This article is part of the Under the Lens series
Fit to Live In: Fixing Our Housing Stock
What makes a home habitable? What makes habitability laws successful? To round out our latest Under the Lens series, Fit to Live in: Fixing Our Housing Stock, Shelterforce held a webinar on Feb. 11. Moderated by Lara Heard, Shelterforce’s associate editor, “Fit to Live in: From Ordinances to Outcomes in Habitability” featured two leaders working on habitability challenges in different areas of the country.
The speakers were:
- Matt Kreis, general counsel at the Center for Community Progress
- Y. Frank Southall, organizing and community engagement manager at Jane Place Neighborhood Sustainability Initiative
Watch the full video above, or read a lightly edited transcript of the conversation below.
Lara Heard: Why we chose to cover habitability was we were seeing it come up over and over again in tenant organizing campaigns. It’s an issue that also intersects with other problems that we have been covering—[and] that are also getting worse. For example, deteriorating public housing stock [is] an ongoing issue—one that only gets worse with time. Obviously, climate change makes everything worse. We had a climate change series in the fall of 2023, [and] we had a housing and disability series before that. Both of those [series] just made us think, Okay, we should give [a] spotlight to habitability.
For me [the meaning of habitability is] in the name: habitat. What makes our home a healthy, livable habitat? That is a subjective question, which we’ll get into a little bit later. A lot of the common issues that came up in articles we wrote were ones that there [are typically] laws around: things like having heating; damage from floods, humidity, mold, [or] having pests in your home; not having adequate cooling, which is becoming more and more of a problem; and more. Not everyone has the same definition [of habitability].
Now I’m going to [turn] to the panelists. [Can] you introduce yourselves and where you work?
Yasin Frank Southall: I’m the organizing and community engagement manager at Jane Place Neighborhood Sustainability Initiative, a community land trust and housing rights organization here in New Orleans. I’ve worked in many cities across the country. I’ve seen different habitability standards—from California to Washington, D.C., to Ohio.
Matt Kreis: I am the general counsel at the Center for Community Progress. My organization works with communities all over the country [that] are impacted primarily by vacancy and abandonment. I’ve been with the organization for about 10.5 years. Before that, I spent a decade at the City of Chicago Department of Law, working with various departments [that touch] a host of these types of issues.
A lot [of my work there] focused on vacancy and abandonment, but [also on] other community development issues.
The obvious question that we’ve led up to is, What does “habitability” mean to you? The reason we’re asking this is [that] the term can be almost jargon-y. Let’s make sure [our panelists] are on the same page.
Southall: Habitability, to me, is the ability for an individual or family to not only survive, but [to] be able to live and advance. It’s basically the idea that one should be able to have a safe temperature standard. Someone should be able to prepare food in the way that people in our country and culture prepare food—without any hindrances. They should be able to bathe without many hindrances. They should be protected from the elements and from pests of any sort. Not only be protected but also [assured] that they won’t get sick [from] mold, mildew, those type of things. … The ability for people not just [to] survive, but to thrive.
Kreis: I have no disagreements with that. My brain also chunks these things up a little bit into, How does habitability—or how does that word “habitability”—apply in different contexts? I think the most common one that pops into my head first is usually rental properties and the implied warranty of habitability that requires a landlord to provide renters a living space that is fit for someone to live in—in the way that I think Frank so eloquently just put.
It’s also habitability in the context of somebody who owns their home: Maybe an elderly person or somebody who’s aging or fell on hard times or is struggling to be able to maintain [their home] in a way that keeps it free of those conditions and mold, and maybe needs a little bit of help.
To add a third wrinkle to that, I mentioned earlier that my organization works a lot in communities that are really impacted by vacancy and abandonment. What does it mean in terms of habitability … how or whether the block or the neighborhood or the community around you is able to allow you to sustain a habitable and successful home on [your] property? Are you living in a property [where] you’re struggling to meet basic habitability, and you’ve got vacant properties on either side of you impacting the market, resources, [and] all kinds of things that might be able to help you be successful and be more habitable? I think all of those things make a lot of sense, but I think those kinds of conditions impact how I think about that word, too.
I also wanted to follow up with Frank: You mentioned “not just survive but thrive.” Can you go a little bit more into that? I liked what you said about being able to cook your own food.
Southall: It’s just about the ability for anyone to enjoy their home that they’re living in, and the structure— and be able to advance socially, to progress in terms of their physical, mental, [and] emotional health. Our dwelling[s] shouldn’t leave us worse off than before we came into them. Essentially, that’s what I mean by thriving: the ability for people to grow. If you’re dealing with a stove that doesn’t work, you can’t prepare yourself nutritious meals. If you can’t take a shower without worrying about the shower leaking into your children’s bedroom, that’s the issue that’s going to have outstanding impacts on your mental [and] emotional well-being.
What are some of the habitability challenges that you’ve seen in the communities you’ve worked in?
Southall: There [are] no cooling standards. If you’ve ever been to Louisiana, you’ll know that that’s a little bit crazy.
It’s February right now. I’m grateful for this weather, but it’s about 80 degrees, and I refuse to turn on my air conditioner. This is what we’re living with—and that’s [a] normal range for February. It’s not something to do with climate change. Because of the very conservative, right-wing nature of our legislature … there’s less incentive to create standards for renters.
