, depending on how it is amended in the coming months.
The goal of the ordinance, which will not take effect until it becomes law, is to regulate the number of absentee landlords by making annual safety and health-code violation inspections. Today, inspections are not regular, and they are made only when a neighborhood's residents complain about a certain house. As a result, some landlords rarely bother to maintain rental properties or respond to tenants' problems. The ordinance's primary focus is to make negligent landlords responsible for their own houses, according to Ward 1 City Councilman Seth Yurdin, whose ward includes part of College Hill. "The idea is to make sure there is safe housing for people in the city today," he said.
Other members of the council said they wanted the ordinance to focus more on regulating rowdy tenants - specifically, college students. Ward 6 City Councilman Joseph DeLuca was adamant about penalizing young tenants for disrupting neighborhoods. "If there's a problem - 99 percent of the time they're the ones causing the problems because they're the ones having these parties," DeLuca told the council. DeLuca advocated less control over landlords and more penalties for disruptive tenants in addition to evictions. "We're not talking about children, we're talking about adults," DeLuca said. "They're adults - make them responsible. They're the ones causing the damn problems."
At the meeting, Ari Savitzky '06, former Herald opinions editor who lives on Williams Street with current Brown students, told The Herald of his own problems living in a rental property on College Hill. In the first few weeks of the semester, he "did not have electricity or heat and (his) boiler broke," he explained. Savitzky blames the problems on his inexperienced landlord, who owns only the one house that Savitzky rents. In his senior year at Brown, Savitsky said his landlord at the time owned many properties in Providence, and Savitzky said he experienced no major problems with his off-campus housing.
Though the ordinance was continued, some members disagreed about its focus. DeLuca and Ward 4 City Councilman Nicholas Narducci were concerned with tenants and the problems they caused for neighbors. Yurdin and the rest of the committee focused on the rights of the tenant and on keeping bad landlords in check. "The idea is, it's not on the tenant to call when there is a problem," Yurdin said.
The current draft of the ordinance regulates absentee landlords and not necessarily tenants. Yurdin and Ward 10 City Councilman Luis Aponte called for simplification of the ordinance while DeLuca called it a "paper nightmare."
