An ongoing $100 million lawsuit against the city of College Park, accusing the city of anti-student discrimination in city rent control practices, reached an interesting milestone late last month: A judge who has never presided over a case before was assigned to this lawsuit.
Alan Tyler et al. v. City of College Park was filed after a city rent stabilization ordinance went into effect in 2005, with landlords and students saying the cap on rent increases for single-family homes would discourage potential property owners from renting their houses to students and therefore was designed to prevent students from living in College Park neighborhoods.
The city has filed a “motion for summary judgment” that ends the lawsuit if the judge accepts it. But some city officials are concerned about the unpredictability of an untested judge.
“Who knows, with a new judge?” said District 2 Councilman Bob Catlin, who had first proposed the rent stabilization in 2003. Catlin would not comment further on the lawsuit, except to describe Alan Tyler – the landlord who was chosen as the main plaintiff in the lawsuit – as “incredible.”
Tyler did not respond to calls seeking comment.
The city ordinance at issue says the rent stabilization program is designed to “protect tenants from unwarranted rent increases” and to “strengthen College Park neighborhoods by reducing the number of single-family homes that are rental properties.”
“The city enacted this in the hopes that if it’s uneconomical for people to rent houses to students, they won’t do it,” said David Dorsch, chairman of the College Park Landlords Committee. “Their goal, as they stated many times publicly, is to get all the students out of College Park, to keep them on the south side of 193 and west of Route 1.”
Dorsch and city officials agree that one effect of rent control is to discourage the conversion of single-family homes into rental properties. But District 3 Councilwoman Stephanie Stullich said this is necessary to keep the city’s neighborhoods in a “balance” between rental and owner-occupied homes.
“When houses rent for exorbitant amounts of money, homeowners can’t compete with investors,” she said. “This community needs to be a place that serves both students and non-students.”
Stullich went on to describe rent control as something that benefits student renters by keeping properties affordable for them.
“The high rent forces students to live in overcrowded conditions, and rent stabilization is just trying to moderate the increases in rent that we’ve seen in the city,” she said. “When I was a student at Berkeley, we had rent control. And the students there thought it was a good thing. It protected us from rapid increases in rent.”
Dorsch said landlords have trouble making ends meet as other costs have increased, and they need to be able to raise their rents to cover these costs.
The city ordinance caps rent increases for single-family homes at 0.7 percent of the property’s assessed value this year, on a sliding scale that allows for smaller and smaller increases annually. Multifamily homes are allowed slightly higher increases. Apartment buildings are exempt.
The apartment exemption is one of the main factors of the discrimination lawsuit, Dorsch said, because he feels it demonstrates an intention to discourage students from living in College Park’s neighborhoods.
Stullich said she sees the claims of discrimination as an attempt “to manipulate student fears.”
“Mr. Dorsch represents a group that wants to escalate their rents as high as they possibly can,” she said. “I think for a landlord to argue that this is an anti-student measure, he’s trying to stir up the emotions of people who he doesn’t actually care about.”
But disagreements on whether rent control is a positive or negative action have no bearing in the city’s legal standing in the lawsuit, city attorney Suellen Ferguson said.
“There are people who disagree with any number of things that the council may do. That doesn’t make the law invalid,” she said.
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