There [are] a lot of issues around certain intersection[s] between class or race, and so we find in the major cities in [the] south of the state—which is where the bulk of the population lives at—the bulk of renters are Black. … When you go farther north into Shreveport, Monroe, which culturally tends to resemble more of Arkansas or Tennessee, you see a lot more white renters in the form of mobile home parks. There’s not really a desire to improve the lot and life of renters in these areas.
And then, of course, we have climate change. It’s increasingly getting hotter. There are … more storms. Because even with properties that were subsidized with HUD funds, because of [the] lack of strong statewide standards, even [with] those properties, [under] good administrations—like under [the] Obama administration—it meant that the type of oversight that people make in New Jersey or New York, we’re only getting a fourth of that. So, when these storms come in, and there’s been delayed maintenance, it means the problems just grow. We are working on [a] formula that we’ve been trying to figure out for a while, where we can input the number of calls we get around habitability standards, look at certain category hurricanes, and be able to predict whether or not a roof is going to collapse in the apartment building. It’s very basic math: If you put one plus one, and you know these conditions are happening, you can almost predict that there [are] going to be major issues under certain storms. We saw that during Hurricane Ida. These are the major challenges we deal with.
On top of that, we had Katrina, which, due to the federal government’s neglect around managing water issues in southeast Louisiana, led to levees collapsing. There [are] all these layers of issues. But we’ve been able to get some laws passed.
Something that you mentioned to me earlier—and [that] I saw in Shelby’s article—that I thought was interesting was … the unique architecture of New Orleans. Do you mind chatting a little bit about that and how that works with the climate?
Southall: Our architecture in many of our older neighborhoods [is] designed for cooling. So, this intersection of climate change [and] habitability standards …means that when we have really hot days, they’re terrible, but they’re able to filter out the heat a lot more. When we have incredibly cold days, it becomes almost a matter of life or death because southern Louisianians aren’t accustomed—nor is their architecture designed, historically—to meet the demands of freezing temperatures.
Last year, we had a foot of snow. It was the first time ever in our region … It wasn’t as bad as Texas, but it was definitely really bad for some people. Because our houses are so drafty in bringing in the cool air and keeping in the cool air, it really became a life-and-death situation for some elders. That’s the other issue we’re dealing with. It’s all intersectional: the architecture, climate change, horrible laws that don’t protect people.
The other thing we are getting right now is just a massive wave of developers wanting to come to [the] city and profit off the explosion of transient lodging and short-term rentals. We have historic neighborhoods being gobbled alive by Airbnb.
Kreis: It’s really a broad question. I think we could talk about a lot of particular conditions and … challenges that really impact habitability. I’ll talk about two. I’ll talk about [challenges] in the context of vacancy and abandonment, and I’ll talk about [challenges] in the context of rental properties.
With rental properties, I think one of the biggest challenges is those market conditions that dictate the conditions that people are willing to accept—and landlord activity, or, I should say, investor or slumlord activity. In a lot of the communities we work in, especially communities that have a lot of vacancy or abandonment, you often find a lot of neighborhood markets with relatively low real estate values and a clientele desperately in need of housing or shelter—but they don’t make a lot of money to pay for it.
We did a lot of work in Detroit, for example, around some of [the city’s] rental ordinances, and nearly half of the families that are renters [made] … a couple of years ago … $30,000 or less. Families that are making that much can only afford a certain amount of money. The property that is in Detroit fluctuates from neighborhood to neighborhood, but you often see the right kinds of conditions for investors to acquire properties relatively cheap—maybe from [a] property tax sale or some other kind of a thing—slap on a coat of paint, and charge one of these families that can barely afford $600, $700, $800 in a month, that much for property that’s substandard.
I think that the market, in a lot of places, we need to understand what that means: what it costs to buy a property, what it costs to invest and fix that up to make sure it’s completely habitable. But also, who are we trying to serve? What do they need? I think that needs to be top of mind. So, I think the market is really an interesting thing to think about. Again, we’ve got to talk about habitability first—we’ve got to figure out a place to live.
The other thing I think [about] in the rental context [is] anytime you talk about enforcement, who’s going to look at these laws and [enforce them]? I think Frank mentioned some really great … tools that tenants should have access to: right to counsel, all kinds of things to be able to try to protect themselves in the courts. Those things are absolutely essential, and the number one thing that you need. Otherwise, you’re looking at local governments, as well as the ones who are there to enforce these habitability laws, and there [are] a lot of challenges with that. It takes a lot of resources to run that program and to do it right.
You also see a whole lot of landlords challenging a lot of these laws around regulating rental property. A lot of Fourth Amendment challenges to inspection programs. They just don’t want the government in their property. Tenants are often afraid to call the local government because they’re afraid of the retaliatory impact of doing so. I think that whole system presents a whole lot of challenges.
