Cleveland City Council on Monday night approved an overhaul of city housing laws in an effort to get a handle on unresponsive or unreachable property investors.
Among the changes is a requirement that faraway landlords designate a local agent to be on the hook for their properties.
Council signed off on many of the housing code reforms proposed by Mayor Justin Bibb’s administration and dubbed “Residents First.” They preserved, but dialed back, a point-of-sale inspection for vacant property.
And members also said City Hall’s effort won’t succeed unless it hires more building inspectors.
Local agent requirement
All landlords must keep a local agent – someone who assumes legal responsibility for code violations – on file with the city. Landlords who live in Cuyahoga or the surrounding counties may be their own local agents.
But rental owners based outside this seven-county area must have a local agent who lives in Cuyahoga County. Landlords would list those local agents along with the rental registrations they must file annually with the city in March.
The Bibb administration says the local agent requirement will help the city hold people accountable for dilapidated properties owned by out-of-towners. City Hall has had difficulty making contact with landlords based far away from the homes they own, city officials and council members have said.
If the building inspectors can’t reach the property owner, the city can hit the local agent with fines and housing court summonses instead. Landlords must indemnify their local agents, meaning that agents could sue landlords to recover the costs of code violations.
“So that owner, at the end of the day, is still going to be getting hammered,” mayoral advisor Austin Davis told council last month, “either if it’s by us or by the local agent that they signed a contract with.”
Vacant building inspections
Cleveland will also set up what is essentially a point-of-sale inspection system for vacant buildings, according to Building and Housing Director Sally Martin O’Toole.
Owners must register their vacant buildings with the city, which will inspect them within a year of a sale. The buyer of a vacant building will be responsible for fixing code violations within six months.
This proposal faced the most resistance. Council amended the legislation to require only exterior, not interior, inspections when a vacant property sells. Council President Blaine Griffin told O’Toole and Davis he was concerned the point-of-sale rules would put a damper on an already slow housing market in some neighborhoods.
“Some of us in some portions of this city have a very difficult time attracting anybody to come and even rehab or build a birdhouse,” Griffin said at Monday’s finance committee meeting. “What we often get pushback about is that we don’t create a market for investment.”
Throughout council’s hearings on the legislation, O’Toole argued that housing inspectors needed to get inside vacant buildings to ensure they were in good shape. The legislation package gave her department the tools it needed to do its job, she said.
“I wasn’t hired to do half the job,” she said at Monday’s hearing. “I was hired to do the whole job. And I want to do the right job for Cleveland.”
The legislation – particularly the point-of-sale inspections for vacant buildings – faced opposition from the Akron Cleveland Association of Realtors, who created the website clevelandresidentslast.com lobbying council to vote no.
“We must remember that the Cleveland market is still in recovery,” the website reads, “and it’s critical that the city focus on enforcing its existing laws before introducing additional hurdles for its residents.”
The point-of-sale rules will take effect in six months. They’ll expire in two years unless council chooses to renew them. Council added that sunset clause to force the city to evaluate the program after giving it a two-year test run.
Civil tickets
The law gives the city a new avenue for dinging property owners for code violations. Building inspectors will be able to issue $200 civil tickets rather than taking owners to housing court. The city can add unpaid fines to an owner’s property tax duplicate.
Parking garages
The new law also requires regular parking garage inspections – a new development for Cleveland. Every five years, garage owners must submit inspection reports to the city.
Suburban garage collapses have captured news headlines in the past few years. A partial garage collapse in Willowick last year injured two people. A Lakewood garage partially collapsed in late 2021.
Council pushes for more building inspectors
Bibb’s latest spending proposal budgets 90 code enforcement positions in the Department of Building and Housing – less than the 105 budgeted last year.
But city officials told council there’s money elsewhere in the budget – in a new section called the “vacancy pool” – that could pay for even more building and housing positions. Their presentation to council included a slide bearing Bibb’s signature that promised to give the department the staff it needed to carry out Residents First.
Council members urged the administration to hire more inspectors. Ward 8 Council Member Michael Polensek, who often pushes the city to step up housing code enforcement, addressed some of his remarks to Bibb himself, who was not in attendance at the hearing.
“You’re not going to be successful, Mayor Bibb, unless you hire the people to fill the positions,” he said.
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