RENT CONTROL AND LANDLORD TRANSPARENCY

 1 April 2022

Dear Mayor Jones:

In my letter about employment, I suggested promoting measures that allowed reciprocal transparency, as employers can ask for a lot of information, including credit reports and background checks, but not the reverse.

I’d like to suggest this for landlords, too. The person (or corporation) that owns the property should be transparent to prospective tenants and renters. We should be able to see exactly who the owner is (not the corporate shell or LLC), whether the landlord pays the taxes and other bills on time, and what other properties the landlord owns.

And it should be required that landlords disclose when they are selling the property. I would not have stayed in this apartment last year if I had known my old landlord had sold the building. (Nor would I be needing any assistance if I had moved last May.)

The new owners raised the rent with no improvements, and discontinued cleaning and some regular maintenance on the property. Rental properties require a lower down payment than a house, and less investment overall. Tenants pay the mortgage, not the landlord, and we deserve transparency. If we are going to pay the mortgage for a new set of owners, we should be told before the sale, not after.

(And there have been some truly horrific landlords in the St. Louis area. To name just two, Michael’s Lizt and Fox of Bellington Property. Both criminals were allowed to keep their own luxurious residences, while the refugees and other vulnerable people they swindled were left homeless.)

Moreover, the city of St. Louis desperately needs rent control. I am not the only the person that has seen an increase in rent with no value added to the property. The illusion of increased property taxes on these rentals is quickly offset by the poverty they create, and the outflow of renters from the city. If millionaire landlords milking tenants dry were the key to increased property values in the city, it would be evident by now.

More transparency for tenants, rent control, and developing sustainable neighborhoods and more resident property owners* are the keys to a prosperous and healthy St. Louis.

Please work to create laws and statues that require landlord transparency and rent control.

* The $1 house sale led to only four sales in 2019. Has any research gone into why the incentive was not more successful? Perhaps the homes were not attractive to people that have the money to renovate, and more assistance with loans and grants needed to be offered? And the list of homes from the LRA is a dense and difficult to read spreadsheet. It does not encourage browsing. Also, it maybe that most people didn’t hear about it or didn’t fully understand how the plan worked. Reaching out to city residents about available properties could be integrated into building sustainable neighborhoods. And these tax lien sales need to be promoted more than 2 weeks in advance and need to give priority to buyers that are looking to reside in these properties. Saint Louis does not need anymore “bulk buying” Section-8 dependent landlords, many of whom don’t even reside in the State or in the Metro area.