The other [challenge] is what I mentioned earlier: those habitability challenges in communities that have vacant and abandoned properties. I remember working in a … smaller city in Kentucky. We were there to look at land banking and how they could utilize some of these vacant lots and try to develop some homes because they really had a desperate need for affordable single-family homes in other parts of the community. We talked with a number of folks, and they’re like, “What’s stopping you from developing some of these single-family homes or doing things?” We talked to the developers who are trying to develop rental properties … [to] people [who] were seen as [being as] responsible as you can be in the landlord context, and we [asked], “Well, what’s preventing you from investing more money into your property?” They [said], “It’s all the vacancy. We don’t have a lot of faith that there’s going to be good investments, that people are going to do good things. This property is sitting there; it should have been torn down years ago, and that’s impacting our willingness to invest in the property.” Now, if they’re renting it out, we can have a whole conversation about whether they should be making it habitable anyway—they should. I think that those kinds of conditions—both market [conditions] and then the presence of other deteriorating factors, [like] vacancy and abandonment [and] other signs of disinvestment, particularly in communities that have been experiencing that for decades—are major challenges to this issue that need to be at least part of the conversation.
When you mentioned the Fourth Amendment challenges and the legal challenges, are you talking about something that’s ramping up in recent years?
Kreis: I have seen more cases about that lately. I think there are probably others who would have a better [sense] of whether my perception is true. When we’re seeing a lot of challenges to systems where the government is going into your property and taking it, I know that’s been coming up in Ohio lately and in other places around the country. Again, I think landlords are just trying to get around some of those habitability programs, particularly where there’s maybe some more proactive rental inspection programs that are happening—programs that, I think, can be structured in a way that can really help to elevate the quality of the housing stock that’s available.
What kinds of legislation have been recently introduced or passed in the areas you have worked in relating to habitability—and what makes those laws pass or fail?
Southall: In New Orleans, we passed a law called [the] Healthy Homes Ordinance. Our habitability standards law is literally referred to as “Healthy Homes,” which … we did for explicit social and political reasons. Basically, it was a set of standards that we based [on] somewhere in the north. I think it was someplace in Illinois where we [decided]: Let’s do this; let’s just copy this. It’s sensible. One of my former board members, Maxwell, may disagree, but … we were like, What do other cities have that are things that people need? Then we fine-tuned it to our lived reality. … We did it with coalition—one of the biggest coalitions I’ve ever seen in the city. We had over 40 organizations. I would say about 50 percent of them were very actively engaged. Twenty-five percent of organizations were groups that had deep memberships, so that when we needed to get people to go to city hall, we were able to amass those numbers.
The most important thing we did [was use] a tenant organizer struggle at a complex with a notorious landlord—that even our Republicans would use as an example of a bad landlord—[named] Joshua Bruno. He allowed his properties to decay so significantly that bricks were falling on elderly people’s head[s].
[We] organized tenants, and we [were] able to explain [to] tenants [who] wanted solutions that [what] could have counteracted what they were going through was Healthy Homes. One of the things that was very critical to our success [was] the fact that we had an army of pro bono attorneys. Attorneys were off the clock who worked at various nonprofit organizations—my friends, anyone we could get to do legal research about how to do this ordinance.
The reason why we had to do that is because in Louisiana, we are preempted by several laws that restrict municipalities or parishes … from enacting laws that interfere between the relationship between the tenant and the landlord when it comes to money being exchanged. We did a lot of research and realized they’ve created a permit process [where], ultimately, municipalities and parishes in Louisiana are allowed to issue permits for everything. The city of New Orleans is the sole issuer of hotel licenses, for example. The state doesn’t do that. We basically figured out a legal strategy [where] if some asshole [in] Baton Rouge and their state legislature tried to pass a law restricting our habitability standards ordinance, it would test a live date. That’s what we did. So far, knock on wood, we haven’t seen any legal challenges to it because if they sued the city over it, it would undo laws of permitting and licens[ing]. I think the corporations in our state would not like that. We had to do a lot of work to get it passed.
We [also] looked at other city standards in Illinois and Ohio, but really it was building connections with other states in [the] Deep South about what they were experiencing that also led some of our attorneys to [look] at certain legal routes. Because basically all of our preemption laws in Deep South are similar to each other. That really … helped us out: this regional alliance—a regional solidarity in mutual aid.
Kreis: I think one of the things that I put out there [in my op-ed] is—especially when it comes to the community—to also recognize everybody is in a bit of a different place. I’m not just talking about rental properties; I’m talking about the broader context of a neighborhood. Everybody comes from a different place. Everybody is in a different situation.
As far as what pieces of legislation have been introduced, passed, or really worked recently, sometimes it’s just recognizing that, more than the legislation, what we need is to better understand the needs of the people that live there. Is this an issue, in a particular neighborhood, of resources? Are there more aging homeowners who need more supports? Are there other economic issues? Can we do things like put together a community toolbox, monthly cleanups that offer support, and things like that?
We can pass a lot of laws to figure out how to address things that are out there, but I think we need to do more as a community. I’m also talking from the local government perspective of understanding the needs of the communit[ies] … and how we can better address them. I think we can also then use that information to help craft better standards that we can realistically enforce that are actually going to keep people safe and habitable.
As far as legislation that’s been introduced … we took a look at Detroit. One of the things that we’ve often talked about that can be effective in helping to address rental properties is a proactive rental registration and inspection … program where landlords are required to register their properties with the community and then are subject to regular inspections every three years or so, where local government comes in and makes sure … [if there’s] lead present in some cases. We talk about that in the context of Rochester in the piece. Is there mold? Is there running water? Is there heat? [Are] there the heating and cooling systems that need to be there? Are these people living in basically safe conditions?
