BRATTLEBORO — In municipal elections on March 7, ballot questions in support of just-cause eviction policy won in Winooski and Essex. Last year, voters in Burlington passed a measure there.
But it lost in Brattleboro. Why?
Just cause is a local ordinance to force a landlord to have a reason (a just cause) to evict a tenant who plays by the rules - i.e., pays their rent on time, doesn't break clauses in the lease (like no pets), doesn't sell drugs out of the apartment, doesn't damage the property, doesn't smoke.
Currently in Brattleboro, landlords can evict tenants without cause; when the lease runs out, they might evict at will for any number of reasons.
They might want to renovate and raise the rent, for example. Or not renovate and still raise the rent. This is capitalism, they argue - owners can do what they like with their property.
This adds an extra layer of uncertainly to renters, especially to those living in apartments considered affordable. Housing advocates have argued that the most vulnerable of the population are at risk of homelessness.
Why? Given the extremely low availability of rental units - a situation not limited to Brattleboro - a tenant who has been evicted from an affordable unit will find it extremely difficult to find another affordable place in the community; proponents of the just-cause movement talk about people being forced to live in their cars.
Different wording, different results
The Essex amendment was one line long: “Shall the Town of Essex amend its charter to give the Select board the power to enact an ordinance to protect residential tenants from eviction without just cause?” It was clean, clear, and somewhat vague about particulars. It passed with 60% of the vote.
The Winooski amendment was quite different. It was long, complex and written in legalese. It began: “Shall the Charter of the City of Winooski, Acts of 2013, No. M-9, as amended, be further amended to give the City Council the power to provide by ordinance protections for residential tenants from evictions without 'just cause' by adopting and adding a new subsection 304(b)(13) to read as follows....”
What followed was a list of instructions: providing protections against eviction to be written into the charter; providing a list of reasons for eviction for just cause; providing a list of exemptions; putting a limit on “unreasonable” rent increases; and defining the meaning of “reasonable” and “adequate notice.”
It passed with 73% of the vote.
Basically, these amendments require the town's governing body to write an ordinance protecting renters. The resulting ordinance will be passed on to the Legislature to go through the process of becoming a state law. If the House and Senate agree on the amendment - and they are free to change the wording - there will be a full vote. If the bill passes both houses, it will go to the governor for his signature or veto.
The Winooski amendment contains identical language to the Burlington amendment that passed in 2021. That one made it through the Legislature, only to be vetoed by Gov. Phil Scott. Without a commanding majority, the resulting override failed by one vote.
This year, the intention is to bring it up again, and this time Democrats have the votes to override Scott's veto.
The Brattleboro charter amendment language was identical to the Burlington and Winooski amendments, except for new restrictions on landlords that had them up in arms.
For one thing, it capped rent increases at a specific 12%. For another, it required landlords who evict tenants in order to do renovation work to provide them with another apartment or pay one month's rent for “hardship” and relocation assistance, and then re-offer the apartment to the tenant when the work is finished.
Brattleboro landlords, led by property manager and Realtor Sally Fegley mounted a campaign to stop the amendment, a campaign that resulted in flyers, road signs, media coverage, and more.
The campaign worked for them. The Brattleboro amendment failed with 65% of voters rejecting the measure.
Crime fears
According to Fegley, the amendment failed because people are afraid of crime.
“It failed in Brattleboro because we did a fairly good job of informing the electorate,” Fegley said. “And I think the electorate is very driven by antisocial behavior and crime right now.
“In Brattleboro, it's really an issue. And it's really a problem,” she continued. “The article would have enabled anti-social behavior to continue.”
People are angry right now, Fegley said.
“In the extreme, it's drugs,” she said. “And there's a whole lot of drug dealing going on in town. And landlords are the first line of defense against drug dealing, because, you know, if you get a responsible landlord - and by the way, some of the drug houses in town have landlords who are inept - but responsible landlords would have those drug dealers out of their building.
“And as I walked around town handing out flyers, countless people spoke to me about drug trafficking in their neighborhoods. Neighborhoods where you wouldn't even suspect it. Nice neighborhoods.”
But not everyone who is evicted from their apartments is a drug dealer or a prostitute. Much was made during the runup to the election about the Section 8 and disabled tenants who were being evicted, as their leases ended, from an apartment complex on Route 9, simply because the new owners wanted to do renovations and then rent the apartments at a much higher price.
That building was an anomaly, Fegley said.
“Unfortunately, that one building has given all the landlords in Brattleboro a bad name,” she said.
Some landlords with empty rental units were keeping them off the market until they saw how the amendment fared, Fegley said.
