Oxford housing commission considers tools to support tenants

Oxford’s Housing Advisory Commission (HAC) considered multiple approaches to improve tenants’ rights and fund advocacy and education efforts during a Dec. 10 meeting.

After a fire broke out at Parkview Arms Apartments in May, some residents turned to City Council to raise awareness about other issues regarding living conditions in their units. More than 30 tenants of Parkview Arms received eviction notices in June. While some residents saw the notices as retaliatory, one property manager said the notices were standard practice and not formal evictions. Tenants had 30 days to take action, the manager told the Oxford Free Press at the time.

Vice Mayor Chantel Raghu proposed a number of solutions following the incidents, including adoption of a nuisance ordinance which would hold property managers accountable for repeated calls to emergency services. Cincinnati has a similar law which states that the owners of multi-family premises which are “deemed to be a chronic nuisance under Cincinnati Municipal Code … may be billed for the cost of enforcement services and cited civilly or criminally.”

While the HAC did discuss Raghu’s proposal during the Dec. 10 meeting, city staff proposed another option: a resolution aimed at making it easier for tenants to pay late rent to avoid eviction.

The proposed resolution would create a new chapter in Oxford’s code to establish a “tenant’s right to assert tender of rent as an affirmative defense to eviction.” Under the proposed language, a tenant who attempts to pay all past due rent and late fees prior to the property manager filing an eviction or the court issuing a judgment, that attempt would count as an “affirmative defense” to any legal action, regardless of whether the property manager accepts the payment.

The Ohio Revised Code does provide tenant protections, Law Director Chris Conard said during the HAC meeting, but low-income residents often don’t have the time or resources to look into their rights. Advocacy groups are often an important part of the process, Conard said, but while Oxford could potentially provide funding to an advocacy group, it can’t form one itself.

Nuisance ordinances like the one used in Cincinnati tend to work better in larger urban areas with more advocacy groups, Conard said. The alternative proposal to make it easier for tenants to pay late rent, known as “pay to stay,” might have more tangible benefits for Oxford residents.

Assistant City Manager Jessica Greene said the pay to stay proposal came after city staff met with legal aid. When Greene asked what Oxford could do to fill in gaps in state law to help people facing eviction, she said this resolution was the top suggestion.

“In our research, we found that sometimes nuisance property laws actually lead to more evictions,” Greene said. “... We also learned that that would be really cumbersome [to track nuisance calls].”

Greene suggested that the HAC recommend the pay to stay resolution to counsel and table discussion of a nuisance ordinance for now, though the HAC ultimately tabled discussion of both to allow more time to discuss the options in a future meeting.

Cathryn Loucas, a lawyer and member of the HAC, said she’s worked with property managers in the past. She felt that most of them were flexible with tenants in Oxford, especially because of the costs associated with filing evictions and attracting new tenants. Loucas worried that passing the pay to stay resolution could encourage tenants to do something unsafe to come up with money in a short period of time to pay the rent they owed when faced with eviction.

Jason Bracken, a city council and HAC member, said he could see the pay to stay resolution discouraging property managers from being flexible with tenants. He wanted to see more case studies before officially recommending the resolution to City Council.

“We’re not the first to do this,” Bracken said. “There are a bunch of cities that have done this, so we can contact them to see, is this successful … has this situation ever come up where they’ve gotten more strict based on this rather than less?”

Beyond updating the city’s code to protect tenants, the HAC also considered ways to improve advocacy efforts in Oxford. Conard said helping tenants to avoid evictions could have positive impacts on health and safety for the whole community, as well as cost savings by avoiding the additional costs that come along with being unhoused.

Greene has started researching funding opportunities to support outreach and education efforts that would help tenants better understand their rights. Nicola Rodriguez, a member of the HAC and director of social services for the Talawanda-Oxford Pantry and Social Services (TOPSS), said legal aid does visit TOPSS once a month to help tenants with legal issues.

In addition to supporting housing advocacy efforts, she said the city could look into increasing funding for code enforcement staff. Oxford currently has one full-time code enforcement officer and one part-time inspector, and the city completed nearly 3,000 rental unit inspections this year as of Dec. 11.

“Code enforcement can deal with some of the nuisance issues that we’re talking about, but right now we have one full-time code enforcement employee,” Greene said. “He is amazing and inspects all these rental properties, but outside of inspecting rental properties and really blatant violations, we just respond to calls, whereas if we had additional staff we could be a little bit more proactive.”

Currently, each rental property is inspected every two years, and property managers have to voluntarily let someone into the units for interior inspections, which most do consent to. If a tenant asks the city for an inspection or the city obtains a warrant, however, staff can do interior inspections regardless of property manager approval.

Any initiative to add city staff would need to go through City Council for approval. Greene said she plans to look into funding sources to support advocacy organizations in town in the next couple months, as well as see whether any Miami University classes could assist in creating a tenants’ rights document for the city.