Theoretically, those things can work really well, but the problem was Detroit had something on those books for a long time, and [the city] added in a bunch more conditions around habitability, especially around lead paint in 2017. They asked us to come in and take a look and say, “We don’t think people are complying. We have a pretty low compliance rate. What’s going on here?” The new changes to their laws were in 2017, and then in 2023–2024. At that point in time, they had about a 10 percent compliance rate. About 10 percent of landlords had gotten a certificate of occupancy that would allow them to legally rent those properties out.
We did a whole lot of work to try to figure out what was the problem. Why weren’t landlords registering? What about the tools to hold them accountable? What [tools] weren’t working? You can read the report, and you can agree with some of the findings or not, but some of the things that I think were really important were …—understanding that market a little bit, mak[ing] sure that they understood what people could afford to pay, what landlords could be charging.
I think that some of the changes that they ended up making were around protecting tenants, improving that tenant escrow program, things like that. A lot of what we found … is that every time you build this type of program and you require landlords to submit to some kind of registration component (and you’re looking to protect tenants), you need to understand a lot of the conditions that lead to noncompliance in the beginning—and a lot of the vulnerabilities that exist for that particular set of folks.
One issue in Detroit that we found is there’s a rent escrow program, which allows tenants to pay directly into the city their rent if a landlord is not complying or has not gotten a certificate of occupancy for that building—and almost nobody had taken up on it. One of the main reasons we found was that most renters in Detroit don’t have a written lease, and that was a requirement to participate in the rent escrow program.
You can see why maybe somebody behind a desk thought that that made some sense for a condition, but at the end of the day, that requirement made it so that that program was wholly inaccessible. I think that there [are] … a number of things that we’ve been recommending, and [that] Detroit ended up identifying … to pass and make some of those parts of their program a little bit more functional.
Hopefully, some of the changes that [Detroit is] making to help landlords comply—particularly landlords [who] are serving more vulnerable communities—and to help make sure tenants have access to the type of protections they were intended to have … will result in greater compliance over time.
Matt … you mentioned building a community toolbox. Can you describe what you mean by that?
Kreis: [In]some of the communities that we work in—Gary, Indiana, has created them, a lot of other communities have—we’re talking mostly about habitability and living standards inside the house, but [for] a lot of folks, you can start to see evidence of that decline and their ability to maintain their properties on the outside. They have trouble mowing their grass [or] taking their garbage out … So, communities have created these community tool sheds or toolboxes. Sometimes the local government helps to stock those with certain tools—with rakes and other machinery that might be helpful at cleaning up; mowers; things like that—where community members can go out and borrow from that tool shed to … help do some things in the community. Volunteers can help do some of the work there. There’s been some really good programs out there around the community tool sheds.
Frank, I had a question about building a coalition. What did it take to build that coalition? Did it naturally come together? Did it require a lot of work?
Southall: One of our unions, UNITE HERE—organized two big hotels, and they were hearing from some of the workers that they were living in absolute horror. UNITE HERE was down to fight and figure out ways to get tougher standards in place. Some other [organizations] were a little bit more reluctant, in part because of the way that wealth-generation works in our city. Property is a major driver of wealth and economic stability for some of our [middle-class], upper-middle-class folks.
At the end of the day, most people said, “Hey, we see what you guys are doing. You guys aren’t trying to take away homes from working-class Black communities or working-class Black landlords.” We were able to articulate, despite what the landlord lobby was trying to state incorrectly, that … we were aiming most of this legislation at big corporate landlords—those private equity firms that are gobbling up property. Once people understood that it became easier to build coalition.
Part of that has to do [with the] unique architectural designs of many of our houses. There’s this thing called [a] shotgun double that’s pretty common in New Orleans, where you’ll have the owner of the house live on one side, and then you’ll have a rental unit … on the other side. That’s a big number of rental units in many of our core neighborhoods. Once we got around the fearmongering of the landlord lobby, we were able to build pretty easily across different sectors: healthcare, education, youth development. We were able to bring a very diverse coalition together.
I think that’s a good reminder that this issue, more than many that Shelterforce talks about, is so regional—and even city-to-city. We all have different types of housing, different climates, different demographics, different age groups that are living in that housing. Things in New Mexico are different from things in New Orleans.
What makes for effective and ineffective enforcement of habitability laws?
Kreis: I think this dovetails nicely with one of the questions that was in the chat: What are some of the best examples of well-designed rental registries?
There are others who do great work in this area out there, too. If anybody’s curious, … we’ve written some good stuff, but [there’s] also ChangeLab Solutions, which is a West Coast organization. They’ve put out a proactive rental inspection ordinance, like a template ordinance. Obviously, it needs to be tailored everywhere you go. For me, when you talk about habitability laws, I think [there are] the standards of what habitability should mean—that’s one thing, and I think we need to be clear on what those are. At a very basic [level], especially when we’re talking about rental properties, we just need to define first, what are those very basic standards that absolutely need to be met to ensure that that person is living in a safe, healthy place?
Like Frank said earlier, these people should be living in a space where they can cook their food the way they want, where they don’t … have fear of mold or other things like that. I think we need to decide what those are and make sure they’re super clear and not overly complex. We have very complex building codes [and] property maintenance codes all over the country. We have different lead inspection standards and different things in different places. We need to understand what those are [and] what the housing stock is in our community. Do we have an older housing stock, like [in] the city of Detroit or a lot of northeast cities [where] houses were built pre-1980, pre-1970, pre-1960? We have to understand what the type of housing stock … is and then build those standards to ensure that we can realistically comply with them and keep people safe at the same time. I think that’s the first part of understanding what that means.
