http://www.twincities.com/stpaul/ci_20410240/u-s-house-committee-seeking-details-over-st
With apologies to the Steve Miller Band for the title …
This past week we received a notice of a $52.05 “fee” being assessed for “improper care of a discarded electronic device” at one of our properties. Wow! They revert to five dollar words to say you put a radio in the garbage can.
Upon review it seems our tenant put a radio/CD player in the green garbage cart. Either a scavenger or DPW took it out of the cart and left it in the alley.
As I drove around the Southside this weekend I noticed a bunch of small electronics laying next to garbage carts with little orange stickers. So despite the bill saying the property was posted, it appears the only posting were these stickers that mostly face away from the house. To make it worse the property owner does not get notice by mail until the fee is assessed.
This must be one helluva profit center for the city.
I really wish city officials were there to hear the tenant’s reaction to having this charge passed on to them.
Milwaukee Code:
79-2-13-b. No person may place an electronic device in mixed municipal solid waste or discard or otherwise dispose of an electronic device except by delivery to an electronic device collection or recycling facility.
State law that defines what an electronic device that is prohibited from being placed in the garbage:
1. A peripheral, as defined in s. 287.17 (1) (j).3. A facsimile machine.4. A digital video disc player.5. A digital video player that does not use a disc and that is not a camera, as defined in s. 287.17 (1) (a).6. A video cassette recorder.7. A video recorder that does not use a cassette and that is not a camera, as defined in s. 287.17 (1) (a).8. A covered electronic device, as defined in s. 287.17 (1) (f).9. A telephone with a video display.10. Another kind of electronic device identified by the department under s. 287.17 (10) (i).
File under “Buying Single Family Rentals Has a Downside”
Our crew shows up to work on a vacant property this morning and finds the siding and storm windows gone. It was an okay looking place yesterday. Now it needs to be resided.
At least this time they did not steal the plumbing and electric wiring.
A year ago a similar thing happened. A tenant that lived in another of our homes a couple doors away saw the neighbor stripping our property and called 911. The police said ‘have your landlord file a report so he can file an insurance claim’ and did not send out a squad. By the end of the weekend the neighbor had stripped all the plumbing, heating and electric wiring from the house.
I sent the police and the DA photos my tenant took showing the neighbor loading the siding on to his car. We ended up razing the property as the damage was so extensive.
No one was ever prosecuted, even though the damage exceeded ten grand.
On May 23, 1986 the City of Milwaukee removed tenant responsibility from the code. The removed section was based on Wisconsin §704.07(3)(a)
The Wall Street Journal Reports on the dismissal of Manger v. Gallagher:
How far will the Obama Administration go to impose racial lending quotas for banks? Far enough to lean on St. Paul, Minnesota to deny the Supreme Court the chance to rule on whether the government’s actions are legal.
The city of St Paul withdrew their petition to have the US Supreme Court intervene and stop the case over their alleged discriminatory housing code enforcement. This, less than three weeks before the Court was to hear oral arguments.
From an article in the St Paul Star Tribune:
[The plaintiff-landlord] did not respond to requests for comment, but his lawyers have argued in court that he and other inner-city landlords were targeted for aggressive code enforcement primarily because they rent to low-income and minority tenants in aging neighborhoods that some would rather see gentrified. His lead attorney, John Shoemaker, said the effect of the city crackdown was to shut down properties, increase costs and limit the supply of affordable housing in the Twin Cities.
After reading the amici briefs it was clear that St Paul could not be allowed to win at the Supreme Court. To have won would have undone 40 years of Fair Housing and Equal Rights legislation and court cases. I’m pretty sure someone smarter than St Paul’s current legal staff sat them down and explained all of this to them.
St. Paul now boasts that “it will be successful in defending its code enforcement actions in any court”
Hmm, if that is so then why did St Paul try so hard to avoid trial by going to the US Supreme Court after a Court of Appeals decision to let the case go forward? Remember that this case is in its eight or ninth year and has already had a major impact on St Paul’s budget.
Ironically St Paul is now having listening sessions with landlords to try and work out arrears of contention. Perhaps they should have taken this approach a decade ago.
I predict a settlement is imminent.
Hats off to Frank and the others for having the fortitude to stay the course for all these years.
If you have been a reader for a while you are aware of the St Paul landlords’ case against their city’s code enforcement department. The case is now at the US Supreme Court. Here are a few updates and articles:
The following article is from RoofLines
At issue in the case, Magner v. Gallagher, is whether the Fair Housing Act prohibits the full range of discrimination in housing that many Americans still face in the 21st Century.
