Wednesday, March 8, 2000
The University Daily Kansan
Section A • Page 7
return deposits
PMS told the residents that if they cleaned it out, it would compensate the residents for their trouble, McGraw said.
McGraw and his friends cleaned the house, but PMS never delivered the money.
PMS leases state that oral agreements are not binding.
"A lot of leases have a little line in there that says no oral agreements are binding," said Jo Hardesty, director of KU Student Legal Services. "Oral agreements are still binding between people, but unless there are witnesses, it's hard to prove in court."
Deposit battles
A trash pile in the garage was never removed for the entire year that McGraw and Batten lived at 1915 Vermont St.
After McGraw's lease was up and he moved out, PMS mailed him a sheet of paper itemizing the charges against his deposit.
McGraw said that he had asked PMS to clean the trash out of the garage when he first moved in.
Included in the charges was a $100 charge for removing the pile of trash.
"It was shocking to find that we were being charged for trash that pre-existed at our arrival." McGraw said.
Landlords often withhold money from a tenant's deposit oftjustifiably, and this is one of the most frequent complaints received by KU Legal Services for Students and Housing & Credit Counseling Inc.
Landlords are required by state law to itemize and explain each deduction from a deposit.
PMS withheld the entire deposit, $1,095, from McGraw and the other tenants, and the company sent them a bill for $559 more.
Many of the PMS charges, however, are not justified.
On the inventory McGraw received, no description was included for the garage of the house. No record exists of the garage's move-in and move-out conditions.
"The house was cleaner when we moved out
Bob Ebey
"Iwould be the first to admit that we have some bad landlords in Lawrence what you would call slumlords."
Vice President of Landlords of Lawrence Inc.
than when we moved in," McGraw said.
Elsewhere in the itemized charges, PMS charged the tenants $76 for missing dining room outlet covers, a burned out light bulb, a missing downstairs bathroom tissue holder, a crack in the bedroom window and a broken light fixture in a bedroom.
On McGraw's inventory, all of these items were marked as broken or missing when he moved in.
In addition, PMS had charged the residents previous to McGraw $50 for the same cracked window and missing coverlets, but it hadn't fixed them before McGraw moved in.
So far PMS had earned as much as $491 by charging tenants for problems that PMS should have fixed.
McGraw went to the PMS office and pointed out its errors.
PMS reduced their charges by $79.
McGraw and his housemates have not paid PMS any of the money.
Dan Simon, the PMS employee who filled out the inventory checklist, said he only was responsible for filling out the list, not assigning the charges.
PMS would not comment further.
KU Legal Services for Students advised McGraw and his roommates to file a suit against PMS in small-claims court, where a three-month-long waiting list currently exists.
Most students don't have the time it takes to contest unfair practice at court. Most just sign their lease, take their losses and move on.
If they get such money back, the draw suit, it would be an exception.
ing complaints since percent, are located on just four of 66 city streets: more housing code Louisiana, Ohio, Tennessee and Kentucky. There have been cabing or structural 54 severe structural-blight complaints since 1994. Roof, the minimum housing. gutter, front and back porch problems are considered severe complaints, or 25.7 structural-blight violations.
enant's attorney, and I sent letter."
The records also show that inspectors often accept a landlord's word that corrections have been made instead of making a reinspection.
Maggie Currv/KANSAN
or on the team. The tenant before Cuelo had called the building spacious and broken her lease with PMS, leaving vacancy in the middle of the semester, a relatively hard time to find renters.
Cuelo moved in Sept. 20, the day her lease began, wd the repairs still hadn't been made.
- On June 21, 1995, an inspector wrote, "Manager wrote me and said they moved the containss line, and there is no more water. I will not reinspect."
On Aug. 7, 1995, an inspector wrote after contacting Mary Pat Jacobson at Property Management Services, "Mary Pat said everything everything is taken care of. Tenants seem happy. I sent no letter because the phone call helped."