The second part … is some of the things that I’ve heard Frank talk about. … Who are the people that are impacted here and how are they protected? I’ve seen a lot in the comments … talking about … [how] every time a tenant raises an issue of whether those standards are being met, they put themselves at risk. Can the landlord be retaliating for that? Retaliatory evictions are something we know … can happen. Is a tenant really stuck? Are they not on a written lease? It’s the only place they could afford, and this was the only landlord that was willing to rent to them, and they’re charging them an exorbitant amount, but they can’t find any other place else to go. Maybe they have a record or something along those lines. We have to understand and build an ecosystem where we can allow those tenants to communicate when there are problems and not risk displacement. Are we going to get that right perfectly? No. But [there are] things like right to counsel [and] rent escrow programs.
We’ve got to have a network of folks [who] are there to help educate and support those folks, too. There are a lot of communities that might have some of these things in place, but who are the lawyers or advocates [who] are there to support those folks? As we start thinking about … maybe we want to enforce these standards a little bit more and build out a proactive rental inspection program, is aggressive enforcement on the side of the local government going to actually result in displacement as opposed to helping to elevate quality … ?
The third element … that may not be as popular is to find your good landlords because they’re there. I know that there are communities where there aren’t a lot of them, and there is a huge subset who have capitalized on the vulnerabilities of people that live there. But in my experience, in a lot of communities, there are a subset of very good landlords who do want to do well. Yes, they want to make money, but they don’t want to hurt anybody. I think as you’re designing the system, you’ve got to find who those folks are and work closely with them to try to design a type of system that, at the very least, they’re going to be okay with.
One of the things that we talk about … is you register your property, you subject yourself to regular inspections, you meet those standards in the regular inspections, and you get a certificate that’s valid for a certain period of time. At the end of that period of time, you get that redone.
As we learn more about these communities that are trying to do [this], I think what we also want to do is focus enforcement on really trying to … make sure that we know what the good landlords are doing. Make it easy for them to comply with these habitability standards. They still have to be met, but make it easier for them to get through this inspection process, get their license, and try to focus as much as we can on identifying … the bad landlords. Who are the landlords [who] are failing to offer or meet those basic habitability standards?
How can we leverage some of the data that we have at the local government level on compliance rates, conditions, reports from other folks to try to identify who those landlords are and try to focus most of those limited local government resources on identifying those bad landlords and really helping to [hold them to account]? Easier said than done. Minneapolis, Minnesota, has actually done some really good things over the years to try to use data to really focus their efforts on prosecuting and regulating bad landlords. They do so by segmenting landlords into different tiers based on historical compliance rates—whether they’re passing, whether people are reporting them for other things.
Southall: My perspective is nuanced, given the conditions we live in in Louisiana. Getting Healthy Homes [to] pass was a major win … for not just renters in New Orleans, but really the housing rights and housing justice movement in the South … [in] one of the most conservative states. Without New Orleans, Louisiana would be more conservative than any state you could think of. Our metro area is significantly more progressive than many other areas of the country.
Getting [the ordinance] passed was a major victory. However, due to all of these compounding impacts of the pandemic, and [their effects on] our city’s budget, and now Trump and … what Trump’s done to cut funding for municipalities, and … this economic downturn we’re in, and the fact that tourists aren’t coming here … our city is in an economic crisis. Coming out of the pandemic, there [were] economic issues, but we weren’t in a crisis. What that means is there’s been a freeze on hiring inspectors.
There’s also the fact that our inspectors are housed in code enforcement, which is something we’re working on—trying to get them moved out. Rather than hiring inspectors just for Healthy Homes, for rental units, they decide to keep them just in code enforcement. They did hire 10 new code enforcement inspectors, and there were other staff to support that work, but the problem … is that someone can always be pulled away.
The one thing I will say about our system is that if you are vigilant—if you do call two, three times—if they haven’t processed your case, they will, and they will send someone out. That could be because not the full range of people who should be using Healthy Homes are using it. Either way, I will say that when I tell tenants [to] call again … usually they’ll get someone. Usually, when tenants come to our local tenant union, the New Orleans Renters’ Rights Assembly, and [that] group of folks escalate[s] things … tenants get results really quickly.
We had one tenant who was on the Permanent Supportive Housing voucher, who’s a Renters’ Rights Assembly member, and he was able to use Healthy Homes to prevent a retaliatory eviction. That’s one of the key things about our law that we were able to research, and [we realized that] going [the] license permit way was the key route. We were able to put a stipulation in saying, “Hey, if you want to rent your properties in the city of New Orleans, you cannot retaliate against the tenant if they are making complaints.”
This is perfectly legal; it doesn’t run afoul of any of our state laws. That’s to protect thousands and thousands of tenants when they’ve made complaints. Unlike some other municipalities, you still have to be in compliance with the rest of your lease, paying the rent. There’s no escrow withholding that exists. That’s illegal—explicitly—in our state law. What that does allow is for other routes to ensure that landlords are financially penalized.
