As first deadline arrives, new Healthy Homes program is off to slow start
19th February 2024 · 0 Comments
By Katie Jane Fernelius
Contributing Writer
(Veritenews.org) — In the summer of 2023, Samantha Huffman moved into a new rental in Uptown. At first, it seemed like the perfect fit for her and her roommates: it had plenty of bedrooms and was close to public transit. But Huffman soon started to notice issues.
First there was the mold, especially in the air conditioning system. She brought it up with her landlord, but she said he told her that it was just mildew. Next, Huffman noticed just how wet her house could get: the rental was covered in tarps, and any time it rained, water leaked into the foyer, crawling across the black tiles. Pieces of the exterior wall fell off, the foundation had visible cracks, and the interior ceiling walls began to cave in.
Huffman kept contacting her landlord, asking for support, but she said he largely rebuffed her concerns.
Finally, Huffman took matters into her own hands and paid out of pocket to test her apartment for mold; it came back positive. When she confronted her landlord about it – asking him to deduct the cost of the test from her rent, he threatened to evict her and her two roommates, one of whom was living with stage-four cancer.
“He’d rather kick me out than fix it and I’ve only been there for six months,” Huffman said at a January meeting where the city introduced the rules and regulations of its new Healthy Homes Program, which is meant to provide recourse for renters in situations like hers.
The program, which was passed into law by the New Orleans City Council in late 2022, officially launched at the beginning of this year. The program requires owners of rental properties to register them with the city and keep them in compliance with a set of health and safety standards.
The registry is currently in its first phase, where the city aims to register parcels with fifty or more rental units on them. Owners of medium-sized properties, with between four and 49 units, will be required to register them later this year. The smallest properties – including single-family homes, doubles and triplexes – must register at the beginning of next year.
But the rollout has been slower than first hoped for. The program’s implementation was delayed by six months. Then, the city failed to allocate $2.5 million for the program in its 2024 budget. An amendment later allocated funding for the program.
The deadline for large-property landlords to apply is Thursday (Feb. 15). As of last week, the Department of Safety and Permits had received applications for 35 properties. No certificates of compliance have been issued so far.
According to the city, funding for the program has only recently become available, impacting their ability to hire staff in the Department of Safety and Permits to work on the program.
As of last week, three of 13 Healthy Homes staff positions were “fully onboarded,” John Lawson, press secretary for Mayor LaToya Cantrell, wrote in an email. “The hiring for these positions is a top priority, and the hiring/onboarding process is fully underway.”
New minimum rental standards also went into place at the beginning of this year. These standards include having adequate air conditioning and heating, an operable fire and smoke alarm, working appliances, a hot water heater, as well as no evidence of mold or rodent infestations. The program also empowers residents to file complaints against their landlords for failing to meet those standards by using the city’s 311 program, which will alert city Code Enforcement of the issue and prompt an inspection of the rental property.
The city has received seven complaints of properties allegedly being out of compliance as of last week, according to Lawson, and inspections were expected to begin within days.
A long road to implementation
The push for the Healthy Homes ordinance was a multi-year effort backed by a coalition representing over five dozen organizations. The coalition advocated for a comprehensive “healthy homes” policy, which would create a registry of rental properties and set basic health and safety standards for all rentals. The coalition argued that these standards would need to be ensured through proactive inspections, 311 reporting and protection from retaliation for tenants. The groups also advocated for financial support for small landlords to bring their buildings up to code as well as for tenants who could be displaced if their rental homes were found to be inhabitable.
The Healthy Homes program came in response to an affordable housing crisis in the city: a perfect storm of declining public housing, a low stock of affordable units and an explosion of short-term rentals cannibalizing the rental market.
In 2017, then-Councilmembers Cantrell and Jason Williams sponsored the ordinance, but despite support from Mayor Mitch Landrieu, the effort never moved beyond committee to a full council vote. Other councilmembers at the time expressed concern over the legality of the ordinance, as a similar effort had been deemed unconstitutional in Ohio, and many landlords and realtors organized against the ordinance, arguing it would “destroy affordable housing and drive rents through the roof.”
But the organizers behind Healthy Homes continued to push for the ordinance. And five years later, Councilmember JP Morrell, with support from the city’s Health Department, championed the ordinance, once again bringing it to the council’s agenda.
“When Morrell was elected to the City Council, housing advocates approached our office about the problems facing many renters across the city,” Monet Brignat-Sullivan, communications director for Morrell’s office, wrote. “With the help of organizations such as Louisiana Fair Housing Action Center, we were able to pass the first-ever rental registry in the city of New Orleans.”
The ordinance passed in November 2022 with unanimous support from all councilmembers.
But several major components were taken out of the final legislation.
First was the registration fees paid by landlords. These fees were designed to be high enough to provide funding for the program in the aggregate while staying low enough to not be burdensome to tenants if landlords chose to pass down the costs down onto them.
Also missing from the ordinance was routine inspections of properties. Under the final ordinance, rental properties will only be inspected if a tenant makes a complaint to the city.
Some Healthy Homes advocates expressed concerns that the ordinance had been so watered down by the time it finally became law as to be ineffective.
“This very effective and very essential piece of legislation has been effectively gutted,” said Andrenecia Morris, executive director of HousingNOLA, in a story reported by The Lens at the time. “What you have today is not good enough.”
Concerns from housing justice advocates escalated when the city punted implementation of the program from June 2023 to January 2024. That was followed by the budget issue late last year.
Still, the final Healthy Homes ordinance did include many of its initial proposals: the rental registry, the minimum rental standards, and the ability for code enforcement to inspect properties.
The success of the program might better be measured once the program is fully staffed and all properties are registered. But in the meantime, its 311 reporting is already bringing some success for tenants like Huffman – even if it’s just to bring additional pressure on her landlord.
In an interview, Huffman said she filed her own 311 complaint against her landlord, connected with free legal counsel, and then moved out. Her landlord, who held on to her deposit for more than a month, finally returned it to her. Money in hand, she and her roommates were able to find and move into a nicer place in Gentilly.
“We’re relieved to finally be here,” Huffman said.
This article originally published in the February 19, 2024 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
