Ansonia Alderman Patrick Henri wants the city to adopt a new law to combat blight and residential rental properties he says put undue demand on city schools and other services.
Henri, who represents the Sixth Ward, views the problem as an abundance of rental properties owned by people who don’t live in Ansonia.
“Generally speaking,” Henri said during the Board of Aldermen’s regular meeting last week while bringing up the idea of a new law, “If somebody doesn’t live in a home, it’s not going to be kept up.”
His solution?
An “absentee landlord business license.”
Henri summed up his proposal like this: “If you don’t live on (a) property (you want to rent), there’s some kind of fee, you get inspected, if it doesn’t meet blight or whatever other kind of regulations, then you don’t rent.”
Click here to read the city’s anti-blight ordinance.
He said the program would help combat blight and, in the long run, help to keep the costs of city services down.
“If you live in a one-family home, the services you require for that one family are for one family,” Henri said during last week’s meeting. “But if there’s a two‑, three‑, four‑, six-family home, you have the potential for that many more uses for city services, not to mention the schools,” Henri said. “We know the schools are overcrowded.”
Henri said having fewer rental properties in town will help ease that overcrowding.
“We need to get away from the trend of having rental properties, absentee rental properties,” he said, adding later: “I would love if we could just start eliminating multi-family homes and replacing them with single-family homes. That’s probably way down the road, but we have to start somewhere.”
Aldermen didn’t discuss Henri’s plan, instead voting unanimously to refer the idea to John Marini, the city’s corporation counsel, and their ordinance committee.
The issue is not unique to Ansonia.
In Derby, for example, former Mayor Anthony Staffieri created a Housing Task Force to tackle issues like crime, blight, density and absenteeism among landlords.
After a spate of violence on Derby streets in 2010 and 2011, residents said absentee landlords were renting apartments to criminals.
The problems led to the passage of a “chronic nuisance” ordinance.
Is This Legal?
Another Connecticut city, New Britain, adopted “landlord licensing” ordinance in November 2012 despite hundreds of landlords speaking out against it.
Several of those landlords also sued the city, saying the law was unconstitutional.
The New Britain Herald reported Feb. 11 that the city’s Common Council is now looking to repeal the ordinance.
The New Britain law sparked a huge controversy.
So won’t those who own rentals in Ansonia just sue the city’s pants off if the city passes a similar law?
Marini says he’ll be “looking into it.”
He said via email Feb. 14 that he’s researched the New Britain law and will work with Henri to craft an ordinance that would be “right for Ansonia.”
“Obviously we are a different city with different challenges,” he said. “The ultimate aim is to get out-of-town landlords to be responsible for their property and to their tenants. There may be many avenues to achieve that end.”
Efforts to restrict certain uses of property have landed the city in hot water in the past.
In March 2012, Ansonia officials signed a settlement agreement with the federal Department of Justice because the city’s zoning regulations had prohibited “clinics for the insane, alcoholics and drug addicts.”
Henri said Friday he was only vaguely familiar with New Britain’s law, and deferred to Marini about whether Ansonia’s new law would prompt lawsuits.
But he reiterated his dual aims in bringing the matter up.
“The intent here is for the properties that logically may call for more demand on city services help to contribute fairly into the city coffers,” Henri said via email Feb. 14. “A business license fee would help that effort while having the added affect of keeping blight in check. I do not want to perpetuate the financial demands that multi-family residences vs. single family residences put upon us and blight is just an apparent fact in too many of our neighborhoods that needs to be addressed on any front possible.”