Abatement cases, for example—you [can] combine that with your retaliation piece. A judge [says], “Hey, landlord, you can’t evict this person or retaliate against them.” Then it’s flagged to the judge that … maybe this tenant should have some type of abatement consideration. We’ve seen judges do abatement without even being prompted by the lawyer. That’s … a 180 compared to how things were done 8 years ago. In that way, things are better, but we find that unless we’re organizing an apartment complex, tenants aren’t getting macro relief; [there isn’t] widespread relief.
For tenants in smaller structures, the city is much quicker to repair things. [It’s] in those apartment complexes that have 200 or more units where we see things not working en masse for tenants. It’s kind of … a glass-half-full situation where, yes, it works [but it] doesn’t work … for everyone. I think I mentioned [in Shelby’s article that] I don’t think [this] works … for everyone. I do think it can work, but it takes a lot of self-advocacy and connecting with [organizations].
Even though I’m a tenant organizer at heart, I don’t want people to have to connect to me in order to get justice. I think people should be able to get justice just by calling the city that they’re paying taxes to.
Is there anything else you wanted to say on this, because it’s a complex topic?
Southall: I’ve been fortunate to be able to travel to over 10 countries on 4 continents to look at how they do habitability standard laws. I would say … the money piece is at the root of it: more inspectors and penalizing landlords harder get[s] better results. As well as the tier system Matt mentioned … we don’t want to force a small or working-class Black [or] Brown landlord out of business who is just barely holding on to their home.
I’ve talked with landlords [whose houses I’ve gone into] … [to help] figure out how to get resources for them. These things … have to be very nuanced. We are more focused on targeting corporate landlords, not just because private equity is the new boogeyman that we should all hate—we should hate private equity, obviously—but … because these people have political, economic, and social influence.
I can show you landlords [where] it takes a longer time—they have the same amount of units [as] corporate landlords. One landlord … [the city will] go after very quickly, and then [with] another one, it will take them a week, two weeks to go after [them]. That aspect of money and politics—we can’t pinpoint, we can’t say anything for sure—we feel as though there’s [a] connection there. That’s why I would say that if the city did have more inspectors and more oversight, then I think we would see things moving quicker. But that just could be a Louisiana problem.
Kreis: I think that’s an everywhere problem, Frank.
How can we use habitability laws to create better homes? What are some best practices from everything you guys have learned?
Kreis: I think that there’s a whole host of things. When you’re designing these habitability laws, [it’s a question of] how can we use them? I think Frank hit on a huge one, which is resources. In many jurisdictions, these laws exist in some way, shape, or form. I think somebody put in [the] chat—they were talking about New Jersey—[that] we’ve got habitability-related laws on the books. [The laws are] there; we just don’t have anybody to enforce them.
I think that point that you were making a little bit earlier, Frank, is huge. … Some jurisdictions have done well for advocating for more help at the local government level for code enforcement. I do think it’s not as big a priority. Code enforcement isn’t always the most popular … function of local government to support—and certainly not to fund. Their departments are strapped, and so what do they do in most cases? They focus on the calls coming in, and they prioritize them in [terms] of, Is this one going to fall down? Did this elected official call me today about that property? [They prioritize calls] in a way that allows them to barely keep their head above water. It doesn’t allow for more proactive use. I talked a lot about some of the ideal elements of a proactive rental inspection strategy. You can’t do that unless you have the staff to be able to conduct those inspections, and to do a good job when they’re conducting inspections, and … to work with a landlord who is trying to comply or may not understand.
Frank … brought up [the fact that] sometimes families accidentally become [landlords]—they inherit that property from their family. Their parents passed away, or maybe they’re heirs, and they really want to do this right, but maybe they need some more resources to figure out how to do it. If all the code enforcement officer has is that hammer—write the citation, fine you the maximum amount, walk away, and leave you—maybe we’re missing an opportunity to really build up the capacity of that local landlord who’s entrenched in the community, who we want to be a good landlord. Those are opportunities.
Resources are key. Somebody else also talked about … owner-occupied properties. I think, again, resources come into play. Do we have enough inspectors to allow them to work with community members, [to] go out more proactively to community members, maybe where there [are] more owner-occupants, and actually do some education work? Or go through and just be like, “Hey, listen, these are some of the things that sometimes people get dinged for. Here are some local contractors. Here are some ways you can deal with this. Here’s a program that’s at Home Depot. Here’s a grant program we’re aware of.”
Code enforcement officers are often, from a local government standpoint, one of the first folks out in the community, in the face of that local government, and there’s a real opportunity there for them to be seen as a resource, not necessarily an adversary. That may be aspirational. We point in the article to the city of Peoria, Illinois, which has … worked really hard to build a new culture of what they call “code encouragement.” They work really hard to build relationships [with] the community members. They hire people within the community. They do some really fascinating and interesting programs. They do coffee with inspectors. They try to really respond and build relationships so that people call them before there’s a problem. Is that always going to work? No. It’s not going to be perfect, but I think there are ways and opportunities that are out there for folks.
How can we use habitability laws to create better homes for people to live in? I can see that laws can be really helpful, but I think it’s more about investing more resources and building out a culture of support that hopefully leads to a greater culture of compliance—almost more than anything. There are things about our law[s] that we can absolutely change. We absolutely have to have those good laws on the books, but we have to prioritize putting the budget and the resources behind those laws to make them work; otherwise, they’re just not going to. I don’t mean that to be negative; I just think that that’s a really important point that we often forget about.
