Landlords

Baltimore landlords will no longer be able to throw an evicted tenant's belongings onto the sidewalk, and gun offenders will be required to register their address every six months under a pair of bills signed by Mayor Sheila Dixon. The gun-offender registry, which was modeled after a similar program in New York, requires gun offenders to register their name, aliases, address and other information within 48 hours of a gun conviction or release from jail. Dixon introduced the bill in July, and the legislation slid through the City Council with little opposition.

A rental property owned by Mayor Sheila Dixon failed a federally required housing inspection at least six times in the past three years, and a city agency has repeatedly threatened to suspend her from a subsidized rental program because of those inspections, documents obtained by The Sun show. Handwritten inspection reports for the single-family rowhouse in the 2200 block of Ruskin Ave. indicate that many of the problems are relatively minor, from a leaky ceiling and flaking paint to worn caulk around a tub, records show.

Landlords in Howard and Montgomery counties cannot turn away low-income renters who pay for their housing with federal vouchers, Maryland's highest court ruled yesterday. The unanimous ruling upholds fair-housing laws in those counties and, housing advocates say, provides momentum for a drive to pass a statewide law requiring landlords to accept rental vouchers. Such a law, advocates say, would make it easier for poor people to live in affluent communities with better jobs and better schools.

Mayor Sheila Dixon's administration introduced a package of legislation in the City Council yesterday that officials hope will give the city more power to force home and business owners to clean up their properties. The three bills, some of the most significant that Dixon has sent to the council since becoming mayor in January, would impose fines on landlords who do not register with the city and would define when a tenant or a landlord is responsible for sanitary violations. "These are the first in what will be more legislation supporting the mayor's cleaner and greener initiative," said Dixon spokesman Anthony McCarthy.

In two new HotSpot grants announced yesterday, Brooklyn Heights will receive $123,000 in state funds next year to fight crime and get tough on absentee landlords with shabby homes, and Parole will get $105,700 to boost the Neighborhood Watch program and help clean the community's streets.The awards are among 36 grants announced by the Governor's Office on Crime Control and Prevention. The $6.3 million statewide expansion of the program adds 26 communities and expands the boundaries of six others.

With their investments jeopardized by the continuing spread of Baltimore's slums, two powerful groups of property owners are pledging unexpected support for a pair of proposed state laws that would make it easier for the city to seize rundown houses.Banking officials and landlords have long opposed giving the city broad confiscation powers for fear that the ax would fall on them, placing millions in mortgages and property holdings at stake.But their resistance has softened amid growing recognition that Baltimore's 40,000 abandoned properties are dragging down real estate values across wide sections of the city and acting as warrens of crime that have destabilized entire neighborhoods.

Amid an outpouring of concern over drug dealers buying up slum houses in Baltimore, city and state lawyers are preparing legislation that seeks to give officials broad new powers to seize private property.Two bills expected to be introduced soon in the House of Delegates would attack the city's rampant blight by making it easier for prosecutors to confiscate houses owned by criminals and by bolstering the city's authority to seize 40,000 abandoned dwellings.With millions of dollars in urban-renewal projects pending in the city's worst slums, the stakes are high.

Following revelations that convicted felons own at least 200 rowhouses in East Baltimore, Maryland's chief federal prosecutor said yesterday that she would convene high-level meetings with city and state officials to coordinate an attack on criminal landlords.U.S. Attorney Lynne A. Battaglia said that a 1996 agreement between her office and city prosecutors to cooperate on confiscating houses and other assets owned by drug dealers had been "little used" since then and was "clearly in need of restating."

Dear Mr. Azrael:My wife and I decided several months ago to move to Howard County and either have a new house built or purchase a relatively new house in Ellicott City.Consequently we visited numerous builders' models and had just about decided on a builder and a location when we received an unsolicited card in the mail from a real estate agent, reporting that he had just sold a house in our neighborhood and offering to meet with us to give us an assessment of our present house for purposes of selling it.We called the agent and, after meeting with him, we decided that we would put our house on the market as soon as we were sure of what we wanted to build and where we wanted to relocate.

EVERYONE who supported a change in Howard County's fair-housing laws may have meant well. But the County Council took a big risk by giving landlords the option of placing a ceiling on the number of tenants whose rent is subsidized by the government. The council recently passed a bill letting landlords turn away low-income families once a 20-percent threshold of subsidized tenants is reached.The action was taken to save the fair-housing law: Some landlords have threatened to file suit to dismantle it. These landlords claim the marketability of their apartment complexes is reduced when too many low-income families move in.Housing officials hope the ability to limit low-income tenants will keep some landlords from dropping out of the subsidized housing program and encourage others to participate.

