Democratic lawmakers introduced a bill on Feb. 17 that would repeal limitations on how local governments can regulate landlords.
Democratic lawmakers said if passed, local governments would be able to regulate landlords by not allowing them to obtain tenant information not required by federal law. The bill would also not allow them to ask for a lease renewal until six months or less remain on the lease, which could help college students across the state scrambling to find affordable housing.
Roys said the measure would “enable local governments to set local ordinances that are appropriate for their communities.”
This bill comes after lawmakers passed several bills limiting landlord regulation in 2019, including speeding up eviction and limiting local power to police landlords. Many members of the Wisconsin Legislature are landlords themselves, with almost one in five lawmakers voting in favor of these laws owning or managing rental properties, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
The bill is sponsored by two Democrats in college towns, who say they have growing concerns about housing affordability for college students across the state.
“I suspect there have been a number of landlords in the legislature who put these laws into place in order to make it easier to be a landlord, but not so easy to be a tenant,” co-sponsor, Rep. Brienne Brown, D-Whitewater, told the Cardinal.
Sen. Kelda Roys, D-Madison, told the Cardinal she has long been concerned by rising rents in college towns. Madison officials have pointed to state laws — like the ones Roys wants to repeal — as reasons why the city cannot enact rent regulation or other reforms housing advocates have called for.
“It is not fair to college students to be putting them in the situation of moving to a new community, starting to live on their own for the first time, and then weeks later, they're forced to scramble for housing for a year from now,” Roys said.
Students like Dhriti Nekkalapudi said they struggled with finding housing at the beginning of the fall semester.
“Less than a month after classes began, all I heard around me were people talking about signing leases,” Nekkalapudi told the Cardinal. “I barely knew anything about the area yet, much less who I wanted to live with for a year.”
Both lawmakers said they do not believe this will cause issues with housing or development in Madison or other Wisconsin cities.
“If there just isn't enough housing in the first place, rents are going to go up because of supply and demand,” Brown said. “If you are now cutting people out of the housing market because you're forcing them to make decisions a year in advance about where they're going to live, that creates more problems for homelessness than for landlords.”
Roys said they are open to compromise to make the bill bipartisan, but the Assembly is now out of session making the bill unlikely to advance.
“I’m always open to compromises and to hearing what my colleagues on both sides of the aisle are interested in,” Roys said.
