Supporters of rental registries see them as a necessary tool

For 17 years, a back-and-forth battle has rippled through Pittsburgh City Hall, marked by accusations of constitutional overreach, threats to public health, and a parade of legal actions that have gone all the way to the state supreme court.

The issue at hand is no hot-button culture war concern like abortion rights or gun control: It’s a rental registry, which would allow the city to keep tabs on who owns rental properties and enact regular inspections of the city’s housing stock in a bid to improve apartment quality and protect tenants.

Back in 2008, an ordinance signed by then-Mayor Luke Ravenstahl required apartment owners to pay a $12 annual fee to pay for mandatory inspections. But the city’s landlords fought back. The Apartment Association of Metropolitan Pittsburgh filed a lawsuit in 2009, triggering years of debate and negotiations that scuttled the law. A second version, passed in 2014, raised the fee to up to $65 a unit, but property owners successfully argued that this amounted to an illegal tax. A 2021 version with lower fees was struck down by a state judge as “placing an excessive burden on landlords.”

A 2023 version that included short-term rentals is currently winding its way through the legal system awaiting a decision by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court after a June 30 injunction.

Lawrence H. Fisher, an attorney who represents the Apartment Association of Metropolitan Pittsburgh, called the ongoing dispute “a 17-year war” and maintained that the rental registry “trampled all over the constitutional rights of land owners in Pittsburgh.”

Pittsburgh City Council member Erika Strassburger, on the other hand, sees a rental registry as necessary to ensure that habitual code violators — the “worst of the worst” — are found and removed. “There are people living in the city of Pittsburgh who are living with rodents, bedbugs, mushrooms growing out of the floor,” said Strassburger, who represents a district that includes the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University. It’s full of former single-family homes, often owned by out-of-town investors, that get rented out to students. “What I’m afraid of is we don’t know how bad it is,” she said, “because we have not been able to officially get inside so many of these properties.”

The database at the heart of this saga isn’t unique to Pittsburgh — many US cities, from Oakland to Jersey City, have enacted rental registry programs since the early 1980s. They’re designed to address a critical information gap. Outside of irregular property inspections, many cities are in the dark about the status of their own local rental market, its fitness, and even its costs.

Rental registries attempt to correct this, flipping a complaint-based code enforcement regime into a proactive government responsibility. The premise is that by enacting regular inspections and data-keeping initiatives, cities can give tenants more information about housing quality, catch violations before they become serious and better direct funding for retrofits and housing assistance.

With its aging housing stock and chronic shortage of affordable units, the US is in need of such tools. Currently 35% of the apartments in the US are at least 60 years old, per the US Census Bureau; the median age of an American home hit 43 in 2021, according to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, up from 27 in 1991. Older buildings are more likely to pose health risks to residents, due to inadequate heating and cooling, mold and rodent infestations, and exposure to toxic lead from paint or pipes.

CityHealth, a joint project founded in 2016 by the nonprofit de Beaumont Foundation and health-care giant Kaiser Permanente, has been promoting rental registries, with proactive inspections every five years, as part of their blueprint for advancing the health of Americans. Executive director Katrina Forrest says 17 of the nation’s largest 75 cities now have some version of such a registry, as interest in this brand of tenant protection became more acute as the housing crisis has worsened.

“One of the big issues that we’re seeing in the rental space right now are investor-owned properties where you don’t even know who the landlord is,” said Forrest. “That’s why a policy like a rental registry is so critical — you actually know who owns this property, and who would be responsible for rehabilitation.”

At a time when landlords and apartment owners have been charged with knowing too much about the rental landscape — via allegedly colluding on rental rates via software like RealPage — supporters of rental registries bill them as a means of leveling the playing field. Like speed cameras for housing cops, they make it easier to catch offenders and and enforce laws already on the books.

But those paying the fines often see a significant new threat to their rights.

Renter Rights v. Landlord Rights

While the issue isn’t tracked on the national level by groups like the National Multifamily Housing Council, local landlord groups have vigorously opposed cities’ efforts to establish rental registries. Many ask for a seat at the table to help negotiate ordinances, or push to make their terms voluntary.

Those arguments emerged in Southern California recently after Huntington Beach passed a rental registry ordinance in November 2024. In response, the Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles launched a campaign to encourage landlords with properties in the city to call their council member and complain about the registry’s potential impacts. Among them: Fixing up their properties can trigger gentrification. “[I]f these major repairs and maintenance costs are incurred and owners are not able to cover them, they will be forced to sell their properties to developers that will turn them into luxury housing,” the association’s statement said.

