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Landlords warm up for fight against Boston rent stabilization by suing city

A landlord group today sued the city to obtain copies of e-mail between City Hall and members of the city rent stabilization advisory committee in the year before Mayor Wu appointed them last March.

In its suit, filed in Suffolk Superior Court, MassLandlords claims the city responded to its public-records request by supplying a single e-mail welcoming the 23 people on the committee to committee membership and refusing to say whether or not there were, in fact, additional e-mail messages it wasn't turning over.

The group says it "beggars belief" that the city and the 23 never exchanged a single other e-mail. It says one member, Karen Chen, executive director at the Chinese Progressive Association was already a member of two other city task forces, and another member, Emilo Dorcely, CEO of Urban Edge, was quoted in a BPDA press release on March 11, 2021.

Perhaps the agency published the press release without cc'ing the individuals quoted in it; but that seems unlikely. For the City of Boston to have no emails whatsoever even cc'ing Ms. Chen and Mr. Dorcely in the period March 2021 - March 2022 is extremely unlikely, to say the least.

The group says it's been trying since last April to get copies of all the supposed e-mails - and even won a favorable ruling from the Secretary of State's office that the city needs to deliver them - without success.

The state public-records law normally requires municipalities to respond to requests within 10 days, although they can request 30-day extensions from the Secretary of State's office.

The law does not require a reason for wanting specific records, but in its complaint, the landlord goes into great detail why it thinks rent stabilization would suck, even quoting a 1985 study by the Academy of Finland of the perils of rent control, which the group says Wu's rent-stabilization proposal would actually lead to. It then gets into alleged discrimination against Black people in a rent-control regime and lists the total political contributions made by members of the advisory committee - and by their employers.

The public has an interest in knowing what communications passed between Defendant and the individuals who became members of the committee, how the Mayor came to choose those particular individuals, and what motivation may exist for them to persist in advocating for policies known to economists and to the general public to be harmful and contrary to the public interest.

The City Council this week began deliberating Wu's proposal, which would require approval of the state legislature and governor.

The landlord suit was filed by Peter Vickery, an Amherst attorney who has also filed a number of lawsuits against Boston Medical Center and Children's Hospital on behalf of employees fired after they refused to get vaccinated against Covid-19.

Complete complaint (1.7M PDF).

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Comments

The complaint lists political contributions made by members of the rent stabilization advisory committee. 2/3 of the people living in Boston are renters. Go look at how much money your landlords give politicians, and then think about the choices pols you vote in to office make:

https://www.ocpf.us/

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Emails to and from city officials (on their City-provided email accounts) are, with limited exceptions, considered public records. The landlords are correct in that it is very difficult to believe that exactly one email was exchanged between anyone on the committee and any city official or employee.

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Who are the members of MassLandlords? You can learn the answer IF you join as a member. If folks want to see public emails then morally the public has a right to know who are the members (without having to pay or in any other way become a member).

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but…

In 1985, Heikki Loikkanen of the Academy of Finland predicted availability discrimination under rent control. When landlords are hemmed in at or below inflation, with eviction restrictions, they hold units vacant longer waiting for a perfect applicant with high income and perfect credit.

how is this not read as a threat?

In America and in Boston, no less, we have had a Black-White wealth gap and rental application gap that previous housing policies have exacerbated. The Economic Policy Institute shows 2018 median household income was $41,692 for black households and $70,642 for white houscholds.* ApartmentList shows black households are twice as likely to be evicted as white.

The Urban Institute shows twenty-one percent of black households have a FICO credit score above 700, whereas fifty percent of white households do. A report from the Sentencing Project shows African Americans constitute fifty-three percent of drug convictions, despite representing fourteen percent of drug users.*

?????????????? what is the relevance of this excerpt ??????????????

* also, extra points for the riff on the 12%/50% copypasta

again, i’m not an expert in rent control, but i have been paying attention to politics since 2016 and man this is the same old reactionary bullshit.

1) threaten your constituents with passive statements about things that you’ll be forced to do to harm them under new rules that are designed specifically to tilt the levers of power toward them, 2) feign concern about disadvantaged communities, 3) make broad and unspecific insinuations about political motivations and general malfeasance based on 4 figure donations to vague political causes.

there’s really only one honest sentence in this whole thing:

…and maintains the Certified Massachusetts LandlordTMM program, which is founded on four commitments: Do what is right for ourselves, our buildings, our renters, and the community at large.

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This is already something you see in rental dynamics in general. It's just a rational economic response—if it's harder to get out of a contract that turns sour, you're more careful about which ones you get into.

I also support their attempt to get public records. If Boston is withholding records illegitimately, that needs to be addressed.

The mention of drug convictions is just *weird* though.

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This is already something you see in rental dynamics in general. It's just a rational economic response—if it's harder to get out of a contract that turns sour, you're more careful about which ones you get into.

it's the use of the passive voice that feels particularly icky to me. When landlords are hemmed in at or below inflation, with eviction restrictions, they hold units...

I also support their attempt to get public records. If Boston is withholding records illegitimately, that needs to be addressed.

sure, but their claim is rooted in their gut feeling. the rest is left to the reader who is expected to divine a conspiracy out of some loosely related factoids.

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Does this qualify as a lawsuit intended to make it too expensive to actually regulate the market?

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by definition it is "public participation" - "right to petition."

If you sued MassLandlords for suing the city, now THAT would be a SLAPP.

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