Southall: As an organizer and a coalition builder, I also think about what we are working towards. We first got Right to Counsel [to] pass … because we just wanted to be able to ensure that if we were going out to complexes [and] organizing tenants … there would be legal representation. In Healthy Homes, the anti-retaliation piece—as you can imagine, when you think about tenant organizing—makes so much more sense.
The third piece that we decided to do was around a housing trust fund. We want to flood the market with better opportunities. That’s where our thinking is. It can’t just be … We got this thing passed; it will work. If there were, for example, 6,000 more affordable apartment units that were priced at $600 for a one-bedroom, $800 [for a] two-bedroom … our slumlords would be out of business. Whether they’re being subsidized by federal dollars or not, they’d just not exist. All these things are intersectional.
But as we saw from many natural disasters … we’re all living through this. It doesn’t matter if you’re in the Bay Area or elsewhere. We hear horrible stories about shaky, shady housing being built for even upper-middle-class people. If we have better standards, they will help to force a culture of care, a culture of accountability.
It can’t be habitability standards alone; it has to be all these things working together. For us in New Orleans—when I was asked, “Does it work?”—it works more than 50 percent of the time … because we have these other things working for people.
The organization I work at is a community land trust, [and] we moved one of the families in a substandard apartment complex owned by Richard Hamlet’s company. [Hamlet is a] guy based out of Memphis [who] owns a couple of substandard buildings. Millennia basically bought a huge part of his portfolio a couple of years ago. Because [we] were able to offer housing, as a group, we were able to move this family in. Our vision is that we don’t want Jane Place to own 2,000 units. We do want other community [organizations] to have those 2,000 units so that we can ensure that [for] any slumlord, tenants can organize and put them out of business—and tenants aren’t afraid to organize because they’re not going to be afraid that they will be condemned.
All these things have to be intersectional, working together. New Orleans, due to the will of the people and the will of the tenants, is moving in that direction, though not as fast as I would like it to be.
Kreis: I talked about market—I talked about a lot of things in terms of how people comply with these habitability laws. I think that there [are] the costs of doing so, particularly if we want to make sure that folks are continuing to offer safe and habitable spaces. In some cases, resources are going to be needed in terms of repair grants: home repair grants, weatherization types of grants, all kinds of things. We do not have enough resources to be able to help folks provide housing that will not totally negatively impact the affordability of that housing … in a lot of places. We also need resources to be able to help folks—particularly low-income homeowners—with home repair grants. Also, if there [is] a subset of landlords … providing good, safe, and healthy housing at an affordable rate, are there resources that might be available to encourage them to continue to maintain and comply in other places … whether or not that’s low-interest loans or grants … for home repair?
[Those are] a couple of pieces that we didn’t really touch on that contribute to success here.
I [saw] a couple of questions about LLCs—whether folks are seeing LLCs pop up in their communities, and if there are any specific ways to hold them accountable.
Southall: Our Healthy Homes law demands a manager’s contact info. It can’t just be a manager [saying], “Sorry, my boss is private,” or, “My boss refuses to do this.” No, the legal accountability falls on you. That’s one way that we’ve been able to escalate things. I know that we’re trying to work something into our rental registry where … LLCs are unhidden—where whoever is the direct owner of the property is known to the city.
Kreis: I hesitate to say this: bane of my existence. … Frank, I love what they’re trying to do in New Orleans, and other communities have tried to address that in a number of ways. A lot of ordinances—both for rental or for vacant properties—or other things like that have tried, in previous years, to ensure that LLCs that own property, particularly with registration programs, also list and register a local property manager, things like that.
I think … whether you’re able to hold that type of an entity accountable is really hard. In a lot of places, all we have is criminal enforcement … laws, and [it’s] hard to hold an LLC criminally liable for certain things. It’s really hard to track down the owners of an LLC, which is something we’ve talked about—they can hide behind numerous layers of member managers and whomever. It’s really tough to find them … [and] that single-asset LLC may have zero other assets within it, so they’re judgment-proof if you’re trying to extract some money to cover the nuisance abatement that you just did. Well, they don’t have any money; they just have it against the property.
One of the things that my organization encourages the use of—and this is particularly true with vacant properties [because] there are potential harms with using this on occupied properties—is really focusing on trying to make sure that your state and local laws allow for in rem enforcement.
When you do a nuisance abatement action or you try to hold [LLCs] accountable, you can lien the property and … enforce that lien in a way that causes that owner to potentially … [lose the property]. When you’re talking about a rental property, you better have a pretty good system in place to make sure that if you do go down that path, you have some form of responsible management so you’re not displacing folks … or you have a sufficient place to help folks go to.
Especially in the context of a vacant property, really focusing less on the punitive aspect of it and more on, If you don’t fix this up and we have to do something about it, then you need to pay the public back their costs for continuing to focus on it, and if you don’t do any of that—if you can’t fix it up, if you can’t pay us back for the taxpayer costs that we’ve incurred in trying to make this safe—then you better be prepared to give it up through some public lien foreclosure—or something else like that (to try to fire the owner, if you will).
Again, that might work better in the context of vacant properties. When you look at LLC ownership, it’s going to be [awfully] hard to hold them personally accountable. I think it’s worth thinking about how our laws are structured to focus on the property itself—and what we can do to compel that compliance.
