Breaking down state lawmakers' efforts to address ongoing housing crisis

Just after midnight on the final day of Delaware’s most recent legislative session, a group of House lawmakers made one final attempt to push through a tenants’ rights bill.

The bill, which would have provided state-funded legal representation to tenants facing eviction – and diverted as many cases as possible away from the courts to reduce costs – was one of four key housing bills on the table this year.

Of those, only one – legislation limiting when and how landowners can raise lot rents for manufactured homeowners – made it to Gov. John Carney’s desk. The other two, which would have prohibited landlords from turning rental applicants away because they use state-subsidized vouchers or because they had previously been homeless, never made it to the House floor. Broadly, the bills reflected a focus on tenant protections as a part of a broader effort to stem Delaware’s mounting affordable housing shortage and rising rates of homelessness or housing insecurity.

Housing Alliance Delaware Director Rachael Stucker says in the face of surging homelessness statewide, the failure of three tenant protection bills slows Delaware’s ability to respond to the crisis. “We’re really disappointed by the outcome of this legislative session,” she said, “but not terribly surprised. I think Delaware has a long way to go when it comes to understanding that the legislature plays such an important role in making sure everyone has access to decent housing.”

State Senator Elizabeth Lockman, the sponsor of the measure prohibiting discrimination against housing voucher recipients, says housing is a blind spot for lawmakers. The Senate’s Housing committee, she notes, only formed two years ago.

Nevertheless, Lockman was caught off guard by opposition from multiple House Democrats – including some fellow Wilmington-area representatives – to the three stalled bills, which she links to the political influence of landlords. “It’s a little shocking to see so many of my colleagues – in the House, obviously – to be more interested in the housing provider position than the vulnerable tenant position,” she said.

The Delaware Apartment Association, a professional organization representing landlords, primarily in New Castle County, was the most visible critic of this year’s housing legislation. Its spokespeople, including association president Debra Burgos, argued each bill would have the unintended consequences of driving small landlords to sell their units – either removing them from the rental market or passing them to large, out-of-state rental property companies – or driving rents even further out of reach for low-income Delawareans.

Neither Burgos nor the association’s lobbyist, Scott Kidner, responded to requests for interviews, but during committee hearings, both claimed landlords’ opposition to the legislation was misunderstood as hostility to low-income renters.

Testifying against Lockman’s bill prohibiting landlords from turning away applicants because of their use of vouchers, Burgos acknowledged that many of her association’s members aren’t willing to participate in voucher programs. Only 42 percent of people with vouchers from New Castle County’s Housing Authority, for instance, are able to find housing willing to accept the vouchers. Nevertheless, she asserted the primary hurdle that voucher recipients face is a consequence of the voucher program itself. Burgos says the program’s inspection requirement is problematic, often delaying a move-in for days or weeks - a delay that costs landlords money.

“I think there’s a fundamental misunderstanding on some of the problems landlords have with Section 8 and the vouchers,” Burgos told lawmakers. “It is not the people that accept these programs. They are good residents, by and large. The landlords in our association choose not to accept people because of the program, and it is broken - there are some problems compared to market-rate residents.”

Paul Kiefer

/

Delaware Public Media

Burgos’ objections gestured towards a basic disagreement between advocates and opponents: are Delaware’s current housing policies unfair to tenants or landlords?

From the perspective of nonprofit housing providers, data paints a clear picture of a deck stacked against renters: voucher recipients often wait more than five years to find a willing landlord, and fewer one in twenty tenants have legal representation during an eviction, compared to more than 80 percent of landlords. As rents rise – by an average of more than 5 percent for a one-bedroom apartment in Wilmington last month alone – advocates say seniors and low-income working families are running out of options, and the failed bills could have opened doors to rental assistance or affordable housing for thousands of at-risk renters.

But opponents, including State Representative Jeffrey Spiegelman, argue landlords bear the brunt of Delaware’s landlord-tenant code. “It’s a fundamental disagreement, that the landlord-tenant code as it stands is so much in favor of the tenant against the landlord,” he asserted during a committee hearing on the bill offering legal representation to tenants facing eviction.

Among the obstacles Spiegelman criticized is Delaware’s eviction process itself, which he says is procedurally complex and lengthy, often prompting landlords to pay for attorneys while not collecting rent from the tenant undergoing an eviction.

During negotiations, opponents, including Burgos, voiced support for some temporary measures to forestall evictions – namely state-subsidized rental assistance to tenants struggling to pay rent – but attempts by the bills’ backers to make concessions in exchange for support made no progress.

Those included a last-minute amendment to the eviction representation bill rolling back numerous tenant protections, including a minimum amount of arrears needed for a landlord to file for eviction.

While Lockman is hopeful landlords will continue to negotiate in good faith to reach compromises, she says concessions often create holes lawmakers will eventually need to revisit - pointing to her bill protecting voucher recipients from discrimination as one such case. “Quite frankly, the loophole that Senate Bill 90 was attempting to close was the result of a weakening amendment several years ago on a piece of fair housing legislation,” she said.

But as lawmakers negotiate with landlords, some hope to look beyond the landlord-tenant code to find means of curtailing Delaware’s affordable housing shortage.

State Senator Marie Pinkney, vice chair of the Senate’s Housing committee, says one strategy could be state-level reforms to zoning laws, including rolling back some single-family zoning to make way for higher-density housing construction and mixed-income neighborhoods. “This is a new one for Delaware; it’s not really something small states have looked at,” she aid. “But I think it’s worth looking at how we zone, how we’re able to utilize space and where families are able to build their homes.”

Pinkney says lowering barriers to new, dense housing construction could offer a path to increasing the supply of housing state-wide and thereby reducing average rents – a strategy currently being tested in California, which largely eliminated single-family zoning last year, and in cities like Minneapolis, Portland and Spokane, Washington.

But because housing policy discussions are still relatively new to the General Assembly, Pinkney says she doesn’t yet know whether proposals like zoning reform would fare any better than this year’s tenant protections bills.

And Stucker of Housing Alliance Delaware says with statewide policy changes tabled until January, the state is losing its chance to make use of federal COVID-19 relief dollars to slow the pace of Delaware’s housing crisis. “We’ve seen increased federal investment in housing due to the impact of the pandemic,” she said, “but the inability of our state to make use of that help because of a lack of units, a lack of policy locally that supports people’s ability to make use of that support – for example, housing vouchers meant specifically to re-house people who were made homeless by the pandemic. We are losing an opportunity, and we will continue to lose opportunities, to make use of these investments if we don’t do something locally on the ground.”