Rental Units

Responding to residents' concerns, the Westminster Common Council and mayor have begun making revisions to a proposed property maintenance code, including limiting the ordinance to rental properties. The council has backed away from including all properties in the ordinance, as originally proposed. The majority of the problems the city has had with unkempt properties have been with rental units, not owner-occupied houses or commercial properties, council members said. If owner-occupied houses become a problem, the code could be revised, Council President Damian L. Halstad said at a council work session Tuesday night.

A Chicago-based real estate investment trust that wants to rehab up to 3,000 apartments in Baltimore has made its first acquisitions in the city, the company said Wednesday. Pangea Properties has purchased 42 rental units in three apartment buildings in the Walbrook neighborhood of West Baltimore, according to a statement. The company declined to provide the purchase price or the buildings' addresses. Pangea would like to keep the locations of the properties confidential until they are ready to rent, said Lizzie Souza, a spokeswoman for the company.

Mayor Ellen O. Moyer and two city council members are seeking a new ordinance they say would crack down on residential landlords who fail to adequately maintain their properties. The measure, prompted by concerns raised by a downtown community group, would clarify landlord responsibilities and tenant rights. "Many of these rental properties are old, and they are conjoined," said Jan Hardesty, a spokeswoman for the mayor's office. "That means when there is any kind of issue, it affects more than one property.

A Baltimore landlord with a long history of violating lead-paint poisoning laws was sentenced Wednesday to a year and a day in prison by a federal judge, who called the now-bankrupt businessman a "scofflaw. " Cephus Murrell, 69, of Catonsville sat impassively in U.S. District Court as Judge Benson E. Legg imposed the sentence, which included six months' home detention after release from prison. Murrell owned and managed 175 rental units in Baltimore, officials said, all built before lead paint was banned.

A bill that would require landlords with units built before 1978 to protect their tenants from lead-paint hazards cleared the General Assembly tonight, along with a provision urging courts to penalize baseless litigation over the problem. HB644 , approved in a conference agreement by House and Senate, would extend lead-paint regulations that now cover all rental homes in Maryland built before 1950. The bill also authorizes the state to regulate repairs, renovations and painting in all homes where lead paint is present.

A Baltimore landlord with a long history of violating lead-paint poisoning laws was sentenced Wednesday to a year and a day in prison by a federal judge, who called the now-bankrupt businessman a "scofflaw. " Cephus Murrell, 69, of Catonsville sat impassively in U.S. District Court as Judge Benson E. Legg imposed the sentence, which included six months' home detention after release from prison. Murrell owned and managed 175 rental units in Baltimore, officials said, all built before lead paint was banned.

Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. trumpeted yesterday his commitment to eliminating lead poisoning through a state registry of pre-1950 rental units that was approved a decade ago under a different administration. Though he offered no new proposals or promises of additional funding, Ehrlich's visit to Baltimore sought to highlight gains that safeguard the health of city children. Standing outside the Coalition to End Childhood Lead Poisoning's headquarters in Canton, Ehrlich announced that a letter sent to owners of 50,000 unregistered properties during the summer yielded 17,000 responses.

The state is seeking a $150,000 fine from a Baltimore landlord accused of evading a law that requires apartment owners to remove the most obvious lead-paint hazards from their buildings. The fine against James Cann, who owns 132 rental homes in the city, would be the state's highest penalty in a lead-paint case, said Richard McIntyre, a spokesman for the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE). Experts say lead contamination is one of the city's gravest public health problems. Children who ingest lead can damage their developing brains and suffer learning disabilities, hearing loss, violent behavior and mental retardation.

Groups representing property owners and Realtors in Baltimore clashed at a public hearing last night over a City Council bill that would increase annual registration fees for rental units.Members of the Property Owners Association of Greater Baltimore charged that the increased fees, which would generate $800,000 in new revenue, would force some landlords to sell their properties.But a representative of the Greater Baltimore Board of Realtors said that his group supports the proposal -- as long as the increased revenue is used to hire more housing inspectors, a force that has been dramatically decreased because of budget cuts.

