With student renters filling residential neighborhoods, landlords purchasing single-family homes as soon as they go on sale and many residents tired of student behavior, city officials are looking to other college towns for solutions – and finding conventional methods might not apply.
Interim City Manager Joe Nagro joined an online group of college town officials, administered by the International City Managers’ Association, and found many of College Park’s problems are not unique, he said.
While College Park is not the only college town with a sizeable rental market and its associated problems, it lacks municipal zoning and planning authority – the authority to set and enforce rules about housing types, Nagro said.
Other cities limit how many renters can live in one house or require landlords to register their properties and submit to annual inspections, Nagro said. College Park zoning is handled by Prince George’s County, and despite years of lobbying, the city has yet to assume that power.
Zoning authority might not be a panacea, but it would allow College Park to take measures such as lowering the number of “unrelated persons” allowed in a household from the county’s current limit of five.
“With five people per house and a car for every person, parking is going to become the biggest issue,” Nagro said.
Student renters’ behavior has become a considerable problem at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colo., where a sudden increase in the university’s enrollment has sent students into city neighborhoods.
Residents have dealt with the abrupt change in their neighborhoods and the rowdy party behavior residents say degrades their quality of life, said Fort Collins Legislative Affairs coordinator Mark Radtke.
“We’ve tried to talk to other college communities in the hope that one of them may have the ‘silver bullet,'” Radtke said. With only 6,000 beds on the campus for a student body of nearly 25,000, the city has absorbed much of the university’s population, and renters are unfazed by city limits of three people per house, he said.
Fort Collins is considering a licensing system for rental houses that would be contingent on passing annual health and safety inspections. Landlords would be required to register with the city so they could be contacted about safety violations or chronic noise disturbances, and all tenants would be required to read and sign an addition to their leases that explains city rules.
College Park recently added a listing of city rental properties to the city’s website, including contact information for each property’s landlord.
The information is pulled from the city’s occupancy permits, though some landlords list their work numbers and are unavailable if residents try to call after business hours, said City Finance Director Steve Groh.
Near the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kan., residents do not mind sharing space with students – until the weekends. That’s when partygoers’ refuse litters the normally clean streets, and the “parade” of students leaving area bars consistently awakens residents between 1 and 2 a.m., said Lawrence Assistant City Manager Debbie Van Saun.
“Residents’ complaints run the gamut from rentals ‘changing the character of the neighborhood’ to ‘not enough families with children,'” Van Saun said. “It seems as though we’re seeing the same trend unfolding in the same way.”
Lawrence, a city with a population of about 85,000, has seen the same growth in rentals as College Park, Van Saun said, though that city has a dedicated Neighborhood Resources Department to handle housing inspections and code enforcement.
Lawrence’s city government recently lowered the maximum number of renters to three per house, expanded its code enforcement staff and passed legislation requiring landlords to register with the city so they could be contacted when problems occur.
Nagro doubted if lower occupancy limits would make a significant difference in College Park since landlords would not likely pass up the opportunity to add extra tenants if they have empty bedrooms, he said.
Lawrence has also attempted to use a city ordinance that allows city officials to cite “disorderly houses” that are consistently loud or messy, though the enforcement is difficult because neighbors must file complaints with the city, Van Saun said.
So far the only changes residents have reported have been “anecdotal,” Van Saun said, and the city of Lawrence is waiting to perform an objective audit of how its new ordinances have affected its neighborhoods.
More student-friendly apartment buildings in Lawrence are being developed, Van Saun said – a measure also being used in College Park to draw renters out of the neighborhoods and into new apartments closer to the campus.
In addition to encouraging more apartments such as University View to be built off-campus, the city of College Park has sought out more innovative ways within its limited authority to curb rental growth.
The city hired a consultant in October to review District 2 City Councilman Bob Catlin’s rent control proposal. Catlin’s proposal would cap the maximum rent for a single-family home at $1,800 per month or 1 percent of the house’s assessable value, whichever is higher, hopefully limiting the profits that landlords could make from their properties.
The city also used the state’s Homestead Tax Credit to begin shifting more of the city’s tax burden onto landlords by capping the amount that an owner-occupied property’s value can increase each year at 1 percent. Because the Homestead credit only applies to owner-occupied properties, the taxes on rental properties would rise at the market rate, eventually widening a tax gap between the families and the landlords, Catlin said.
“We’ve been trying to think out of the box,” Nagro said. “We’re looking to make rentals less lucrative and hoping that leads to less rentals.”
