AAUM Campus Neighbors
I attended an Ann Arbor/University of Michigan (AAUM) Campus Neighbors, a group composed of University staff and administrators, Ann Arbor landlords, employees of the City of Ann Arbor, and students.
Housing Survey
This month's discussion focused on a potential survey created by a Ford School of Public Policy class taught by Professor Elisabeth Gerber. Students were assigned to four stakeholder groups: landlords, students, neighbors and the city. Ford School students visited with these stakeholder groups and created recommendations for the survey according to interview results. The research was only qualitiative, and suggestions for the survey were asked to be "revenue neutral changes" to city laws. The three focuses of the survery were 1) trash and litter, 2) fire and safety and 3) parking. I mentioned that the survey should include questions about pushing back lease signing dates, lease certification, cleaning fees, and having leases available ahead of signing dates. I will e-mail Professor Gerber to see if I may have permission to post the survey questions on my website and perhaps ArborUpdate so that she can receive feedback and suggestions from more students. The survey revisions are due by the end of next week so that they may be sent out and results may be reviewed at February's AAUM Campus Neighbors meeting.
Clarifications and Laws: Leases and Cleaning Fees
Alan J. Levey, the Director of Public Affairs and Information from the Housing Information Office, let me know that currently the University has reviewed leases from about 550 landlords. As I understand it, this certification ensures that the leases do not contain illegal clauses. However, landlords may add addendums to the certified leases, which can cause problems. One landlord suggested that these addendums should also be kept in the Housing Information Office. Some landlords also explained to me that it is very helpful for students to bring their business to landlords holding affiliations to groups such as the Washtenaw Area Apartment Association. We then discussed cleaning fees. According to AAUM Campus Neighbors, cleaning fees are legal if they are non-refundable. "Prep-fees," I believe, are not. The distinction, I believe, is that cleaning fees are for future uncleaniliness when new tenants move out, while "prep fees" are illegal because they charge a new tenant for an old tenant's mess. I tried to draw a line between cleaning fees as a strategy to increase security deposits beyond their legal limits. The landlords were not too happy with that. One landlord said that cleaning fees were necessary because a landlord can't make someone pay to have a property cleaned when the tenant has already moved out, but they can't charge the new tenant, so the way she worked around this problem is she "hired" her tenants for their cleaning services, allowing her to return the cleaning fees for good tenants while not technically making the cleaning fees refundable.
Housing Review Website
I also mentioned that ERC would be working to publicize MSA's Ann Arbor Housing Review website http://www.msa.umich.edu/housing/, but landlords thought that these were extremely unfair. In their experiences, the worst tenants who broke something or did something wrong would always be upset with them, but good tenants would leave thank you notes and were pleased with their experiences. They thought that students using the review site would only be the bad tenants venting and not the good tenants with positive feedback. It's important for MSA and the ERC to keep this in mind, as it would not be worth much to only identify the bad landlords; I think it would be more useful to know the good ones. : )
Zoning and Occupancy
After this discussion on Professor Gerber's survey, we began to focus on zoning and occupancy laws. As I understand it, neighborhoods are zoned according to the relationships and number of occupants. "Family" neighborhoods are numbered R1, R2, and R3. People related by blood, marriage, or adoption or households holding less than four occupants may live in a R1, R2, or R3 neighborhood. "Student" neighborhoods are zoned R4, allowing up to six occupants, only allowing for special exemption use for very large households like co-ops, fraternities, and sororities. Some attendants suggested that very large houses such as those located on Michigan (Ave, St?) should be allowed to hold more occupants, as they can have 8 or 10 bedrooms and wondered if zoning could be on a site by site instead of neighborhood basis. However, a woman from the zoning board mentioned that this is hard to pull off logistically, because people could add additions to their homes and neighborhoods would not support these changes.
Fire Safety
We expanded on this topic by talking about fire safety and students who live in attics and basements, exceeding zoning occupancy limits and endangering their lives. Student neighborhoods hold older houses more succeptible to fire. Further, because the living situation in student houses and apartments is not like an integrated family it's harder for individual tenants to know the activities going on in the house and the whereabouts of roommates, making it more difficult to prevent fire and know whether other housemates have escaped burning houses or if they were not at home at all. I let AAUM Campus Neighbors know that many students hold the perception that occupancy restrictions were imposed by landlords so that they could make more money, but if more students knew that the 6-person limit was due to fire safety and codes set by the city rather than the landlords, there might be more compliance. Overall, I personally feel that we should not condone students living in attics, basements, or windowless rooms to save on rent: the life of a student is worth much more than whatever is being saved on rent. That's not to say that we should be working to make rent more affordable, but we shouldn't be doing that by endangering student tenants' lives.
I had to leave the meeting a hair before 6 to attend MSA's open house, but I plan to set up an appointment with Alan Levey.
I'll keep you posted on the survey. If there are any comments, let me know. Zoning and planning are new arenas for me, so I would appreciate any constructive feedback or clarification of laws and code.
Rese
Either way, I think theres still some utility to it. Identifying bad landlords is definitely useful. While some tenants will be unreasonable, I think its fairly likely that theyll be spread across landlords, so a landlord who has a lot of complaints is probably actually doing something wrong, and not just being victimized (as Im sure theyd say) by bad tenants.
In order to evaluate these problems, what we really need is something like, say, a Tenants Union. And yes, regardless of charges of fiscal irresponsibility, I *am* still bitter that MSA killed their funding without *first* coming up with something better. (Comment this)
Im not sure if you were asking about rating tenants, but landlords at the meeting actually said its illegal to do that.
I definitely agree with you; the landlords might not like being rated, but there are so many problems with student tenants and landlords in Ann Arbor and students dont have a resource right now, so this resource is especially important while MSA is working to form a new tenants union-like thing. MSAs General Council, Jesse Levine, is working a lot with Student Legal Services Director Doug Lewis on the Housing Legal Reform Project (HLRP) to increase legal resources for students concerning housing. Im also working on setting up a meeting with the Director of Public Affairs and Information from the Housing Information Office Alan J. Levy to learn more about their services.
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