“They're afraid that an article like that would get passed, and they don't want to be caught with a tenant they can't remove,” Fegley said. “So if that article would have passed or if in the future a similar article passes, there will be fewer rental units on the market. It will be counterproductive to what the article is intended to do.”
In any case, Fegley said, the amendment would have violated contract law and would probably have ended up in court.
“It's the whole idea of the injustice to landlords,” she said. “The tenants would be allowed to leave at the end of the lease, but landlords couldn't ask them to leave. That is a basic violation of contract law.”
A larger movement
The just-cause movement is being spearheaded by Rights & Democracy (RAD), a nonprofit lobbying group active in Vermont and New Hampshire.
On its website it declares, “[W]e're building a strong movement and the people power necessary to win justice and improve the policies that affect us and our communities. From making sure that every worker earns a livable wage, to securing access to quality healthcare and education for all, we are active in a broad range of issues that people face every day.”
In Vermont, RAD's housing justice organizer is Tom Proctor. He is the person behind all of these charter amendments.
“The difference between the Brattleboro language and the Winooski language is that Winooski's language empowers the city council to create just-cause eviction laws in their community,” Proctor told The Commons.
“It gives them flexibility,” he added. “But there are guardrails in terms of what that ordinance would look like. For example, just cause is not up to interpretation. It's very defined. But the language gives them more flexibility, for example, to define what adequate notice is if a landlord is to evict. Or what a 'reasonable' rental increase is.”
In Brattleboro, he said, that increase was capped at 12%.
Flexibility is needed because the housing market is in constant change, Proctor said. Also, it is different in different municipalities. City councils or selectboards need to have the flexibility to tweak the language as it becomes necessary.
In Brattleboro, activists wrote an amendment that is much more restrictive, and “it wasn't my decision to do that,” Proctor said.
“In the Brattleboro amendment, it meant that the Selectboard [members] weren't able to define what is reasonable notice or adequate notice or a reasonable rent increase,” Proctor said. “The Brattleboro activists didn't trust the Selectboard to put in regulations that they thought would actually work. They wanted to have it already in the language. I was personally against it. For my own organizing purposes, I prefer to have standard language.”
The ballot initiative in Brattleboro has a more complicated backstory. It originated with the nonprofit Brattleboro Common Sense, which launched the idea of it on the charter change but ultimately repudiated the ballot question that went before voters.
According to Kurt Daims, the founder of BCS, RAD became involved in the Brattleboro effort at his behest, but eventually they commandeered the organizing effort and effectively shut him out.
“We wanted [provisions for] rent control, eviction control, and creating housing,” said Daims, who faces court action and acrimonious conflict with town officials and some neighbors over his creation of housing - in the form of three recreational vehicles on his Washington Street property that he has made available to people who otherwise would be homeless.
According to Daims, Proctor considered those provisions too radical.
“Well, we wouldn't have put in a section B,” he said. “There's no need to prevent [evictions] with the endless lease when they're already prevented with the rent control provision.”
Daims told The Commons in mid-March that BCS was exploring a number of options to continue to advance the just-cause evictions.
'We just couldn't compete'
Proctor is convinced that the main reason the amendment failed in Brattleboro was because the activists were out-organized by the landlords.
“When it came to Brattleboro, we just couldn't compete against the big money that landlords were willing to throw against it,” he said. “They spent a lot of money to pump out a ton of disinformation. I saw flyers saying that your rent would increase dramatically, and that buildings would fall into disrepair and lie empty.
“The lies got more outlandish as the campaign went on,” Proctor charged. “So when people were going to the polls, they went with a weird animosity against this policy, mostly because they'd been lied to by their landlords telling them that the sky was falling and houses would spontaneously combust if this passed.
“We didn't have nearly the same organization in Essex and Winooski,” he said.
When asked, Fegley said the whole campaign cost under $350.
“I bought the signs online for a total of $332, including shipping,” she said. “I put them up myself. And I paid for the flyers.”
Just cause may have failed in Brattleboro this time around, but the issue is not going away, Proctor said.
“A lot of people are not being allowed to re-sign a new lease,” Proctor said. “Landlords are just chucking them out for God knows what reason - it's a different reason all the time. And then they become homeless.
“That's why we need this protection for renters who are playing by the rules,” he continued. “They pay the rent on time. They look after their properties. They should be able to stay in the places that they consider a home if they are doing those things.”
In a world of AirBnBs and gentrification, tenants need protection, said Proctor, noting that RAD is working on a bill that would offer these protections to all renters in the state.
“We need to provide a legal framework of how to stay in your home and continue being a good renter, pay your rent on time, and look after the property,” he said.
“For the moment, we don't have that legal protection,” Proctor said. “We're not saying don't make profit. We're just saying don't gouge people to the extent that they become homeless.”