Durrell Hospedale | PHL City Council
Last Monday, Councilmember Nicolas O’Rourke’s package of Safe Healthy Homes bills passed out of the Committee on Housing, Neighborhood Development and the Homeless. Again.
By Denise Clay-Murray
Last Tuesday afternoon, the saga of Philadelphia’s Landlords vs. Councilmember Nicolas O’Rourke continued when two of the city’s landlords amended their suit to stop the Safe Healthy Homes package of bills from becoming law.
For those of you playing at home, the Safe Healthy Homes package would provide tenants with the ability to unionize, extend “good cause” eviction protections to all renters and create new accountability for landlords when it comes to having the proper rental licensing, among other things.
The landlords, Seth Floyd and Erica Hadley, filed the amended complaint last Monday, the same day that Council’s Committee on Housing, Neighborhood Development and the Homeless passed the package of bills out of committee by a unanimous vote. Floyd and Hadley’s initial lawsuit led to the bills being sent back to the committee because they hadn’t been passed out of committee properly under the Sunshine Act.
As I mentioned in last week’s column, because public comment was held after the bills were passed out of committee, another public hearing on Safe Healthy Homes was held last Monday. People on all sides of the debate came out for the hearing, which was mainly public comment.
Councilmember Jamie Gauthier, the committee’s chair, praised the committee for its work, which she hopes will help Philadelphians that are living in less than ideal circumstances.
“The stories that we’ve heard during our past two hearings broke my heart, and we cannot allow the broken status quo to continue,” she said. “Philly’s housing crisis touches every corner of our city, and everyone needs to be a part of our comprehensive strategy to solve it. That’s why this committee unanimously voted to right size our landlord tenant laws, and I encourage us to do so again today.”
But for many of the landlords in attendance, Gauthier’s right sizing of landlord tenant laws is their end of the world as we know it.
What I found most fascinating about much of the landlord testimony was the perception that any law that changed the current status quo would represent yet another means for tenants to take advantage of them.
Like, for example, Bill Vargus. Vargus testified against the bills when the Committee held its first set of hearings and repeated some of the same issues that he has with tenants this time around.
But he also talked about a fellow landlord who had been beaten while he was out collecting rents, something that he believes will become the norm with this legislation.
“If you pass this bill, that’s the kind of thing that’s going to become commonplace,” he said. And so therefore, if you pass this bill, someone will get killed. So, if you don’t want someone to get killed, you need to kill this bill.”
But if we’re going to focus on people not dying, we have to focus on both sides, the Rev. Gregory Holston, executive director of Just Nation said. While no one wants to see landlords beaten or shot, there should be equal concern for the children that are still testing positive for lead poisoning because landlords haven’t done their due diligence, he said.
“I hear about the small landlords and what they’re going through, and we do need to do something about the kind of situation that Bill Vargas just described,” Holston said. “But the problem is he’s worried about what people may get killed and not enough about the people who are already impacted. We have done studies of those on Street Road who have been involved in gun violence and found out that many of them have the toxin of lead paint in their bodies that has caused permanent brain damage to them and is one of the reasons for some of the violence in our community today.”
While the bills passed out of committee, O’Rourke recognized that there may be some adjustments that need to be made to them. He said he’s willing to listen to the landlords who voiced their concerns.
“As I have shared with my colleagues, it will remain my posture to hear where there are actionable policy ideas, in this case, amendments that can help us make sure that the bills reduce any unintended consequences or harm that happens on small landlords,” O’Rourke said. “And so yes, we have been in conversation about where there might be some language shifts or things that we can clarify a little bit better. That’s something that I’m always interested in, because there’s been a lot of framing this as an attack or an onslaught on landlords. But the first push, the first thrust here, is tenant protections.”
Like I said, a suit has been filed against this legislation. But, and here’s your civics lesson of the day, if the idea is to keep Council from bringing it to the floor for debate and possible final passage, it ain’t gonna happen. You can’t issue an injunction against something that has not yet become law, and all the committee’s decision did was put Safe Healthy Homes on the first reading calendar.
The earliest the bills could be voted on for the purpose of becoming law is Council’s April 16 meeting.
Another reminder that if you, the Hanging In The Hall reader, have questions or concerns regarding Mayor Cherelle Parker’s FY27 budget, send them to: [email protected] and I’ll try and get them answered for you.
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