Large landlords, tenant advocates might be able to reach compromise on tenant-protection law

But at a City Council hearing today, a leader of a small-landlord group vowed war against a proposed "just cause eviction" law that would require landlords to notify tenants why they're being evicted - and to file copies with the city.

Proponents of the measure, who including City Life/La Vida Urbana and Greater Boston Legal Services, say the measure would help protect tenants from large-scale "cleanouts" by out-of-town investors looking to cash in on Boston's development boom, who they say take advantage of the fact that many tenants don't know their rights, including court hearings on any proposed evictions.

"Every day that goes by, we see more people coming into our organization," City Life Executive Director Lisa Owens Pinto said. "They're scared and they didn't know what to do."

Sheila Dillon, head of the city's Department of Neighborhood Development, took no position on the proposals, which she hadn't seen, but said her office is dealing with growing numbers of tenants who get 14-day or 30-day eviction notices and think they have to pack up and leave immediately, when, in fact, they have the right to a hearing in Housing Court that could keep them in their homes far longer. By July 1, she said, the city's new Office of Housing Stability should be fully operational to help tenants with legal issues.

At the hearing, large landlords at first painted an apocalyptic future for Boston should the measure pass as proposed - with both notification and a requirement for mediation for large rent increases.

Sarah Matthewson, vice president at AvalonBay, which has a number of buildings in the Boston area, said armed drug dealers and prostitutes would use the law to fight eviction and that no sane developer would think of investing in the sort of affordable housing Boston needs.

Gilbert Winn, who specializes in affordable-housing development in Boston, didn't mention explosives-hoarding drug dealers, but said the costs of the measure would make development so expensive in Boston that the only companies that could afford to build and maintain buildings in Boston would be the very large out-of-town companies the measure was meant to protect tenants against.

But then backers of the just-cause measure said they would drop the rent-increase mediation requirement.

On hearing that, Winn said that the proposal now sounded more like an attempt to educate tenants on their legal rights, and that that is something he could get behind. City Council President Michelle Wu jumped in to call for further discussions on a measure both sides could live with.

But Skip Schloming, executive director of the Small Property Owners Association, and his wife Lenore, the group's president, said screw that, because no matter how it's painted, the measure is just an attempt to bring back rent control. Requiring landlords to notify both tenants and the city of reasons for eviction, including rent increases, would give tenant activitsts a way to stir up trouble, in the form of rent strikes and other measures that would either force small landlords to hemorrhage money or just give up and only increase rents at "very modest" rates. And once that happens, you can kiss small rental units in Boston good-bye, Lenore Schloming said.

Skip Schloming said the city could solve its affordable-housing crisis by letting homeowners build apartments in "attics, basements and backyards," which he said they could rent out at affordable rates because their costs would be lower - since they already have all the utilities hooked up.