Shaughnessy said that inspectors had developed rapport with certain managers who they often ad to contact.
expected trouble
Property Management Services allowed Laura
朋o, Shawne junior, to sign a lease in Septem-
ter for an apartment in a white house at 1206 Tennesse-
St.
Unbeknownst to her, city building inspectors ad found seven housing-code violations at the apartment. None of the violations had been fixed. And no one from the city or from PMS informed of the status of her apartment
Wiring work and bathroom repairs needed to be
The morning after Cuelo moved, a repair crew showed up inexplicably and began to work on her apartment, she said. The crew fixed most of the problems.
done, and a working smoke detector needed to be provided.
The house, owned by Michael Imber, professor of teaching and leadership, has been managed by PMS for many years. Since 1996, the house has had two minimum-housing complaints filed against it, according to city records.
Gene Shaughnessy, chief building inspector, said that problems with Cuelo's apartment were severe enough that a second inspection would have been required to ensure that the proper repairs had been made.
The cover plates on the electrical outlets still are loose, Cuelo said. But everything else looked OK.
"I'm very content with it," she said. "I have no complaints still."
City records indicate that a reinspection took place on Sept. 27, one week after Cuelo had moved in.
Neither PMS nor Imber would comment.
Shaughnessy said that the case had been closed about two weeks after that, although there is no written record of that fact.
To inspect an apartment, the building inspector needs permission of the tenant to enter the premises.
However, Cuelo said no building inspector ever came.
Cuelo said that no inspector asked her permission or reinspected her apartment.
Other college towns have fewer housing complaints
By Dan Curry and Heather Woodward
Kansas staff writers
In Lawrence, the Building Inspection Department is complaint-driven, which means no inspections for housing code violations happen unless someone complains in writing.
But this is not the only way of doing things.
In Ames, Iowa, building inspectors have been required to inspect all rental housing every three years since 1979.
"The bottom line is fire and life safety," said Mike Fry, Ames housing inspector. "If they got people living in these houses, we don't want them to die in them."
Ames, like Lawrence, has a substantial student population that has become less content to remain in residence halls, and an apartment boom was the result.
They keep a record of each mandatory inspection in an office computer, and they keep hard conies filed away.
With more apartments to inspect, Fry and four other crew members had to pick up the pace.
In Lawrence, Jim Sherman is the only building inspector responsible for housing codes, which surprised Fry.
Even without mandatory inspections to do, Fry said it sounded like Sherman had his hands full.
"I'd be burned out in two months if I was him," Fry said. "They would have to pay me $150,000 a year."
Mandatory inspections are criticized for being invasive and burdensome, not only for landlords, who must worry about them, but for the tenants, who must allow a stranger to snoop around in their homes.
But Fry said he rarely encountered a tenant bitter about the inspection.
"People are used to it bv now." he said.
Paul Johnson, director of Student Legal Services at Iowa State University, said that despite the mandatory inspections, his office still received plenty of complaints about landlords.
"Most of the cases are deposit dispute cases," Johnson said.
Johnson said he saw 200 cases in 1999. About 40 percent of those cases dealt with substandard conditions.
"We've gotten lots of calls, and it's just an on-going thing," said Jo Hardesty, director of KU Legal Services for Students. "Students have issues, and the cases that come in are usually ridiculous. It shouldn't have to get to that point."
Gene Shaughnessy Lawrence chief building inspector, said that Lawrence experimented with mandatory inspections in the '70s, but quickly found it unfeasible — even then there were too many properties and too much paperwork.
Lawrence might find a solution in Manhattan, Kan.
Manhattan has established a special escrow account for tenants who have landlords that will not make necessary repairs.
After serving notice to their landlords, Manhattan tenants can place their rent checks in a temporary bank account. Landlords can withdraw the money only if the repairs are made.
Dianne Urban, Kansas State University's director of Student Legal Services, said that the city's escrow account was seldom used because most problems were solved by calling Manhattan's Building Inspection Department.
