Government

Exclusive: Senator Mack talks renter’s rights, rally at State House Tuesday

Senator Mack talks to Uprise RI about a raft of legislation she’s supporting to enhance tenant protections ahead of a rally by Pioneer Tenants United at the State House on Tuesday.

Rhode Island News: Exclusive: Senator Mack talks renter’s rights, rally at State House Tuesday

February 27, 2023, 3:23 pm

By Steve Ahlquist

Pioneer Tenants United, a tenants union fighting one of Rhode Island’s biggest “slumlords” – Pioneer Investments and its owner, Anurag Sureka – is holding a “solidarity rally” at the Rhode Island State House on Tuesday, February 28th at 3pm. Senator Tiara Mack (Democrat, District 6, Providence) and Representative Cherie Cruz (Democrat, District 58, Pawtucket) will be in attendance. [If necessary, a snow date will be on Thursday.]

Tenants of Pioneer rentals have long made the case that their apartments are rife with “rats, bugs, mold, leaks, lack of heat and hot water, and raw sewage” as well as a lead poisoning danger to their children. When tenants raise concerns, Pioneer Investments “attempt[s] to force them from their apartments in an act of illegal retaliation” says the tenant union.

Uprise RI has covered the work of Pioneer Tenants United here, here and here. At one of these events Renee Horne, a former tenant of Pioneer Investments and an organizer with the tenant’s union, told Uprise RI, “All 60 of his buildings have common issues. There’s lead. There’s mold. There’s rats. There’s broken windows. There’s plumbing and electrical problems – and the list continues. We’re asking for state minimum standards – and that’s a low bar that he’s not reaching at all.”

Horne added that, “The tenants are scared. He’s a bully. He will evict anybody. He doesn’t care. He thinks he’ll just get somebody else in there. There are three children we’ve confirmed got lead poisoning from his buildings… Individuals are getting sick. Their pets are being eaten by rats… It’s awful conditions, and it’s just not right.”

Ahead of the rally, Uprise RI spoke with State Senator Tiara Mack about the six pieces of legislation to be highlighted. In all, the General Assembly will be hearing testimony on more than 35 pieces of legislation around housing, tenancy and homelessness, with more to come from both Secretary of Housing Stefan Pryor and Speaker of the House Joseph Shekarchi in the coming days or weeks.

The legislations includes:

  1. Landlord Registry – Legislation that would establish a state listing of all landlords and rental properties in Rhode Island to be overseen by the Secretary of State.
  2. Tenant Bill of Rights – Legislation that establishes and codifies rights guaranteed to all renters
    • Right to legal counsel in court
    • Right to Habitability (passed in 1970)
    • Right to Organize (passed in 1986)
    • Right of First Refusal (Tenant Opportunity to Purchase)
    • Right to Equality and freedom from discrimination
    • Right to be free of eviction without good cause
    • Right to repair an deduct cost of repair from the rent
  3. Bed Bug Bill – Legislation that prescribes duties and responsibilities for landlords and tenants where pest management professionals play a role in inspecting and treating bed bugs.
  4. 120 Day notice of rent increase – Currently a landlord must give 30 days notice for a cost increase. This legislation extends that to 120 days.
  5. No rental application fees – On average $30 or more, rental application fees are sometimes collected for apartments no longer for rent or even for apartments that don’t exist. This legislation makes rental application fees illegal.
  6. Eviction Sealing – This legislation would seal court records on evictions

Senator Mack spoke with Uprise RI:

Uprise RI: Can you tell me about the Tenant Bill of Rights and why it is important?

Senator Mack: In Rhode Island we haven’t updated our major tenant legislation since 1986. Rhode Island was then a national leader but since then, and over 30 years, we have we have ceased to be a leader. Many of the laws on our books are outdated. We also have no enforcement of these laws, so, though we have some good things on the books, we don’t have any robust or clear enforcement, meaning that tenants are particularly vulnerable in our state as the cost of renting becomes an even bigger barrier. With Rhode Island being the fifth most expensive places to live now, according to national renter data, it’s increasingly important that we protect the rights of tenants, who are consumers. These pieces of legislations are not aimed at attacking landlords, but at more clearly establishing protections for consumers and outlining how we can keep people in safe, affordable, and quality housing in the midst of a housing crisis.

A lot of this legislation further clarifies our rules and updates them. Again, it’s been more than 30 years since they’ve been updated. These ideas are best practices outlined by national organizations and by President Biden, who on January 23rd of this year, released these as best practices for all states to take up. There is national pressure to pass all this legislation.

This is about consumer protections. It’s about protecting renters and establishing Rhode Island as the national leader we once were back in the 80s when this legislation were originally created. Preventing homelessness and providing quality housing is the primary concern. It impacts people from all walks of life, across all racial demographics, across all socioeconomic statuses.

Uprise RI: Something I think is really important is the right to a lawyer in eviction court, but I can already hear people talking about the fiscal note attached to something like that. We have a public defender’s office that is already woefully underfunded, and the state might have to hire new tenant lawyers for for eviction defense. What do you say to that?

