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State lawmaker proposes stricter penalties for landlords who neglect key repairs

A row of apartments in Wilmington were condemned last spring after the landlord failed to conduct key repairs to the buildings' masonry and foundations.

One of the first bills Delaware’s General Assembly will see this session would pressure landlords to repair dangerous defects in rental housing by allowing tenants to pay rent to the court until repairs are made.

Delaware’s landlord-tenant act sets the basic principle that landlords shouldn’t receive full rent payments if their units aren’t safe to inhabit because of mold, structural failures or broken plumbing, for example. But State Rep. Sherry Dorsey Walker proposes taking that principle further, arguing Delaware doesn’t currently give tenants redress when their homes are unsafe to live in.

“It still leaves our constituents unprotected," she said. "So for the time that a landlord did not repair their property, our constituents are left possibly without housing.”

A prime example of those consequences took place in Wilmington last spring, when the city condemned 27 apartments after discovering a host of serious structural failures that the landlord had neglected to repair. The incident left several dozen people homeless with less than a day's notice and prompted an investigation by the Delaware Attorney General's Office.

A recent study by the University of Delaware estimated that roughly 5,000 owner-occupied homes were in such severe need of repair that they could risk being condemned, but the study did not provide corollary estimates for rental housing.

Dorsey Walker’s bill would allow tenants to pay rent to a court until those serious repairs are complete. If the judge sides with the tenant, rent paid to the court could be used to cover the cost of repairs or to stay a foreclosure. In the most egregious cases, the bill would permit a court to return rent payments directly to the tenant.

"If they don’t fix the property for 90 days, then the rent goes into an escrow account for 90 days," Dorsey Walker said. "After that, if they fix it on the 120th day – that’s three months that the landlord went without their rent. That money should go back to our constituents."

The bill doesn’t currently establish a fund to help landlords cover the cost of repairs; Dorsey Walker argues landlords should be responsible for using their rental income to keep up with repairs.

In some cases, however, the cost of repairing homes — especially those with serious structural defects — may prompt landlords to simply sell the property or demolish the existing rental units.

Dorsey Walker introduced version of the bill at the end of the previous legislative session; it passed in the House Housing and Community Affairs Committee with no opposition but did not progress any further.

Paul Kiefer comes to Delaware from Seattle, where he covered policing, prisons and public safety for the local news site PubliCola.