The case comes out of St. Paul, Minnesota, where a group of landlords who rent affordable homes to racially diverse tenants say the city is driving them and their tenants out of town in favor of less affordable and less diverse owner-occupied housing. The Supreme Court took the case to decide, not whether these facts are true but, rather, assuming they are true, whether the city’s alleged conduct violates the Fair Housing Act absent proof that the city purposefully intended to exclude people of color from its borders.
The Supreme Court Briefs and commentary are posted on Ademocracy
II. Factual Background
…..
This case arises from the City’s adoption of a policy to nonetheless limit its stock of private low-income housing, including by forcing respondents to abandon or sell the housing they provided, in favor of owner-occupied housing. The City pursued that specific policy through the selective and often illegal application of its housing code in a manner designed to produce the closure or abandonment of private low-income rental properties either directly, through condemnation, or indirectly, by rendering the maintenance of the properties uneconomical.
The City’s actions included targeting respondents’ properties for “code to the max” and “forced sale” treatment, falsely labeling those properties as “problem” and “distressed” housing, charging those properties with false code violations, failing to provide respondents with timely notice of claimed code violations, and condemning the properties without a sufficient basis.
Sound similar to Milwaukee’s UWM rental inspection program
The city of Red Wing, Minn. is enforcing a rental property inspection law that requires landlords and tenants to open their doors and submit to inspections of their private property in order for the landlord to receive a license to rent the property.
Under Red Wing’s rental inspection ordinance, it is easier for the government to force its way into the homes of law-abiding citizens than it is to search the home of a suspected criminal. But the U.S. and Minnesota constitutions protect everyone, not just criminals. Red Wing’s inspection mandate is unconstitutional.
“Going Green” is usually a positive phrase. Business that go “Green” are looked at as innovators and use this for a market advantage. It is hard to say anything bad about this type of greeness
However the way the city of Milwaukee is going grheck scares the heck out of me. .
As I drove the Southside neighborhoods finishing up our annual fall exterior surveys of our properties, I was shocked at the number of green boarded and abandoned homes and duplexes in that area. Even more than there were in spring
It is a sad reality that many communities use code enforcement to promote an illegal racially motivated agenda. The ACLU outlines their view of the problem in an article, Renting While Black.
We see it here in Milwaukee where at least one Alderman appears to use Aldermanic Service Requests in a way that only the ku klux klan would be proud of.
Even if so called community leaders are not actively involved in the racially motivated inspections, a complaint based code enforcement that permits anonymous exterior complaints opens the door for neighbors to promote their biases through code enforcement
There have been a number of federal lawsuits over the years alleging racially motivated code enforcement. A list of some of those cases can be found here.
Typically if a case gets to the point that the property owners may win the municipality quickly and quietly settles. Usually not for the full compensation for the harm caused by the racially motivated enforcement. But lets face it, it takes a lot of financial and mental tenacity for a small landlord to slug it out against cities with seemingly endless resources to defend their bad behavior.
However there is one such case that the landlords have held on for something like eight years now. After the Federal Eighth CIrcuit Court of Appeals issued an opinion favorable to the landlords, the city of St Paul has petitioned the US Supreme Court for review (link to petition for review). You can read the amended original complaint that started this case here.
If the Supreme Court hears this case it will have a huge impact on all landlords who follow fair housing practices, i.e. don’t reject tenants tenants simply because they are a different color, nationality, religion, etc than their neighbors. One must really respect these property owners for the amount of sacrifice they have made to get this far.
The case alleges that St Paul housing inspection programs were used in a racially motivated manner to force racial minorities out of St Paul and that such actions violated the Fair Housing rights of the occupants. A very interesting point is a number of city employees including inspectors are on the hook personally in this suit. From a legal perspective they must defend themselves as they and their employer have disparate interest; for the city to win if the allegations are proven true they must claim rogue employees acting outside of the law. For the inspectors to win they must argue that they were following instructions that they believed were legal. The inspectors may have a hard time claiming ignorance however as the owners had provided the inspectors with documentation that the inspectors’ acts were contrary to Fair Housing, yet the inspectors continued with their agenda. At some point the inspectors will have to name their union as third party defendants as the union failed to stop management from allowing/forcing them to violate the rights of the tenants and owners
From my conversations with two of the plaintiffs over the past six or seven years they seem to be just a handful of hard working landlords who independently found themselves on the losing end of government behaving badly. The current case is a consolidation of three or four cases that started independent of each other, but the claims were so similar that the federal court combined them.
Most of the cases claimed RICO (racketeering) on the part of the city employees. The RICO elements were dismissed due to procedural errors. I’m certain that some future case will go to trial on that issue, whether in St Paul or somewhere else.