Urban had about 300 landlord complaint cases in 1999 and 218 in 1998.
A local initiative
Lawrence has more than 16,000 rental units, which is about 52 percent of all the housing units in the city.
Shaughnessy said his present staff would not be able to handle a three-year mandatory inspection program.
"I would say to do a thorough job, it would take at least a half-hour," Shaughnessy said. "So doing about eight per day, with just one person, we wouldn't even be done with all 16,000 properties before it would be time to start again."
Until recently, the city has been unaware that housing issues were a problem that needed to be addressed.
"Housing wasn't a major issue while I was on the commission," said John Nalbandian, who served on the Lawrence City Commission for eight years and did not seek re-election last spring. "I don't think it was a major problem because I haven't heard many complaints about it in this area. Usually if there's a problem, people say we need to change the law."
TENANT COMPLAINTS
Number of landlord complaints to university legal services offices in 1999:
■ University of Kansas: 600
■ Kansas State University: 300
■ Iowa State University: 200
HELPFUL HOUSING HINTS
■ Read the lease before you sign it.
Ask friends and former tenants about the land lard and the property you plan to rent.
Go examine the place you are actually moving into.
Keep an eye out for renewal clauses in the lease. Some leases may stipulate that a tenant must notify the landlord that he or she does not plan on staying another year. Otherwise the lease will renew itself.
■ Bring a video camera along during the check in walk-through.
Oral agreements are nonbinding. Make the landlord put any promises in writing.
Contact the Building Inspection Department in writing about code violations.
- Demand that the landlord justify all charges against your deposit.
Contact KU legal Services about problem at 864-5665
Contact housing & Credit Counseling about problems at 749-4224.
Source: KU Legal Services for Students
Now someone has.
Last February, City Manager Mike Wildgen presented a staff report on housing to the Lawrence City Commission and suggested it have a study session about housing, specifically rental issues. Although the commission unanimously voted to study the issue after the election of the new commission April 6, it did not begin to study rental issues until this January, when the Lawrence Association of Neighborhoods brought commissioners a proposal.
The proposal would require each landlord renting property in Lawrence to register formally with the city. Jo Andersen Abbott, president of the association, said the organization brought the proposal at the request of several commissioners.
Abbott said when neighborhood residents had complaints about a property, they could not find the landlord.
Under the association's proposal, landlords who don't live in town would have to have a local agent who could respond to problems with the property or tenants. There also would be mandatory self-inspections. Each landlord would have to fill out a checklist noting that the property met health, safety and housing-code standards already required by city code. Finally, landlords would have to agree to a good-neighbor policy that would appease neighborhood residents' pleas for less noise, trash and partying by tenants. Landlords would have to inform tenants of the policy.
"Our proposal is such that if there were complaints on a property, the penalties would be pretty stiff because if a landlord was registered, then they're obviously not ignorant. They would have willfully disobeyed the rules," Abbott said. "The landlord would have to stop renting to all their properties until the complaint was corrected."
The landlord also would be fined, she said.
However, not everyone agrees the proposal is the answer. Landlords of Lawrence Inc. has stated that it is firmly against the association's proposal.
Bob Ebey, vice president of Landlords of Lawrence Inc., said the association's assertion that landlords were unreachable was false.
"One of their main concerns is that a neighbor can't find the owner of a house." Eby said. "That's not true. They can call the courthouse."
Ebey said that increased scrutiny of landlords was the wrong focus for new law.
"We feel if the city enforced the existing laws, there wouldn't be a problem," he said.
James Dunn, president of Landlords of Lawrence Inc., agreed.
“It'd be a nightmare for the city,” he said. “The city has enough codes on the books, right now. If they get aggressive with the code, it'll be enough.”
Abbott said she was surprised that all landlords were not in favor of the proposal.
"Lots of landlords helped us write it," she said. "They should be on our side. Everyone will benefit except for people who are breaking the rules. There are a few bad apples that are creating the problem."