Ann Arbor renters applaud new law, but landlords aren’t celebrating
The passage of Ann Arbor’s new right-to-renew law drew applause from renters in the City Council chambers this week.
But one group isn’t applauding the move: the Washtenaw Area Apartment Association, a landlord group arguing city officials are bending to the wishes of a small, vocal cohort of University of Michigan graduate students who lobbied for the law.
The landlord group unsuccessfully sued the city last year over another new law that limits when landlords can show occupied apartments and sign leases, giving tenants seven months to live in apartments before having to decide on renewing.
The latest ordinance changes this week now give tenants the right to renew leases unless landlords have a legal reason to evict them, a first-in-the-state protection for renters who make up a majority of the city’s population.
Chris Heaton, president of the Washtenaw Area Apartment Association and owner of property management company Campus Management Inc., explained why his group thinks that’s a bad idea for both landlords and renters.
“Our members love renewals, renew to almost everyone and share the benefits of renewals with our residents,” he said, arguing the new law is just another mechanism to further ratchet down on last year’s ordinance restricting the start of the leasing season to the spring not long before most UM students leave for the summer.
Renters who spoke out before City Council this week, advocating for the right-to-renew law, urged city officials to listen to them and not let landlords speak for them.
“In the 24,000 units we represent and researched, we couldn’t find a single instance where this ever happened,” he said, adding if it could be substantiated, it would be wrong.
“We see nothing wrong with fairly managed waitlists,” he added. “In fact, many of the cloud-based property management software applications provide waitlist management tools, thus indicating that well-managed waitlists are a common and legal industry standard. What city officials and activists should take away from thousands of people choosing to be on waitlists is that those people want to shop and lease right now and the local government is keeping them from what they desire.”
UM’s fall enrollment data shows a record 51,225 students on the Ann Arbor campus, including 32,695 undergraduates. They account for many of the city’s renters.
Responding to landlords’ claims that there’s a silent majority of undergraduates who don’t support the right-to-renew law, Smith said UM’s Central Student Government, the body that represents undergraduates, endorsed it.
“On top of that, I do not know of a single tenant, undergrad or otherwise, who has been contacted and engaged by their landlord on this issue,” she said. “They’re not calling us up and asking what we think. They’re just sort of imagining it.”
While landlords say they love lease renewals and there’s no problem, Smith said, “We’ve heard from public commenters and people who have emailed City Council who have been essentially evicted from their homes because they did not renew on their landlords’ timeline. We know this is a real problem.”
UM grad student Amir Fleischmann, another GEO member who advocated for the new law, presented council with a petition signed by 678 people. He told council about his dealings with one landlord, saying he was asked in November 2019 to renew his lease through August 2021, which he considered ridiculous.
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“I asked for more time. They told me someone was coming to see my apartment in 24 hours,” Fleischmann said. “I asked if I could include an early-termination clause in the lease, something extremely generous where after six months I could give them three months’ notice to break my lease. They didn’t think that was enough, so they absolutely refused.”
After agreeing to renew, 10 months later, before the extra lease term started, he already knew he couldn’t stay in the apartment, but his landlord refused to negotiate with him about getting out of it and threatened to sue him, he said.
“I eventually was able to find a subtenant,” he said. “The subtenant lost their job because of COVID. They tried to evict the subtenant, going around the COVID eviction moratorium, sued me again, and now here we are.”
Fleischmann said he’s glad some real change is now happening for Ann Arbor renters.
“Hopefully after today, tens of thousands of people, the majority of this town, are no longer going to have to wonder whether their apartment has been rented out from under them without the landlord even giving them the courtesy of asking if they want to renew,” he said. “They won’t have to live in fear of saying the wrong thing when they’re interacting with their landlord and then being thrown out of their apartment as a consequence.
“And they won’t have to worry about being seen as an uppity tenant when asking for much-needed repairs that landlords more often than not do not even make,” he said.
Source: M Live
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