Key West cracks down on affordable housing landlords

BY PRU SOWERS

KONK LIFE STAFF WRITER

In this city of 186 deed-restricted affordable housing units, most landlords follow the rules. But several do not and city commissioners have agreed to lower the boom on them.

In 2014, the percentage of landlords who did not comply with Key West affordable housing requirements stood at 40 percent. That figure dropped to 16 percent in 2015, said Assistant City Attorney George Wallace, who did a study of the reporting rates with the Key West Housing Authority.

But that still leaves 50 units – approximately 27 percent of the total number of affordable houses and apartments in the city – that are not in reporting compliance, with tenants possibly not in residency and income compliance either, Wallace said.

Under city code, landlords renting designated affordable housing must give information about their tenants to the housing authority each year. These reporting obligations are to ensure that tenants meet affordable housing residency and income requirements and landlords are not overcharging for the deed-restricted affordable units.

“There are a few that are simply non-compliant because our code requirements, as we’ve examined it, require some requirements that cannot be met by some and eliminate many others,” Wallace said.

Some of the code non-compliance is the result of overly-stringent requirements, Wallace said, recommending that some sections of the code be relaxed. But several landlords simply ignore the annual reporting requirements and do not respond to repeated attempts by housing officials to contact them. As a result, Wallace asked whether city officials want to pursue vigorous legal action against those landlords that completely fail to respond. City commissioners gave the go-ahead.

“If years go by and there’s no accountability and some owners are taking advantage of the system and renting out their affordable housing at market rates… then they’re not going to do anything unless there’s some accountability” said Commissioner Sam Kaufman.

“Some of these [landlords] are actually playing a shell game with their tenants. They’re playing a shell game with us and with the housing authority,” said Commissioner Clayton Lopez. “We’ve been dealing with this the entire time I’ve been on the commission.”

Commissioner Richard Payne asked whether a tenant could be forced to move if a landlord continues to be non-compliant. Wallace said that while any enforcement action would be taken against the landlord, not the tenant, the landlord could be forced to sell the property, possibly evicting the tenant.

However, Wallace recommended several changes to the reporting requirements that could further reduce the non-compliance rate. Currently, tenants are required to have lived in Key West for a year before they qualify for affordable housing. Eliminating that requirement would bring many large employers in Key West into compliance. For example, Wallace said that some tenants living in the 20 affordable units owned by the Casa Marina Resort, 1500 Reynolds St., are hotel employees who do not meet the residency requirement.

Wallace also recommended that previously qualified tenants not be disqualified when they retire or go onto disability and their subsequent income is paid by the federal government. Currently, city code requires that affordable housing tenants earn their income within Monroe County.

And a third code change recommended by Wallace was that individual tenant income not be lumped together with any roommates living in the same unit.

“If you have a roommate scenario, where there are four people living in a house, they are a household. Their combined incomes may exceed the affordability requirements when their individual incomes do not,” he said.

Commissioners directed City Attorney Shawn Smith to draw up the housing code changes recommended by Wallace and bring them back to them for a vote.

“I’m really happy to see these recommendations,” said Kaufman. “They’re all 100 percent common sense.”

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