On Monday, the Baltimore County Council unanimously enacted stronger zoning regulations governing rooming and boarding houses in an effort to deter irresponsible landlords from crowding rental homes with tenants. The law, which takes effect in 45 days, eliminates a loophole that allowed absentee landlords to circumvent zoning and create limited-liability corporations that gave tenants a small share of ownership. Rules limiting the number of unrelated tenants in a house to two do not apply to owners.

More than 90 percent of rental properties in Baltimore County have been inspected and licensed under a new countywide registration law, officials said. Nearly 12,000 rental properties have been registered, and officials said the county office of permits and inspections is still receiving about 80 applications a week. The law took effect in January after being delayed for six months to give landlords more time to comply. "There are a tremendous number of citizens sleeping a lot easier in their homes because of what has been fantastic compliance," said Mike Mohler, the county's deputy director of permits.

With Baltimore County landlords struggling to comply with new rental-property safety requirements, the County Council voted last night to give them another six months, after turning back a bid to repeal the new law. The council, which had been considering giving landlords until Oct. 1, voted unanimously to extend the deadline an extra three months to Jan. 1. The deadline had been July 1 when the council approved the law in December. According to Councilman Vincent J. Gardina, a Towson-Perry Hall Democrat, the bill will help stem the "deterioration of communities," and seeks only to enforce rental property requirements that have been county law for more than two decades.

The July 1 deadline for landlords in Baltimore County to have their rental properties inspected came and went. Now county lawmakers are talking about extending the deadline to Oct. 1 or later. And one councilman, T. Bryan McIntire, a North County Republican, has suggested scrapping the requirements altogether. About a dozen landlords and residents spoke at yesterday's council work session, most in support of extending the deadline or eliminating the program. The council is set to vote on the rental registration program and several other bills at its Aug. 4 legislative session.

Baltimore County's effort to improve the quality of rental housing countywide is off to a slow start, but that's perfectly understandable. It has taken time for word of the expanded program to get out, and only a handful of private inspectors are available to review thousands of homes and apartments. But just because only about 7,000 of the estimated 12,000 to 15,000 eligible apartments and other rental units have been enrolled doesn't make the program unworkable, as some critics have suggested.

Ammone Phavone didn't understand why a sheriff's deputy was on her doorstep with an eviction order. She scurried inside to get her lease. She told him she'd always paid her rent. Unfortunately, the landlords hadn't paid the mortgage. They'd lost the Baltimore rowhouse to foreclosure months earlier, and now the lender - finally able to take official possession - was making sure it was empty. A real estate agent acting as the lender's representative was just as surprised to find Phavone there last month as she was to hear that she'd have to leave.

SHAKER HEIGHTS, Ohio -- The housing slump is cranking out unfit landlords. Take me, for example. The other day I found myself shooing curb pickers away. My previous tenants were supposed to have cleared out the day before. The new tenants were already busy moving in their stuff. My house now held one 8-month-old, two parents, three grandparents, two cleaners, two movers and one locksmith. And me, taking someone else's personal items to the curb. People were starting to slow down on my rural state road.

When Baltimore prohibited landlords from tossing evicted tenants' belongings onto sidewalks last fall, the city anticipated cleaner neighborhoods, less work for its crews and a big savings for taxpayers. But the ordinance, which took years to win approval, might be causing a less predictable shift in the rental market: Early data suggest that in addition to reducing the amount of unsightly personal property dumped on streets, the law is cutting down on the number of evictions. In the five months since the law took effect, evictions have fallen 25 percent - from 2,723 to 2,050 - compared with the corresponding period a year before, according to city statistics.

Shawn Parsons thought he had done his research. Before he offered a lease for his Fells Point home to a prospective tenant, he reviewed her credit and checked her references. But after that tenant wrote bad checks, sublet the place without permission and damaged the property, he wanted to warn other landlords not to trust her. "If we could have found out anything about this, it would have saved us $17,000 and seven months of [those] people renting the property," Parsons, of Fallston, said.

Among the more familiar beefs of community associations in Baltimore County is the one about the negligent landlord who allows a single-family home that's been chopped up into multiple rental units to slowly deteriorate. Most landlords don't do this, of course, but there are always the few who choose short-term profit over their responsibility to their tenants and to the local community. That's why the Baltimore County Council's recent decision to broaden the county's 5-year-old rental registration and inspection program is a good one. The initial pilot program has helped crack down on illegal apartment conversions and improved the quality of life for dozens of families in selected communities.