Our student government recently passed a proposal to help protect students’ living situations. The Tenant Bill of Rights, in essence, allows for the Associated Students of Madison to endorse landlords who adhere to their stipulations.
Fortunately, ASM was wise about this proposal and consulted the university’s law department to ensure that it actually adheres to existing laws, which is more than some student labor organizations on campus can say.
The bill’s standards hold, for example, that there ought to be a mandatory 24-hour notification before a landlord enters the premises, and addresses other issues like security deposits and lease termination. The proposal is definitely well-intentioned; it will give students another venue to assess potential landlords. But there are two general problems with it.
First, it doesn’t deal with the larger issues like, for example, if something happens during your lease that makes the apartment condemnable? Students obviously don’t want to live in a hazardous place, yet reporting it could cause eviction and then suddenly, you don’t have a place to live in the middle of a semester. Fortunately, other resources have been set up, like the Tenant Resource Center, for those kinds of issues.
The other blaringly obvious problem with the proposal is that, well, it’s just a proposal. It has no teeth, but is intended to “encourage” landlords to treat tenants properly. While it may lack any legally enforceable power, there are other venues ASM should explore to ensure landlords have strong incentives to be on the list.
The easiest way to accomplish this would be for ASM to put forth the list of “student-friendly” landlords on campus during the months when students are signing leases. They could run the list in the student newspapers, email it to students and put it up on posters around campus. Such publicity would give landlords an incredibly strong incentive to be on that list.
To take it one step further, ASM could add even more teeth by listing landlords who refused to try to sign the bill. No landlord wants to be seen as uncaring about their tenants. If you are debating between two similar apartments, and one is run by a landlord who’s deemed “student-friendly” by the student government, while the other refused to sign the Tenant Bill of Rights, chances are you’ll opt for the student-friendly one.
All in all, the bill is a good move, but ASM needs to put some more weight behind it for it to actually have an effect. Since the student government cannot use legal enforcement, they need to do the next best thing: Use social pressure.
Reginald Young ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in legal studies and Scandinavian studies.
