BRATTLEBORO — My wife, Sharon, and I own two apartment houses with five rental units next door to us. We keep a close eye on the property, and I do most of the maintenance on the five apartments.
We urge voters to vote no to the proposed change to the Town Charter regarding “no-cause” termination of a lease. It is not good for Brattleboro, not good for tenants, and not good for housing providers.
In all those years, we have needed to use the “no-cause” lease termination law only twice — in both cases because of a problem tenant.
In both cases, these tenants were disturbing the others with loud noise and harassment. They were damaging the apartment, abusing girlfriends, and violating their lease by smoking in the apartment.
One tenant even stole a neighborhood cat and kept it captive in the apartment. One was coming home at all hours of the day and night habitually intoxicated and asking to be to be let into the apartment because he could not find his key.
Housing providers I have talked to uniformly say that the only time they use the “no-cause termination” law is to remove a problem tenant from the property.
No landlord takes this lightly. Each time my wife and I have had to use this provision it has cost us roughly $5,000 in unpaid rent and the cost to repair the substantial damage caused by the tenant.
We used that provision because any just-cause termination action filed in court would take months to resolve, resulting in a mounting loss of monthly rent, more damage to the unit, no way to protect other tenants from being harassed, and zero chance of ever recouping any judgment for unpaid rent and damages.
To small housing providers like us, $5,000 is not a minor amount of money. We are continually faced with rising property taxes, mortgage rates, and increased costs for insurance, heat/electric/water, and sewer and maintenance. This only makes it costlier and riskier for a person to contemplate becoming, or remaining, a housing provider.
Any profit margin is very slim, especially while there is still a mortgage, and one problem tenant can result in a loss that year. Using the no-cause termination provision is a losing proposition at best, but it is currently the best avenue to minimize loss.
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We also cannot ignore that our judiciary is in crisis mode. Due to the pandemic, systemic lack of funding and resources, short-staffing, and judges retiring, we have no timely access to the justice system.
Judges are being asked to cover other counties and split their time between courts. The time allotted to civil hearings must often be taken to address other higher-priority dockets.
If a contested eviction case comes before the court and requires any measurable hearing time, it will take literally months to get a court date and then an undetermined amount of time for a judge to issue a written decision.
It is also virtually certain that in every single just-cause eviction case filed, the housing provider will never recover a judgment.
Has anyone considered the increased burden on the court system of passing this charter change and the net result to housing providers, who would then be required to retain attorneys, absorb the loss of whatever number of months it takes to have the case wend its way through the system, all the while knowing they will never be made whole when the process is complete?
This is surely not in any way equitable and absolutely does not balance the rights of housing providers with the rights of tenants.
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Our worst-case example is a tenant in an apartment who is a drug dealer who is putting the other tenants at risk and making them miserable.
We could serve a no-cause termination notice and, with luck, within two to three months remove the drug-dealing tenant.
If that option were not available, that drug dealer could continue dealing while we were forced to go through the clogged court system to evict them. Even if they were arrested, they could make bail and then come right back to the apartment.
That does not even account for the burden on the landlord to prove the tenant is a drug dealer — which is virtually impossible unless law enforcement has already made an arrest and is prosecuting a criminal case against the person.
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Eliminating the no-cause termination law would actually result in consequences the proponents of this charter change have not considered. Certainly, for mom-and-pop housing providers like my wife and me, we would have to change how we do business — and we do operate a business, not a public service.
To mitigate the risk of a bad tenant and the prospect of a very substantial loss of money if we have to judicially terminate every single problem tenant, we are going to do our best to ensure that never happens.
We will not take a risk, as we have in the past, in working with a low-income tenant to pay a security deposit over time.
We will require perfect references before we will risk taking on a new tenant.
We will no longer be willing to work with a tenant who falls behind for a month or two due to extenuating circumstances.
We will have to raise rents to ensure that we will be able to bear the cost of judicial evictions. That means we will have to spread the risk over all the tenants, as even one problem tenant who destroys an apartment and who takes us a year to evict could financially destroy our small business and result in our having to sell the buildings.
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My wife and I are not wealthy housing tycoons. Most of the housing providers we know in Brattleboro are also mom-and-pop operations with property close to their homes.
Many laws and provisions are already in place to protect tenants and their rights, including warranty of habitability, remedies for illegal evictions, fair housing laws, and a system that is already rigged so that the housing providers disproportionally bear the cost of any lease termination, whether no-cause or just-cause.
We are not, and should not be, to blame for the larger socioeconomic issues that cause housing insecurity, nor should we financially bear the brunt of the difficult solutions to the same. Housing providers should not be required legally to bear the financial burden of essentially subsidizing housing for tenants.
This charter change is not the way to address this problem.