Senator Mack: We’ve seen huge municipalities like the City of New York implement this and that municipality is about the same size of Rhode Island. There is national precedent and models for what we can do. This is an investment in people. We cannot allow the perceived cost of something to be a barrier to protecting the rights of consumers in Rhode Island. We still have access to ARPA [American Rescue Plan Act] funds. I’m also open to seeing this as a pilot program in Providence and the urban core or in Providence County Courts where we see the highest number of evictions. But it’s a must. Folks need legal representation, especially as folks are facing ever more barriers to housing. And we now have a department dedicated to solving these types of problems, headed up by Secretary Pryor. If Rhode Island wants to protect renters, who are seeing some of the highest rental costs in the nation, it must dedicate resources and tools that tenants and landlords can utilize in order to make Rhode Island a place for families and for future generations.

Uprise RI: Have you been in contact with Housing Secretary Pryor at all? I know he’s planning a raft of legislation in this space. Do you have a sense of how much it overlaps with yours?

Senator Mack: I have been in early, preliminary, conversations with Secretary Pryor, but these are conversations that I’ve been having with the host of leaders throughout the state. It’s not happening in isolation. I’m also eager to be working with the House. Speaker Shekarchi has named housing as one of his top priorities and the Senate leadership has made a commitment to focusing on housing as well. We missed a huge opportunity at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic with $1.3 billion coming into our state to solve some of these issues over the next 10 years. But that opportunity is not completely missed. We have resources at our disposal at the state level that are going to have a huge impact for many different Rhode Islanders.

Uprise RI: There’s a lot of action happening, and I’m excited to see where this goes.

Senator Mack: I’m excited too. I think this is the year. We have at least 15 to 20 State Reps and Senators who are dedicated to these bills. We’re starting to get organized and centering a lot of our advocacy around this. Landlords are well resourced and they are organized but we can’t allow that that to deter us. Also, we have a dynamic where most of the General Assembly are landlords themselves or are property owners. We have very few legislators with experiences as working class people who are currently renters in the General Assembly.

That’s why advocating for the rights of renters, but also as renters ourselves, is important. This is what it means to have working class people in elected office sharing their experiences and not just having folks who are part of the class of people that don’t reflect real Rhode islanders. That’s why it’s important to have this movement and this legislation spearheaded by folks like myself and Representative David Morales, who represent the bulk of the people who experience this.

Uprise RI: On the eviction sealing legislation. I know that landlords are working on their own database, right now, of so-called “bad” tenants, and tenants they have experienced eviction. So even if we do pass this legislation, landlords will have their own top secret, behind the scenes listing to use to discriminate against potential tenants. How do we prevent landlords from maintaining their own list and discriminating based on that list?

Senator Mack: I think we utilize a combination of tools: Keeping a landlord registry, banning rental application fees, having a first come-first serve rental application requirement, etc. If someone who meets all of your requirements files an application and is the first one there, they should be given that apartment. It shouldn’t be a long waiting period. There’s a lot of misinformation out there. I have friends who are landlords – small mom and pop shops. These are not the folks this legislation is geared towards. This legislation is geared towards the big LLCs and corporations where folks cannot, in a clear and concise way, report their landlords for health code or safety violations, and who are exploiting renters for financial gain, on the backs of working people.

Anyone who is already doing the right thing won’t be impacted by this legislation. Anyone who is trying to use property ownership as a tool to better their family’s circumstance or to have additional income is not the target. But we cannot continue to allow entities that are property owners to dictate what legislation we can have. They can create databases on their own, but we should have the tools to do the same. You should be able to report a landlord to a central statewide database if you believe there’s been discrimination based on your past history. We should also be able to know which landlords have been consistently found to be perpetrators of discrimination based on rental history, source of income discrimination, ethnicity, etc., and which landlords consistently have unsafe or unhealthy conditions in their units.

As long as our rules are strong and airtight and people centered, I don’t care what the property owners are doing. If we have good enough systems, it’ll work even if they make these retaliatory efforts to disenfranchise Rhode Islanders. That means we have to be intentional about our legislation. It has to be people-centered, it has to be people-focused, and it has to be centering the best interest of Rhode Islanders. There will always be bad actors, but in a system that is built for tenants and built to promote tenant rights, bad actor impacts will be negligible.

Uprise RI: How do we make that case to the mom and pop landlords who are hearing constantly from the larger landlord groups that this legislation targets them? The landlord lobby pushes the idea that mom and pops will be adversely affected, but it seems they really only care about the corporate sized rental companies like Pioneer Investments.

Senator Mack: Yes, the reality is that the landlord lobby is preying upon these small mom and pop shops saying that these bills are going to negatively impact them. This legislation, as written, is not targeted towards folks who are in owner occupied spaces. The majority of these bills are to help with compliance and to make sure that landlords are already doing what they should be doing; which is maintaining safe, quality and affordable housing for the population of Rhode Island. Anyone who is currently doing that has nothing to worry about. Any good actors and good property owners that are already doing all they can to make sure that their tenants are taken care of, won’t be impacted.

National data says that, on average, owner-occupied units are the most affordable, the most safe and are consistently the ones that meet local and statewide regulations. When it comes to health and safety, it is the big shell companies and organizations that are in it to make a profit and that are buying up properties without regard for human life and human safety that have made it impossible for Rhode Islanders to have quality, safe and affordable housing. The goal of this legislation is to monitor and make sure that our local and state authorities have the tools needed to make sure that housing is a human right and that it’s safe and affordable. This legislation helps landlords and helps you make sure that you’re in compliance with local law. It prevents fines and it helps landlords to have a well maintained record of all that you’ve done in order to prevent legal action against you. It’s a win-win for both landlords and tenants.