Has anyone teamed up with local homeowners about addressing rental properties?
Southall: We have tried that. This is probably more of a New Orleans situation, [but] where our big apartment complexes are located at, they’re in … these post–World War II suburban areas that had a lot of white flight within the city. The middle-class communities left. You have these big apartment complexes where there [are] a lot of social issues, surrounded by middle-class neighborhoods. Oftentimes, we found that many of the neighborhood association residents … will just find me, and [say], “Hey, Frank, I think you understand this. You’ve never wanted to live next to a substandard apartment building. We think that it’s best for people in our community that the whole apartment building just gets torn down.” It makes it really hard to build a coalition that way. I’m not saying that all the folks are NIMBYs and classist, but we find, en masse, that strategy doesn’t work well.
I suspect that, in general, [given] the way that people in our country feel about low-income voucher holders and other people experiencing housing insecurity issues, people don’t take kindly to having an apartment building next to their home. That’s one of the reasons why we’ve never really embarked on that as a coalition tool.
We will work with individuals within neighborhood associations. There’s an amazing person in the most powerful neighborhood association in New Orleans … She’s not a socialist. She’s not reading Marx. But she believes that people should have quality housing, and so she’s able to be our barrier toward the NIMBYs. We found champions in neighborhood groups like that. Otherwise, building coalition with neighborhood associations around these issues can be very difficult.
I saw a question [in the chat] about how best to combat landlord retaliation.
Southall: We just put that into our law. That’s, for us, what you generally should do, depending on what preemption looks like in your state. Definitely get … a couple of your friends who are legal nerds to do some research about how to craft ordinance to avoid preemption issues. That, for us, really solved … about 70 [to] 80 percent of all the retaliation issues that we see.
Kreis: I think it’s another case, too, where resources [are relevant]. Who’s monitoring it? Who’s paying attention to this? Who’s available to be able to hold that landlord who is illegally retaliating against the tenant for reporting this problem … accountable? Do we have the resources, the legal staff, whomever it is that [are] needed … to [hold them] accountable? You can build in things in the law that are really important …
Part of the law [in Detroit] was that landlords can’t evict if they don’t have a valid certificate of occupancy. What they were trying to do is make sure that the court wouldn’t allow a landlord to file an eviction if they hadn’t shown that they had complied with the rental standards for that program. I think that that’s an interesting one. You’ve got to build in partnership with the courts and do education, too, to make sure that they’re on board to avoid that eviction.
So many of these retaliatory evictions don’t end up going through the courts; it’s the landlord basically kicking [tenants] out, and nobody’s around to help monitor it. It happens off the books. Maybe the tenant just got scared, and the landlord told them, “You’re out,” and they threw their stuff out. Where did they go? There [are] a whole lot of pieces to that. I think there are ways that you can build things into the law. I think that we have to be honest, too, about what the reality is—it’s, How is that actually happening?—before we can design the tool to actually address it.
Southall: I forgot to mention how our retaliation process works. You may remember me … saying that getting codeenforcement inspectors [to] come out can be really slow unless there’s a match lit under their butts to move quicker. The one good thing about our anti-retaliation clause is that the second a tenant reports it to [the] city, it gets flagged in the massive database that our civil district court has, in which [the] First City [Court and the] Second City Court are based—the two courts that hear evictions for our city.
Say I report my landlord and say, “Hey, my landlord … hasn’t fixed my air-conditioning unit,” and I reported it two months before my landlord takes me to court. It will automatically pull up in the docket for the judge that this situation is occurring. The judge knows in advance there’s a Healthy Homes complaint, and they’re required by law to first address that issue. The landlord can overcome a Healthy Homes complaint … if there’s a just-cause reason or just-cause eviction. … If the landlord has issue around payment … [or] around threats of violence, they can use that to overcome that.
We intentionally educate tenants. If you have a barbecue on your deck, and that’s not allowed in the lease, get that barbecue inside the house. Then, when the landlord goes to court [and says], “Hey, there’s a barbecue pit on the deck,” the tenant [says], “What proof do you have in the last month that I did that?” It works out.
That’s basically how our process works. I don’t think it’s particularly novel. I think a lot of cities have situations … where [a] tenant complains and then [the complaint] gets routed to [a] central system. When the tenant’s legal name gets pulled up in the eviction court docket, it’s just there. That piece … [has] made my beard and hair less gray—let me put it that way.
Do you have any quick things you want to make sure you share before we go?
Southall: Work with partners around the country. Everything we do in New Orleans is done in collaboration. [There are] also regional partners. Jane Place is a member of Homes for All South. Whatever part of the country you’re in, try to work with regional partners across state lines because you will be more inspired by learning what’s happening. Then just build good relationships. If you’re not an attorney, build good relationships with attorneys who are down to nerd out and do legal research for you, because that has helped us out so much.
Kreis: Ultimately, the way things get done, the way ordinances change, the way the laws change matters so much. Somebody said this in the chat: local media, national media, [and others need to bring] attention to this issue … [or] the changes won’t happen.
I think that was certainly the case in a lot of the places I’ve worked. It was started that way. I think continuing to urge transparency and build partnerships with national, state, or local media to really help to shed light on it is such an important piece.
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