Can a rental inspection program help solve Kansas City’s eviction epidemic?
Advocates for low-income Kansas Citians were seething as they walked out of City Hall one hot afternoon last August.
The City Council’s Housing Committee had stomped on a measure they thought would bring some relief to tenants living in dangerous and unhealthy places: a rental inspection program.
Over two afternoons of hearings, the response to the program — proposed by Councilman Scott Wagner — had been remarkably dismissive. Committee members nicked it to death with a thousand doubts and questions. While landlords in the audience nodded approvingly, elected officials visualized a dumpster load of unintended consequences. A guest who traveled from Baltimore to talk about that city’s model inspection program was accorded a hearing so cursory it bordered on rudeness.
“There was not one single comment made by anyone on the committee acknowledging that Kansas City has a problem,” Colleen Hernandez, a consultant for affordable housing programs, said a few weeks later. “It was stunning to me. I was really disgusted.”
One need only take a drive through neighborhoods to understand that Kansas City does indeed have a housing problem. Four in 10 of its residents live in rental housing. Beyond the boom of pricey new apartments in downtown and midtown, conditions range from adequate to awful. About a hundred tenants in Jackson County are formally evicted in an average week, leaving families desperate to rent anything.
Wagner’s proposal would have asked voters to approve the creation of a complaint-based inspection program, paid for by fees collected from landlords. With the money raised, the Health Department would hire inspectors to check out tenant concerns. The Housing Committee’s decision to place the measure on hold last August meant it would not appear on an upcoming ballot, as Wagner and housing advocates had hoped.
Landlord groups celebrated the burial, but the idea was far from dead. Supporters — among them, representatives from social justice groups, neighborhood associations, and Legal Aid of Western Missouri — resurrected it within a month. If the City Council wouldn’t put the idea before voters, they’d do it themselves.
Currently, Kansas City’s initiative petition process is so loose that citizens could easily order Mayor Sly James to quit wearing bow ties if they had a mind to do so. Advocates had no trouble rounding up the 1,708 signatures needed to get their question on the upcoming Aug. 7 ballot.
And the new measure is actually tougher than the one Wagner had proposed in collaboration with the city’s Health Department.
The original plan called for an annual $25 fee per building. The new proposal seeks $20 a year, but for each apartment unit. And while the first proposal called for inspections only when prompted by a tenant complaint, the new measure allows for health officials to also conduct random inspections of properties they think might have violations.
The push for rental inspections is part of a broader discussion about Kansas City’s shortage of affordable housing and its startlingly high number of evictions. For months, people in City Hall and elsewhere have been talking about research led by housing advocate Tara Raghuveer that shows landlords in Jackson County file for an average of 42 formal evictions per business day. Judges grant an average of 25 of those 42 requests. The number of people who get kicked out of their homes without the formal eviction process is thought to be even higher.
Every Thursday, landlords, lawyers, and tenants pile into courtrooms on the 7th floor of the downtown Jackson County Courthouse for the landlord-tenant relations docket, more commonly known as “eviction court.” Amid the myriad of sad stories there, it doesn’t take long to find a tenant who stopped paying rent because a furnace wasn’t working, a basement flooded, or a ceiling collapsed. Instead of remedies, they find eviction notices on their doors. And, very often, judges grant those evictions, leaving a family casting about for a new home, while someone even more desperate moves into the appalling place they’ve been thrown out of.
“It’s really common,” Gina Chiala says of that scenario. Chiala, a lawyer and director of the Heartland Center for Jobs and Freedom, monitors eviction court weekly. She estimates that at least a quarter of the tenants she speaks to face eviction because they withheld rent as a form of protest.
“The tenant is struggling anyway and they think, ‘Why should I pay full rent and not pay for food and other necessities when the landlord is not fulfilling his or her end of the bargain?’” Chiala says.
Under the envisioned rental inspection program, tenants could call the city Health Department and request an inspection. Officials could order landlords to fix the problem, with the threat of ultimately losing their rental permits if they don’t comply. The proposed ordinance prohibits landlords from retaliating against tenants who complain, and it requires hefty reinspection fees from property owners if violations are found.
Opponents say a rental inspection system will cause more problems than it will solve. Landlords will pass fees along to tenants in the form of rent increases, they predict. Some will leave the business or sell to owners who will charge higher rates, making affordable housing even harder to find.
Alissia Canady, the councilwoman who represents the 5th District, was the most strident opponent of Wagner’s rental inspection proposal. In her words, she “rebuked” staffers from the Health Department when they showed photos of rotting, rodent-infested rental housing in Kansas City.
“People are in that property because no one else will rent to them,” Canady said. “Nothing about this ordinance supports truly low-income people. Either their rent is going to go up or their housing options are going to be fewer. How does that help?”
Bob Wise, a lawyer who represents landlords, framed the people-have-to-live-somewhere argument more colorfully.
“I can get a suit at Brooks Brothers, or I can go to Walmart,” he said. “But they’re not the same thing. You can’t live on Ward Parkway on east-of-Troost prices.”
The problem is, east of Troost prices are pretty damned high. It’s hard to find a rental anywhere in Kansas City for less than $700 a month. Like their tenants, many landlords operate on paper-thin margins, with little money to invest in upgrades. Hundreds of rental properties are owned by out-of-town investors, making it hard to keep them accountable.
The Neighborhoods and Housing Services Department, along with a group of citizens, is studying Kansas City’s housing situation and is scheduled to make a presentation to the City Council sometime in August. Canady said she wants to look at measures such as a receivership plan for properties owned by “the bad actors,” and a low-interest loan fund to help owners fix up properties. The rental inspection plan, she says, gets in the way of substantive solutions: “I feel like the tail is wagging the dog.”
Even supporters aren’t claiming rental inspections are the full answer to Kansas City’s housing woes. Quinton Lucas, the councilman who chairs the Housing Committee, says he plans to vote for the ballot question, even though he voted to hold the measure last year.
“I know there are issues with it, but these are issues that can be worked out,” he says.
At the top of that list: What happens to tenants if inspectors shut down their units, or landlords walk away in frustration?
“It’s extremely important that the city makes sure tenants aren’t doubly victimized,” Chiala says. She wants some of the money raised from landlord fees set aside to help displaced tenants find and move to a new place and pay the deposit and first month’s rent.
One point of agreement is that the rental inspection program won’t work unless the city gets good information to both tenants and landlords. Most low-income tenants are currently at a loss about how to handle a dispute with a landlord or an eviction notice. Volunteers with Chiala’s group hand out information at eviction court, but by then it’s usually too late. Tenants need a well-publicized clearinghouse where they can learn their rights and obtain legal advice. The Heartland Center is raising funds to hire a lawyer to work full-time on eviction prevention.
Landlords say they are also in the dark about how the inspection program would work. A fact sheet compiled by Landlords Inc. answers “we don’t know” to many of the questions it poses. About the only thing the group is sure of is it doesn’t want the ballot question to pass. “We need landlords to organize to vote against the ordinance and to communicate to their tenants that it is in their interest to vote against this ordinance,” Landlords Inc. says on its website.
It’s always risky to predict how a ballot question will turn out. But barring a vigorous last-minute campaign by opponents, most people expect the inspection program to pass. If it does, it will be up to the city to figure out how to make it work.
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