Rentals on the radar

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In the past year since Charlotte’s rental ordinance took effect, 643 properties have surpassed the city’s threshold for crime.

That means, in theory, that Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department officials should have met with the owners of 643 properties, of which 553 were single-family homes.

Not all of those meetings took place, though.

Instead, CMPD has met just 93 property owners, Capt. Stephen Willis, who oversees the police department’s rental property registration program, said.

The reason: The 2 1/2 (one works part time) members of the police department who run the program can’t keep up with the work the rental ordinance has created. For one, figuring out if a property is a rental and who and where the owner is have proven to be time-consuming, Willis said.

That has led to CMPD calling for the ordinance to be changed so that the more than 48,000 rental properties in the city would have to be registered with the program. Roughly 40,000 of those are single-family homes.

Police say making registration mandatory for all rental properties would make it easier for them to crack down on violations.

For rental property owners, citywide registration would mean paperwork and fees that are usually passed on to tenants. And for some of those who have already had experience with the ordinance, it’s a bad piece of legislation.

“The fees and constant mediation plan … we’re almost being penalized instead of being given an opportunity to remedy the situation first,” said Joe Rempson, vice president for Charlotte-based property management company T.R. Lawing Realty.

City Councilman Andy Dulin said the city’s Community Safety Committee is preparing to tweak the ordinance, but it’s unclear what changes are coming; Dulin said “they are not solid yet.”

Some industry officials agree with the intent of the ordinance, which Dulin says is to curb crime. But the mechanics leave something to be desired, they say.

Interestingly, Rempson, who served on a city committee that provided input on the development of the ordinance, has found himself meeting with police over complaints about tenants at a property his company manages.

Rempson said the husband-and-wife tenants had lived in the home for five years. But a domestic violence situation this year led to a police response at the home, sending it over the ordinance’s threshold.

That resulted in a $335 property registration fee, which Rempson said was paid by the tenants.

T.R. Lawing couldn’t just make the tenants leave over the incident, he said, citing state protections for tenants in domestic violence situations.

So, the company had to wait until the couple’s lease expired this month to force them out. Thanks to the ordinance, Rempson then had to create a mediation plan with police for the property.

“They felt we should screen every applicant and do a criminal check every time we renew the lease,” he said. “They wanted us to run a criminal background check on teenagers in the property as well.”

Requirements like that mean more time and money for property owners, he said. Criminal background checks cost between $5 and $10 per tenant, he said.

The current practice at T.R. Lawing is to conduct criminal background checks on adult leaseholders when the lease is signed, not after.

“They were tenants for five years and paid their rent on time,” Rempson said. “There were minimal problems that we were aware of until we got the letter from the police.”

But under the ordinance, it only takes one violent crime to surpass the threshold for single-family homes, Willis said.

Rempson said the company has had to deal with two other tenant-related incidents in the past month, both relating to drug arrests. Those tenants were kicked out, he said.

Rempson said he wasn’t in favor of the ordinance when it was adopted in June 2010. He supports its intent but said it isn’t an efficient way to reduce crime at rental properties.

“Their (the city’s) vision of how to remedy the problem is not real-world practice,” he said.

Here’s how the ordinance works:

A “disorder activity count” is assigned to a residential rental property based on the number of times CMPD has to respond to complaints about it.

A multiplier, based on the reason for police involvement, is used:  a violent crime is multiplied by one, property crimes by 0.25 and request for police service by 0.10.

Once those numbers are tallied, the top four percentile of properties — in each of nine categories based on density — are considered above the “disorder risk threshold” and must be registered.

The threshold for a single-family rental is one, Willis said.

With registration comes a fee and a mandatory meeting with police. All of that is supposed to happen within 30 days of being notified by police that the threshold has been surpassed.

Police and the property owner determine an action plan and schedule a six-month follow-up meeting. If the property remains at or above the threshold at the follow-up meeting, another plan is formed and another meeting is scheduled for six months later.

If there has to be a third follow-up meeting, a property owner can lose the rental registration on a property unless police determine the owner followed the action plan. Police would also consider whether the property has become a public nuisance.

The city attorney’s office decides whether to revoke a rental registration after the second year in which a property remains above the threshold.

Willis said CMPD is asking the City Council to consider requiring all rental properties be registered for a “nominal” fee. His goal is to get it as low as $100 for a single-family home, but he doesn’t know if that will happen.

Currently, fees are between $350 and $1,330, depending on the number of units.

In calling for all rental property owners to register, police lament the difficulties they face in trying to track down landlords.

Currently, police use a tax database to identify property owners, but many times that is difficult — especially for single-family homes — because the listed mailing address might be for an attorney, mortgage company, a P.O. Box or corporation.

“We don’t know it’s a rental property unless the mailing address is different from the physical address,” Willis said. “They are not required to have a business license.”

Once a property is verified as a rental, police must confirm that the crime occurred at the address or nearby.

“It’s too much manual analysis,” Willis said of the current ordinance.

Willis also said the department wants threshold reviews to be done on a quarterly basis instead of yearly.

CMPD also wants to convert to a “bright line threshold” instead of the disorder risk threshold, meaning the department wants to “draw a line in the sand” instead of relying on a mathematical equation, Willis said. For example, two violent crimes or three calls for CMPD service could be the threshold for a single-family home.

CMPD also wants to establish a fine schedule instead of revoking the owner’s right to rent a property. Fines could be levied for failure to register, remediate or adhere to any registration requirements.

A big change would be in the reporting of officer-generated calls to properties, which is currently not considered when figuring a property’s disorder activity count.

Willis said the ordinance likely excluded those calls so that it didn’t appear that police were inflating a property’s disorder activity count. Police are proposing to only count certain types of officer-initiated police responses in the final statistics for a property, he said.

Last month, CMPD presented an update to the City Council on the ordinance. The Community Safety Committee is planning to review the ordinance at an upcoming meeting. The next meeting is scheduled for Sept. 21.

Ken Szymanski, executive director for the Greater Charlotte Apartment Association, says it’s too soon to determine if the ordinance has been good, bad or indifferent.

He said that while a review of the ordinance is a good idea, much of the past year went by with very little progress in enforcement of it.

But he said he has heard that police are “taking baby steps” in enforcement, which he applauds.

Dulin, who sits on the Community Safety Committee, agrees with disgruntled property owners that the process of registering properties and the collecting of registration fees is cumbersome. Not many property owners have paid the fees, he said, adding that the fees are important to the success of the program.

Rempson said property managers and owners want to reduce crimes at rental homes, too, and city officials should focus on working with them instead of punishing them.

“Nobody can keep a property crime-free 100 percent of the time,” he said. “We live in a big city. We have crime all the time.”

Ramsey can be reached at [email protected].