Sticking Landlords With the Bill
Add comment March 10th, 2008
I caught up this morning with Rep. Harry Osterman, a Chicago Democrat spearheading legislation to make landlords pay for the cost of housing tenants when the landlord’s property is condemned.
Rep. Chuck Jefferson, D-Rockford, is co-sponsoring the measure, and the mayor’s office is backing it, as the Register Star reported this morning.
“If a municipality takes an action against a building with condemnation or makes a ruling on safety hazards, and the people are forced to vacate the building because it is deemed unhealthy by the municipality, many of these people don’t have the means to go and find another place to live. They’re going to go live with their relatives,” Osterman told me by phone.
“So what we want to do is have this individual slumlord or landlord, who’s responsible for this building, pay to move someone to another place to live. If for whatever reason that (landlord) is not able to do that, we would enable municipalities to front-end those costs, and then to try to get them back through a civil action against the landlord. The bottom line is what we’re trying to do is if there are renters, who through no fault of their own are in a building that is in disrepair and has been condemned, we want to make sure they have some kind of protections.”
Osterman’s bill:
The landlord would need to pay each displaced tenant $2,000 per unit or three times the monthly rent, whichever is greater, plus the tenant’s deposit, interest and prepaid rent, within seven days of getting a condemnation notice, under the bill.
Critics complain that the measure doesn’t recognize the possibility that a tenant may have caused the damage to a rental unit, prompting the city to condemn it. Osterman said he is prepared to negotiate a provision making that clear.
“What I have committed to do is to work with them to strengthen that provision, to very explicitly and flesh out in an amendment, that this is not the tenant’s fault, but this is something due to the inaction of the owner,” he said.
