NH bill seeks tenant protections for abuse victims, disabled people
Rep. Ellen Read, D-Newmarket, learned about being forced to abandon an apartment as a teenager in Tennessee when an abusive boyfriend held her captive for three days and hit her with a car. After being stalked for 16 years, she said, she only felt really released from him when he committed suicide in 2016, the year she was first elected to the New Hampshire House of Representatives.
On Jan. 25, she told her story for the first time to fellow lawmakers while testifying before the House Judiciary Committee on a bill she is sponsoring – House Bill 261, which would allow those living in rental housing to break a lease if they can provide documentation that they are being abused and stalked.
Read’s name wasn’t on that Tennessee lease, “but if I had been, I would have had to stay with my abuser. I don’t think we should penalize people for surviving.”
Nor should a landlord, said Nick Norman, a lobbyist for the Apartment Association of New Hampshire.
“We are very sympathetic, but we don’t see the landlord should bear the cost for this situation,” he said. Turning over a property without enough notice is costly. Sometimes, landlords have to go through an eviction procedure, even though the property is vacant, to get it ready for a new tenant – a process that could take months, he said. He suggested that if the bill were to pass, there should be some public compensation for that loss.
There is a law to allow tenants to leave an apartment in federally funded housing without documentation but by simply signing an affidavit. Indeed, two representatives from the NH Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence suggested that committee amend the bill to align it with that law.
The coalition has to deal with housing for thousands of victims each year, many of whom have to break their lease and often they don’t have time to get a court order for protection or pick up a police report before they have to flee, said Rachel Duffy, the organization’s housing and economic justice manager.
But there is a difference between public and private housing, said Rep. Bob Lynn, R- Windham, the committee’s chair, noting that in the former it’s the public swallowing the cost. “It’s another thing for the landlord to bear that cost who presumably not at all at fault.”
HB 261 would also allow those who suddenly become disabled to break their lease if that disability prevents them from enjoying their property.
That happened to a neighbor of Read who was unable to climb a third-floor walkup after the loss of his legs after an accident, she said.
Landlords quibbled with the word “enjoying,” which they said implies that a tenant could break a lease if they no longer could stand the color of the bathroom paint. They also said that the disability documentation was not as strict as the first part of the bill, which David Cline, a landlord and treasure of the AANH, praised.
“We want real standards that we can hang our hats on,” he said. (The bill does require a note from a medical provider to document the disability).
“Tenants do take the law and abuse it,” added Norman. “You don’t want to set up as system that is so lax that they can terminate their lease at will,” said Norman.
Norman added that most landlords work with tenants who become disabled and can’t make the rent, and “I can’t imagine any landlord who would say, ‘I want you to stay in a violent situation.’”
But Brandon Lemay, a tenant activist from Manchester, said that those testifying are “mom and pop landlords that know the tenants and look them in the eye. We have an increasing number of corporate landlords who follow the lease, follow the law. There is not much leeway.”
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This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: NH bill seeks tenant protections for abuse victims, disabled people
