Tenants push for 'rent abatement' policy in Davenport, hold session on Iowa City program (2024)

When Gavin Gassmann first moved into a unit on Third Street in Davenport, everything seemed fine.

Then, he noticed a crack in the ceiling and water damage that grew. The landlord didn't fix it. That winter, the furnace went out and the pipes burst, causing water damage. After six months of cracking, the ceiling caved in over his bed while he wasn't home.

He got the city involved, and inspectors ordered the landlord to fix it and other hazards.

But Gassmann had had enough. He decided to move out.

He noticed later the building had been condemned. Apparently, the fixes had not been enough.

"If inspectors had better tools for motivating owners to make repairs, that building might still be available to rent," Gassmann said.

Tenants like Gassmann are pushing for the City of Davenport to adopt a rent abatement ordinance, which would allow the city to order a landlord not to collect rent until serious code violations were resolved.

The Quad Cities Tenant Alliance, which formed after the 2021 evacuation of Crestwood Apartments in Davenport, is hopeful a rent abatement ordinance can be another tool for city inspectors to enforce the city's housing code and motivate landlords to fix problems before buildings deteriorate to a point of needing to be shut down.

"We know that building inspectors often face a catch-22 on attempting to enforce the code," Gassmann said. "When substandard buildings are condemned, Davenport renters are displaced. When the buildings are not condemned, there could be catastrophic consequences."

Iowa City already has a rent abatement policy. Stan Laverman, Iowa City's Senior Housing Inspector, answered questions about Iowa City's ordinance to an audience of about a hundred people Monday night at the Zion Lutheran Church in Davenport.

Iowa City enacted its rent abatement ordinance in 2017, spurred by a decades-long effort to bring an Iowa City apartment complex into compliance. The complex, called Rose Oaks Apartments, fell too far into disrepair and ended up being demolished in favor of new student housing, displacing hundreds of renters, after changing hands multiple times over 17 years.

Since enacted in 2017, Iowa City has used rent abatement just 14 times in seven years.

"After this took place, we kind of did a deep dive into what could have been done differently over the past — what turned out to be 17 years," Laverman said. "So, there's a pretty good example of we didn't have it right. There was a lot of years that tenants lived in buildings where it was substandard. There were times that I went out to that building once a week to verify pest control was being done and that's what it took to verify that work was getting done."

Had the city known about rent abatement earlier, Laverman said, the city could've stepped in at several points. For example, he said in 2008, the city stopped placing tenants with federal Housing Choice Vouchers into the building because the city didn't have confidence the units would stay in compliance.

After the 2017 displacement, Laverman said the city started more assistance programs for displaced tenants when large complexes are redeveloped, such as moving and deposit assistance.

"A lot of people are saying, well, why are you here? I think it's important for us to kind of admit the mistakes that we made. We're not perfect in Iowa City and we need to pay it forward and make sure other people are aware of this opportunity," Laverman said.

In Iowa City, a typical inspection gives landlords 30 days to correct items, but may be shorter. In a life or fire safety issue, for example, the landlord may have 7 or 10 days or just 24 hours.

The state code also allows cities to petition a judge for a civil citation, but Laverman said this can sometimes take 30 or more days which lengthens the amount of time a tenant is staying in substandard conditions.

Iowa City likes to time the rent abatement notice for about 15 days before the end of the month because the city gives a 10-day notice for one final opportunity to correct.

"Honestly, once they get that notice that they're not getting rent next month, it's amazing all the roadblocks that go away," Laverman said. "For the most part. Not all are wins, but a lot of times it's corrected immediately."

Asked whether rent abatement would allow tenants to stay where they're living, Laverman cautioned, however, that there may be "a narrow window of, is it safe enough for you to live there, but has some major function gone?"

"The building doesn't have heat in the dead of winter, we're not going to be able to allow tenants to stay," Laverman said. "But you get into the spring and it might be uncomfortable, but when you start to choose between whether I'd rather be outside or in a building that doesn't have heat, that's a perfect example of we can make this work. Or there's water, but there's not hot water ... All of those things are decided on a case-by-case basis."

Laverman said the city is very purposeful in using rent abatement only for the most regulation-resistant landlords. But, Laverman said the knowledge that the city can abate rent acts as a deterrent for landlords to stay in compliance.

"Rent abatement is a big stick," Laverman said. "The state grants us authority to use that. I think it's important to use it appropriately and rarely."

Laverman called rent abatement "just another tool" for inspectors to enforce housing code. He said there's a little paperwork, but it's less paperwork than filing for a civil citation in court.

"The ability to say we have this in our back pocket and if you don't gain compliance, not only are we going to issue a civil citation, but eventually, we're going to issue a notice of rent abatement where you're not allowed to collect rent from the tenant is a big deterrent or a big motivator to have landlords come into compliance," Laverman said.

One landlord that was issued a notice of rent abatement tried to evict the tenants, Laverman said, but the tenants let the city know and the city appeared as a friend of the court to inform the magistrate of the rent abatement order in place for the units. The magistrate agreed that the tenants should not be evicted.

As for landlord response to Laverman's proposal, he said he meets almost monthly with a local landlord association, and that group had no problems with the rent abatement ordinance, he said. It's landlords already trying to skirt city regulation that will claim it's unfair.

In one case, Laverman said, a unit's air conditioning kept going out over a period of months and the landlord's solution told to the tenants was to trip the breaker back on. Once a heat wave hit in August, it was unbearable in the house. Because of the documentation the tenant provided, Laverman said, and the city's history with the landlord, they gave a rent abatement notice and the issue was fixed.

Laverman said there have been 14 times where tenants haven't paid rent under the ordinance, but the city has issued more 10-day notices where problems were corrected immediately.

Laverman said the city determines if a landlord is noncompliant by going back through the city's software with records going back to at least 1992.

"There's just a pattern that develops over time of landlords that exhaust every extension and are resistant," Laverman said.

Laverman said Iowa City's housing division has five staff members handling about 20,000 rental units.

"I would say that strong enforcement of the housing code and systematic rental housing code, preserves rental housing, and this is just one final tool to make sure that landlords are following the housing code," Laverman said.

Laverman declined to talk in detail when an audience member asked about his opinion on Davenport's rental inspection process. He did offer a lesson Iowa City learned from the partial building collapse in downtown Davenport last year, however.

"We learned a lot from what happened in Davenport," Laverman said. "Those are tough decisions to make and I'll admit that in December we had a building where a brick wall started coming away from the house and we quickly determined that it was a structural wall and we handled it a lot differently because of what happened in Davenport than we would have in the past. I'm sorry that happened. We learned a lot from that."