Chair Sanchez round 2: Housing Vacancy Survey methodology and high road/low road landlord distinction

Excellent.

Thank you.

Okay, and then last question in this section.

Both the housing plan and the rental ripoff report borrow a term from the labor movement and rest a distinction between landlords who take the high road and those who take the low road.

Can you share what specific benchmarks you use to define each of these terms?

How should the city distinguish between owners that want to do the right thing and those that are intransigent?

What are the use cases for escalating enforcement actions supporting owners with financing and other tools?

And before you answer, I won't name the houser, but I had a conversation yesterday with a houser who is on the worst landlords list,

has a lot of open B and C class violations, has a very, very high rate of rental arrears within the portfolio of properties,

and really describes themselves and understands themselves as a good landlord, somebody who wants to do the right thing, but ends up on this list.

And if you just look at the data, is one of the bad ones, right?

So just very curious if you have...

those specific benchmarks and how, if you could point us to the ways that rental ripoff report recommendations and the block by block plan contemplate working with the high road landlords.

Yeah, I mean, we've had a lot of discussion.

Thank you for the question.

And we've had a lot of discussion at today's hearing about what constitutes a qualified purchaser and HPD's ongoing work to evaluate who they should be working within their preservation programs.

And so really we're talking about the same set of metrics and really making sure that the owners that we're working with have the capacity to manage extremely distressed buildings across their portfolio.

At the same time, with this sort of high road distinction, we're also really looking to work with owners who want to work with their tenants.

And so we are really putting an emphasis on dialogue with residents and resident associations and a willingness to both work with us and also with people who live in their buildings themselves.

And so that communication and collaborative relationship is really important for our enforcement programs, but also our preservation programs.

Finally, to your question of a landlord who is wanting to do the right things, one of the things that we're hoping to be able to do

in partnership with the council in the coming years is to really smooth out that relationship between our enforcement programs and our preservation programs so that, for example,

we can discharge a building from the alternative enforcement program if it enters into a preservation deal with the city.

And so I think there's a lot that we can do here.

To really make sure that this distinction is meaningful and looking forward to continue to define it together.

Thank you.

There have been many conversations that I've had with different landlord groups, you know, folks like Sponey, who are owners of small rent-stabilized properties, affordable housers who end up on lists like this.

And invariably, they have interesting ideas, right?

Like, you know, this idea that fines and fees do not inherently improve conditions for tenants.

So what if we could treat the good ones differently, I think is an interesting thing.

You know, you convert your fines and fees to rent forgiveness, and then when rent...

Rent collections pick up again, those funds could go for improvement of the property.

I think that those kinds of ideas are interesting.

So just putting in a plug for bringing them in and having more conversations.

Yeah, very much.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Okay, so I'm going to call on...

I'm going to recognize Councilmember Brewer.

Call on Councilmember Ressler, followed by Councilmember Nurse for round two.