The council in Prince George’s County, Maryland, moved quickly last month to cap rent hikes at 3% for most rental units. But it does not take effect until next week, so some landlords increased rent above the cap on people with leases that ended on April 1.
Some landlords are trying to exploit other loopholes, as well. This has prompted the council to bring up emergency legislation aimed at stopping that.
Introduced on Tuesday, the goal is to pass the bill by April 25. As emergency legislation, it would need a supermajority of eight votes to pass, and if it gets that, it would take effect immediately.
A preliminary vote got nine votes as the council discussed the measure at the meeting of the committee of the whole.
The lead sponsor, Council member Krystal Oriadha, said it was born from what she described as “retaliatory” actions against renters around the county, who fought back with landlords asking for rent increases higher than 3%.
“What we saw people doing was … trying to terminate someone’s lease, but then offer them a new lease instead of a renewal,” Oriadha said. “They wanted the same tenant, but they just wanted to charge them more money.”
The law, set to take effect next week, doesn’t offer the same protections to new renters that it does to current ones, so someone moving into a place could be charged $2,000 for an apartment that someone else paid $1,500 a month for until moving out, since that’s a new lease.
“The initial bill created the opportunity … to get rid of their current tenants,” Oriadha said. “It’s usually a cost burden. So if you have 100-plus units, and you evict everyone, and then you need to turn around, and get 100-plus new units at a higher rate but the market can’t bear it. It’s just cost prohibitive.”
Instead, she said some landlords were hoping they could terminate a lease without losing the hassle of losing the tenant
Other behavior that would be outlawed in the emergency legislation includes harassment, intimidation, threats and any other sort of interference against someone who exercises their rights not to pay rent hikes of more than 3%.
“I’m just sorry that we find ourselves in a position that we have to do this,” said Council member Jolene Ivey, one of the sponsors of the bill. “The whole reason why we passed the original bill to limit rent increases to 3% for a year is only because of the bad actors that were abusing their tenants. Now we’re finding it’s those same bad actors that are looking for ways to avoid complying with this legislation.”
She said landlords who forced double-digit rent hikes on longtime tenants, “little old ladies,” is how Ivey described some of them, are the reason why the legislation happened to begin with.
“Those same buildings and those same owners are busily trying to find other ways to jack up rents,” she said. “It’s painful.”