“Our position on rental registries has always been that we believe a rental registry is clearly unconstitutional in that it forces apartment owners to disclose confidential business data without any sort of due process,” the group told Bloomberg CityLab in a statement. “These rental registries merely allow cities like Huntington Park and others to conduct ongoing ‘fishing expeditions’ without reasonable suspicion, and as such, these regulations discard any and all probable cause standards in its efforts to gather what amounts to confidential tenant rental data and confidential financial records of property owners.”

In its battle against Pittsburgh’s ordinance, the Apartment Association of Metropolitan Pittsburgh has argued that all four iterations of the law contained some form of overreach, such as spot checks that infringe on tenants’ rights and the publication of private data about landlords.

That argument often resonates with conservative lawmakers at the state level, who have passed preemption laws that block cities from setting up registries. The city of Louisville just watered down its rental registry laws in response to the threats from Republicans in the Kentucky legislature, and both Oklahoma and Texas legislatures have pushed back on efforts from cities in those states to establish registries.

Tenant groups and housing advocates counter that registries are valuable tools for improving housing safety and fighting negligent landlords. Boston, which has had a system in place since 2012 to track 140,000 rental units, has seen a significant reduction in housing code violations since the registry was established, said CityHealth’s Forrest.

In Santa Monica, California, councilmember Dan Hall has proposed a rental registry for the increasingly unaffordable beach city, where about 70% of residents rent their homes. He sees this as a step to protect tenants from price gouging, algorithmic price setting and housing violations, and a tool for more systematic code enforcement and tracking landlords who have been repeat offenders. He sees growing support for the idea as part of a generational shift.

“More and more of our generation — my millennial generation — is renters,” said Hall, who lives with a partner in a rent-stabilized apartment. “There’s certainly, if not a broader power realignment per se, more attention paid towards renters and the issues that we face.”

The Price of Public Health

One celebrated example of an effective rental registry comes from Rochester, New York, where a coalition of public health advocates used a proactive rental inspection program as a tool to combat lead poisoning in the city’s aged housing stock. In 2005, the local government took the city’s existing certificate of occupancy requirement for buildings and added a requirement that property owners submit to a lead hazard inspection when renewing. In the first decade after the law was passed, instances of elevated blood levels in Rochester came down almost two-and-a-half times faster than anywhere else in upstate New York.

Katrina Korfmacher, a professor of environmental medicine at the University of Rochester Medical Center and a member of the coalition’s executive committee, said a key aspect of the program’s success was understanding that piggybacking on the occupancy requirement helped bolt-on inspections to an existing framework and requirement. The Coalition to Prevent Lead Poisoning has used the slogan “Find The Hazard, Fix the Hazard, Fund the Fix,” to explain its strategy.

“We’ve seen this over and over again, where a city council will say, ‘Rochester has got a great lead law, we should adopt that,’” Korfmacher said. “And they do, but then they literally can’t implement it, because they just don’t know who the target of the legislation is.”

In Washington state, several cities recently passed rental registry ordinances in response to local housing trends. As costs rose, residents were pushed into rentals and the housing condition became a bigger issue, said Leonard Bauer, the former development director of Olympia who’s now a consultant with the Municipal Research & Services Center, a policy nonprofit helping Washington state governments.

Olympia’s new registry tracks not only the condition of housing in the city but also rental rates, using a requirement for landlords to have up-to-date business licenses as a mechanism to force regular inspections and collect data. Enforcement typically relies on complaints, and landlords can utilize public records acts to find out who complained about a subpar apartment in their building. Bauer said tenants can be reluctant to complain and often feel trapped.

Creating more rental registries won’t be easy, said CityHealth’s Forrest. Cities can be intimidated by the nuts-and-bolts of setting up a tracking database, creating an inspection schedule and hiring staff; in large cities, implementation costs can run over $1 million. Landlords have complained about the hassles of dealing with registration software. And with local governments reliant on property taxes — and by extension, landlords — pushback from property owners can carry a lot of weight.

But she says cities are increasingly warming up to the idea. Forrest and others make the case that such a program can even generate revenue through registration fees. And the payoff in public health is considerable.

In Pittsburgh, Strassburger called the city’s perennial struggle to set up a program with mandatory compliance “inexplicable and infuriating, ” especially as several other cities in Pennsylvania — including Allentown, Sharpsburg and Harrisburg — have done so since the original registry ordinance passed 17 years ago.

“I would have vastly preferred we instituted this in 2008 and iterated over time,” said Strassburger. “We’ve gone this entire time without protections for our most vulnerable folks.”

Source: Bloomberg CityLab