When Jeneya Lawrence wanted to move about four months ago from Bond Hill to Avondale, where she works, she found a vacancy in a multi-family house.
The apartment was perfect. The four bedrooms were enough room for her two children and her partner, with enough space left over for a community food distribution nonprofit Lawrence wanted to start. What’s more: Lawrence had actually lived in another unit of the house as a child and had a lot of memories there.
But there was a roadblock: the landlord said the last resident there hadn’t worked out well, and he needed a $1,200 security deposit on top of the first month’s $1,000 rent.
That $2,200 up front was too steep for Lawrence. She asked for a payment plan, but the landlord declined.
“I wanted to move back in there,” she said. “I felt like it would have been perfect, but it just didn’t work out that way.”
A new law in Cincinnati could help others like her starting today, however.
Cincinnati City Council in January passed the so-called “Renter’s Choice” legislation first introduced by council member P.G. Sittenfeld.
The legislation requires landlords to provide one of three alternative options when it comes to security deposits:
- A lump-sum deposit that is no more than half of one month’s rent ($500 instead of $1,200 in Lawrence’s case)
- A plan in which the tenant makes equal payments of the deposit over no less than six months
- Renter’s insurance that offers low premiums — as low as $5 a month — to tenants instead of a lump-sum payment
Small landlords — those who own fewer than 25 units — are exempted from the requirements.
“This was done out of recognition that as we adjust to these new rules, property owners who have hundreds or even thousands of units of multi-family housing have different compliance capacity than, say, a senior citizen on a fixed income who lives on the bottom floor of a duplex and rents out of the upstairs,” council member Sittenfeld said.
Council passed the legislation 7-1 earlier this year. Social service groups and housing organizations have applauded the law. But not everyone was thrilled by its initial draft last year, which only included renter’s insurance as an alternative to security deposits and didn’t exempt landlords with fewer than 25 units.
The Real Estate Investors Association of Greater Cincinnati says the legislation won’t solve underlying problems with housing access but has agreed the new version with multiple alternatives is better and is supportive of it.
“The final version of this bill is a significant improvement over the original proposal,” REIAGC President Felicia Bell told council in January. “As a result, the organization is able to get on board. But please note that affordable housing is the real issue and no legislation will solve this problem. Removing barriers to developing, building, rehabbing and providing rental housing is the only solution to affordable housing.”
Cincinnati needs at least 28,000 units of housing affordable to the city’s lowest-income residents.
After some searching, Lawrence eventually found a place near downtown with a lower security deposit — not ideal, she says, but better than her previous home. She said the search was a struggle in a city with a big affordable housing gap — a struggle made more difficult by the barrier presented by security deposits.
“It is really hard to find a home that would be affordable,” she says. “It’s hard to find housing in some of these higher-poverty areas.”
But she thinks the law kicking in today could help people in the position she was in.
“I feel like more options are better than no options,” she says.
This article appears in Mar 18 – Apr 14, 2020.