Tenant rights advocates are pushing back against a bill aimed at standardizing housing regulations across Wisconsin municipalities.
Senate Bill 639 addresses the relationship between property owners and municipal government including landlords' repair costs, credit background checks and building inspections. A hearing on the bill is scheduled for Wednesday at 10 a.m. at the Capitol in room 411 South.
emperatures in the Central Valley are dropping at fall gives way to winter. But for many families that also means enduring another winter in substandard housing, a problem that the City of Fresno says it has been working to fix since the passage of a new rental inspection ordinance in February.
That ordinance was supposed to set up a process for city inspectors to check most rental housing units in town to build a database and make sure living conditions are healthy and safe.
Roaches, mold and crumbling ceilings - complaints from some tenants who say it's not what they expected when they signed leases on their rental homes.
Another tenant didn't expect to be jolted by an electric shock during a dip in her swimming pool either.
"I jumped in the pool, the pool was literally electrified," Cathy Cole told Eyewitness News of the shocking experience on Memorial Day weekend.
"It scared me," she said. "I thought I was being electrocuted."
Bruce Nicholson and Lisa Daspit thought they had found the perfect house. They spotted it from the car -- a bright yellow bungalow with white trim, partially hidden from the street by an array of palm trees on the lawn -- while exploring a favorite neighborhood in Margate, Florida, outside Fort Lauderdale. The couple had dreams of owning their own home, and this single-family rental offered both the time to save and the space to grow.
They called the number for Waypoint Homes posted on the sign out front and moved in shortly thereafter, excited to make the house their own.
One of President Donald Trump’s closest friends and confidants took advantage of the Great Recession to build an unprecedented real estate business that makes him tantamount to a modern-day slumlord – buying up homes, bumping up rents and allowing the properties to fall into disrepair.
Southern California billionaire Thomas J. Barrack is the mastermind behind the scheme, founding a company five years ago that has taken 31,000 single-family homes off the housing market and calling it “the greatest thing I’ve ever done.”
Complaints of repairs undone and evictions undeserved prompted consumer investigator Jim Strickland to speak to metro tenants of a local corporate landlord.
Waypoint Homes rents thousands of single family homes across metro Atlanta, and that number will more than double after a merger with another rental giant. This fact did not sit well with local tenants, who call Waypoint Homes an absentee landlord at best. The Better Business Bureau's d+ rating for Waypoint comes with an alert for a pattern of complaint.
The I-Team investigated the "Billion Dollar Landlords" and the tenants who say they're being bullied by them. There are allegations that the landlords are quick to threaten evictions and slow to repair.
The complaints include problems with overall living conditions, repairs, and billing disputes, as well as quick eviction threats. In a joint investigation the ABC7 I-Team and ABC News are exposing complaints connected to the new trend of "Billion Dollar Landlords."
Last Tuesday we mobilized to attend the first-ever State Assembly Housing and Community Development Committee informational hearing on “The Housing Affordability Crisis: Exploring the Effects of Renter Displacement” and asked you to contact your local state representatives to demand the repeal of the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act.
A landlord has agreed to pay more than $1 million to tenants who were evicted after a fire swept through their illegal apartments in a warehouse space in the Inner Mission District in 2014, the first legal settlement related to the rash of fires that have displaced residents in the neighborhood over the past four years.
A new state law designed to battle bedbugs requires California landlords to provide tenants with written information about these blood-sucking, tenacious pests and how to report suspected infestations to the landlord.
The disclosure requirement took effect for new tenants July 1 and will apply to existing tenants Jan. 1.