{"id":184,"date":"2019-03-22T18:08:32","date_gmt":"2019-03-22T18:08:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/?p=184"},"modified":"2019-03-23T05:13:57","modified_gmt":"2019-03-23T05:13:57","slug":"florida-state-lawmakers-want-to-strengthen-renters-rights-next-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/184\/","title":{"rendered":"Florida State Lawmakers Want to Strengthen Renters\u2019 Rights \u2013 Next City"},"content":{"rendered":"

nextcity.org\/daily\/entry\/florida-state-lawmakers-want-to-strengthen-renters-rights?utm_source=Next+City+Newsletter&utm_campaign=79c4ef7c39-Daily_781_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_fcee5bf7a0-7…<\/a>
\nFlorida State Lawmakers Want to Strengthen Renters\u2019 Rights Javier Figueroa moved to Orlando in November 2017, not long after Hurricane Maria wreaked havoc on his hometown of Manat\u00ed, a small city on the north coast of Puerto Rico. After living on FEMA housing aid for about a month, he started looking for an apartment for himself, his wife, his mother and his 7-year-old son near his son\u2019s school. He applied for a lease in a housing complex, paying $85 apiece for background checks for the three adults in the household. The rent was $1,197 per month, he says. According to the application, he was supposed to show that he earned at least three times that amount. That was basically impossible, Figueroa says. He has a disability and receives Social Security insurance income. It wasn\u2019t until a Puerto Rican woman who worked in the leasing office helped him navigate the application process that he was able to secure the apartment.
\nAfter a year, Figueroa moved his family to a low-income housing development in nearby Apopka, Florida. He paid a $100 fee to have his family placed on the waiting list, he says. The deposit for the apartment was $1,294, and his family lived in a hotel for a week between leases. It\u2019s been over a month since he left his last apartment and he still hasn\u2019t gotten his security deposit back.
\nUntil he moved to Florida, Figueroa, who is 42, had never been involved in community organizing. But he now works with Vamos4PR, which advocates for the Puerto Rican diaspora. Over the last few years, Figueroa has talked with lawmakers about the difficulty of finding and keeping an apartment for families like his in Florida.
\nIn early March, two of those lawmakers, State Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith, who represents parts of Orlando, and State Sen. Jos\u00e9 Javier Rodr\u00edguez, who represents parts of Miami, introduced identical bills that would grant a sweeping set of new rights to tenants across the state. Among the provisions in the legislation are a \u201cjust cause\u201d eviction clause, requirements that leases be provided in the preferred language of the tenant, a right of first refusal for tenants when their landlords are selling their buildings, and a rule that would require landlords to pay back three times the security deposit amount if they fail to return the deposit within 30 days of the end of a lease.
\n\u201cWe started talking at the beginning of this year about the need to protect renters in the state of Florida,\u201d Smith says. \u201cSo many of Florida\u2019s laws and protections are centered around landlords, and we think that\u2019s wrong, because so many tenants and renters face problems when it comes to fair treatment in housing.\u201d
\nThe legislation was crafted in cooperation with a coalition of advocacy groups across the state, Smith says. They include Organize Florida, the Community Justice Project, Manufactured Housing Action, and Vamos4PR. (A Vamos4PR spokeswoman, Carolina Gonzalez, helped me and Javier Figueroa talk over the phone in English and Spanish last week.) The legislation is a push in the direction of more stability for renters, they say, if not the silver bullet to solve the state\u2019s housing crisis.
\n\u201cWe all really care about increasing renter protections in the state, because there\u2019s really not that many at all, and promoting a narrative around rent control and how it\u2019s a simple solution to the crisis,\u201d says Sheena Johnson, campaigns director for Organize Florida..
\nAccording to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, Florida has a shortage of more than 425,000 housing units for extremely low-income renters \u2014 families of four with less than $24,600 in yearly income. In Orlando, the affordable housing market is particularly tight, with just 17 rentals accessible to every 100 extremely low-income renters. And housing advocates say the state\u2019s tenant protections are unusually weak; a RentCafe analysis concluded that Florida is one of the most landlord-friendly states in the U.S.
\nJohnson says Organize Florida works to empower low-income tenants in their conflicts with their landlords. Last fall, the group helped tenants in an Orlando apartment complex organize an effort to have city officials enforce rampant code violations, including caved-in roofs, broken lights and infestations. The effort resulted in the city imposing the maximum fine on the building\u2019s owner: $1,500 a day until the violations were resolved, Johnson says. Laws like those introduced in the state legislature will help tip the scales back in tenants\u2019 favor, she says.
\n\u201cThe root of [the crisis] is gentrification and capitalism,\u201d Johnson says. \u201cBut in terms of figuring out how to have a solution without dealing with the root causes of it, we need to have a state that has strong renter protections and a state that has some sort of landlord accountability.\u201d
\nAlso included in the legislation: housing protections for survivors of domestic abuse, language prohibiting discrimination against tenants based on gender identity and sexual orientation, a prohibition on evictions during states of emergency, and a requirement that landlords provide three months\u2019 notice when they\u2019re planning to raise rents by more than 5 percent. Other bills introduced recently in the legislature would undo a state law that limits local rent control policies and prevent the legislature from repeatedly raiding the state\u2019s housing fund, known as the Sadowski Affordable Housing Trust Fund. According to a report in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, lawmakers have diverted money from the fund every year since 2003 to balance the state budget.
\nCarlos Guillermo Smith says he wasn\u2019t surprised that a group of landlords came out in opposition to the new bills as soon as they were introduced. (A landlord group in Florida did not respond to a request for an interview.) Passage of the bills is not a sure thing, Smith says, but if they are approved, they\u2019ll enact a comprehensive set of tenant protections in a state that has fewer than most.
\n\u201cThe legislature is full of people who want to protect the rights of landlords, and that\u2019s fine,\u201d Smith says. \u201cBut there needs to be balance. We have a tough hill to climb, there\u2019s no question. But what I\u2019m really excited about is, this is really creating a conversation and highlighting the abuses that are happening.\u201d
\nThis article is part of Backyard, a newsletter exploring scalable solutions to make housing fairer, more affordable and more environmentally sustainable. Subscribe to our thrice-weekly Backyard newsletter.<\/p>\n

Mary Bolton 202-390-1208<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

nextcity.org\/daily\/entry\/florida-state-lawmakers-want-to-strengthen-renters-rights?utm_source=Next+City+Newsletter&utm_campaign=79c4ef7c39-Daily_781_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_fcee5bf7a0-7… Florida State Lawmakers Want to Strengthen Renters\u2019 Rights Javier Figueroa moved to Orlando in November 2017, not long after Hurricane Maria wreaked havoc on his hometown of Manat\u00ed, a small city on the north coast of Puerto Rico. After living on FEMA housing aid for about a month, he started looking for an apartment […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-housingarchive"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}