RICHMOND HEIGHTS, Ohio -- City Council heard the first reading Tuesday (June 13) of an ordinance that city leaders hope will help protect local tenants from losing their apartments.
Mayor Kim Thomas said Cuyahoga County representatives are encouraging communities to approve similar “pay to stay” ordinances, which seek to protect tenants from being evicted for non-payment of rent if a tenant has tendered all past-due rent and any reasonable late fees to a landlord prior to an eviction action and the landlord has refused that tender.
The proposed ordinance states that, while it attempts to protect tenants, it “in no way limits the ability of a landlord to initiate an eviction action for reasons other than solely for a non-payment of rent.”
Thomas said that, in some cases, “When residents complain to a management company, they are faced with eviction notices. They (apartment management) just make up a reason to evict them, so we want to make sure we do our best to protect those residents.”
The mayor gave an example she said occurred last week: She received three calls from a woman, 80, who is a tenant of a local apartment about a non-working elevator. The woman had also called a city employee regularly over the previous month to voice her complaints about the elevator.
“She complained so much,” Thomas said, “she went back and told the management, ‘I spoke to the mayor.’
“Ten minutes later, I got a phone call (that) the management company had threatened to evict her. She said, ‘Mayor, he’s going to evict me because I made complaints.’”
Thomas called the apartment manager and told him he couldn’t evict the woman because of her complaints.
“He said, ‘She talks too much,” Thomas said.
“And so we have to protect our tenants, because she was speaking about a condition she didn’t want to stay in, but for him, this was the norm.”
Ward 2 Councilman Frank Lentine said, “So many of our senior citizens that live alone are afraid to come forward, to come to a (council) meeting like this, or voice their opinions.
“We tell them they have to go to Lyndhurst (Municipal) Court and put their rent in escrow” as a group to legally prevent management from getting rent money until conditions are improved.
“We tell them certain things they have to do; we can’t do it for them,” Lentine said. “And it’s so difficult to get enough courage for these people to stand up, because they’re afraid of retaliation, and maybe this (ordinance) will answer some of those concerns.”
During Tuesday’s Committee-of-the-Whole meeting that preceded the regular meeting, council members heard from a woman who lives at the 444 Park Apartments, 444 Richmond Park Drive.
In September 2022 and January of this year, the city sent adjudication letters to the various owners of the 444 Park Apartments.
The orders listed several violations that need to be corrected, and required that the owners and management of the complex -- the city’s largest at 735 units -- correct the listed building code violations or risk having its city-issued certificate of occupancy revoked.
The owners have appealed the letters.
The 444 Park resident told council that the week before last, every elevator in the complex’s west building was not in working order for five days. The woman said her husband undergoes dialysis three days per week and that she required the help of city firefighters to help him up steps to the couple’s apartment.
She said her husband has since been hospitalized and that she returned Tuesday from a hospital visit to find her elevator not working.
“We never know when (the elevator) is going to work and when it’s not going to work,” she said.
The woman said that while tenants pay for trash collection, when the elevators are not working, they must carry the trash down the stairs.
She said the elevators were working before she left for Tuesday’s council meeting.
Fire Chief Marc Neumann said he went to 444 Park at 4 p.m. Tuesday and there was an elevator repair company at work.
Neumann said the fire department, since Feb. 12, has answered 11 elevator rescue calls -- calls for help when someone is trapped in an elevator. Seven of those calls have come from 444 Park.
“That doesn’t include how many times an elevator is out of service in a building,” Neumann said. ”We don’t track that.”
Neumann said the RHFD last responded to 444 Park on Sunday (June 11). There are three elevators cars in each building and, in Building D on Sunday, two of them were out of service.
“There were three occupants in the (lone working) elevator. We extricated them safely from the central main elevator,” he said.
In such situations, Neumann said, firefighters, after rescuing those trapped, must turn off the power to the elevators and wait until a certified repair team comes to fix them.
As for the ordinance, while all council members’ names were added as sponsors, Ward 4 Councilman Mark Alexander said: “This ain’t going to change the situation. This is not going to help that (444 Park) lady’s situation.”
Alexander said that he doesn’t know of a landlord who would go through with evicting a tenant who is paying their rent. He said the ordinance only gives “false hope” to tenants that they will be helped.
“It all comes down to one thing and one thing only,” Alexander concluded. ”You’ve got to take their (landlords’) cash supply away. When the owner of that apartment complex goes to his checking account and there’s no money there and it’s sitting in Lyndhurst Court (in escrow), he will sit up and listen.
“Until that day happens, nothing will happen.”
Alexander said tenants need to group together and go to court to keep their rent in escrow.
Thomas did not disagree with Alexander, but said the ordinance is a “first step” toward helping tenants.
The matter will be heard three times before council before becoming the subject of a vote.
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