Views expressed in opinion columns are the author’s own.
While College Park continues to refresh its infrastructure and focus on luxury accomodations for the young professional crowd — a movement largely propelled by the University of Maryland — Old Town, the largely residential neighborhood near the College Park Metro Station, still remains. It has a spot on the National Register of Historic Places, with some homes’ construction dating back to the late 1800s. It’s also where a number of fraternity and sorority houses lie, as well as the bulk of zoned multi-family homes.
Students who can’t afford to pay for market-rate apartments — which sit around $1,524 a month for one bedroom — can generally find better rent prices in a house. However, the houses in this area often purchased by landlords and rented out to students, who have comparatively little power to renovate them, as they begin to crumble from age. The city should be doing more to make sure these properties are livable if it wants to maintain the remaining economical housing around the university.
An egregious example of this kind of abuse came to light recently. Notorious slumlord Tom Chen rented out a nearly 90-year-old property in Old Town to 37 people — all of whom are students at this university — that lacked heating, ventilation and air conditioning.
It was later revealed that Chen didn’t even own the property. Rather, it belonged to an investment company, Midaro Investments 2016, LLC, that demanded tenants sign a lease that would make them liable for those problems — problems that would be inherent to any poorly maintained house that was nearly a century old.
On top of everything else, the house had more than twice the number of occupants it was zoned for. The issue arises from the combined wear of having 37 people use a house and its utilities. Landlords can easily blame maintenance issues on tenants being callous or misusing appliances, but ultimately it’s a landlord’s job to make sure things are in order. And when they aren’t, the city is supposed to hold them accountable by issuing housing code violations.
A city property inspection report from Sept. 7 — 11 days before Midaro told the tenants they’d be evicted — found the house had 35 code violations. The property had accumulated 16 code violations over a two-year period before the 2017 mayoral election, and was condemned before that. Chen also has a track record of extensive code violations across many of his properties in Old Town.
The city’s failure to address these code violations, allowing Chen to continue renting out the property, is a case of negligence. Chen won’t change unless he’s held accountable for these issues; likewise, other landlords like him who rent out decrepit properties in Old Town won’t have any reason to get better unless there’s action by the city.
College students will always be at a disadvantage when battling their landlords — they don’t have the money, time or experience to fight for their rights to a home. The city’s responsible for addressing its slumlord problem, and its current inaction is a moral failure.
Sona Chaudhary, opinion editor, is a junior English and geology major. She can be reached at sonachaud@gmail.com.