Vacancies in Howard County's tight rental market were so rare last year that some people with federal rent subsidies have been unable to find housing, reducing the number of Section 8 migrants to Howard by about 60 families compared with 1999, a consultant's study has found. The number of individually owned single rental units in the county - often townhouses and condominiums - has dropped 25 percent since 1999, says the study, which was authorized by the county Department of Housing and Community Development.

A bill that would require landlords with units built before 1978 to protect their tenants from lead-paint hazards cleared the General Assembly tonight, along with a provision urging courts to penalize baseless litigation over the problem. HB644 , approved in a conference agreement by House and Senate, would extend lead-paint regulations that now cover all rental homes in Maryland built before 1950. The bill also authorizes the state to regulate repairs, renovations and painting in all homes where lead paint is present.

Lead poisoning, once widespread, appears on the way to becoming a rarity among children living in old rental housing in Baltimore and the rest of Maryland. But the problem is growing among youngsters who live in owner-occupied and newer rental homes, and that is prompting state officials to look for new ways to fight the longtime health scourge. State environmental officials reported Tuesday that the number of Maryland children found last year with harmful levels of lead in their blood declined to 531, down by 22 from the year before and less than 0.5 percent of all youngsters tested.

The striped awnings at the storefront windows of the Van Burens' Bolton Hill residence speak to a time in the late 1800s when every four blocks or so had a commercial corner in an elegant neighborhood of Victorian townhouses. "This was probably never a one-family home," said Susan Van Buren, indicating an old photo on the office wall just inside the entrance showing a merchant behind the counter of his general store. "And there was a butcher across the street," she continued.

Health advocates and landlords squared off Thursday in Annapolis over a proposal to beef up Maryland's lead-paint law, which both sides agree has succeeded in drastically reducing the number of young children poisoned in older rental homes. Advocates, pediatricians and health officials urged the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee to approve a bill that would require landlords to test for lead dust in rental units built before 1950 if they are to be occupied by families with children.

The Baltimore County Council unanimously enacted legislation Monday that will require rental property owners to install carbon monoxide alarms in all units heated by fuel-burning equipment as well as dwellings attached to an enclosed parking area. The measure takes effect in 45 days. Landlords will have eight months to install the devices, which will make a distinct audible sound before the colorless, odorless gas reaches unsafe levels. The original bill had given property owners a year but Council Chairman Joseph Bartenfelder asked for an amendment shortening the time given "the rash of CO incidents" in the county recently.

Firefighters detected potentially lethal levels of carbon monoxide inside a Middle River rental home over the weekend, days before elected officials are set to take up a measure that would require every rental unit in the county to install devices to detect the dangerous invisible gas. Emergency crews arrived at a home on Bellanca Court early Saturday and detected carbon monoxide levels of more than 220 parts per million, according to Baltimore County...

For some, the quest for affordable housing has taken on aspects of a crusade. And like any crusade, the potential to shade the facts is incessant for those on either end of the issue.The Howard County Zoning Board recently unanimously endorsed an amendment that would allow developers to build at greater densities in some locations if they include affordable housing in their projects. The definition of affordable housing, however, was never made explicit. Councilman Paul Farragut, who authored the amendment, insists that "what we're really talking about is the $80,000 townhouse."

In their zeal to protect "property rights," commissioners Donald I. Dell and Richard T. Yates are creating a dangerous situation for people who rent housing in Carroll County. By refusing to allow county inspectors to enforce the county's livability code, the commissioners are giving unscrupulous landlords the opportunity to maintain substandard, possibly dangerous, rental units.At present, county housing inspectors respond only to complaints that landlords or tenants file. For the past several months, New Windsor Mayor Jack A. Gullo Jr. has been waging an unsuccessful campaign to have county inspectors respond to complaints by neighbors or municipal officials.

Carbon monoxide poisoning killed three members of the Wiley family in July 2005 after the colorless, odorless gas built up to astronomical levels in their Eastern Baltimore County rental home in the Cove Village complex, apparently as a result of faulty installation of the unit's furnace or other appliances. It's not so surprising, then, that immediately after Cove Village management installed carbon monoxide detectors in all the other homes in the complex that firefighters got a string of false alarms from nervous residents.