Doug Shimell

It’s been two and a half years since City Council passed the bill granting free legal service to tenants facing eviction.

And the city is just starting to offer the service for low income renters in two North and West Philly zip codes.

While city officials claim the program helps landlords avoid vacancies and turnover costs, Hapco Philadelphia contends free legal counsel allows tenants to continue to stay in their apartments rent-free.  And this comes on top of months of no rent payments during the COVID eviction moratorium.

Hapco Philadelphia has always advocated communication, education, and mediation with our tenants to avoid eviction.  But when coupled with the recently-passed city eviction diversion program, it’s another green light for tenants not to pay rent.

Hapco Philadelphia feels the millions of dollars councilmembers are spending on free attorneys would be better spent funding landlord-tenants rent relief through the PHL Rent Assist program.

Hapco Philadelphia has advocated keeping the city’s PHL Rent Assist program beyond the COVID pandemic.

Originally created to help landlords recover lost rent from the eviction moratorium, emergency rental money was something desperately needed long before the pandemic.

Rental property owners have struggled for years with city regulations, fees, and cost that make it difficult to stay in the affordable rental housing market.  And the eviction moratorium simply pushed more landlords to sell and get out, adding to Philly’s affordable housing crisis.

PHL Rental Assist’s former director, Greg Heller, told Hapco Philadelphia in a newsletter article that he hoped City Council would maintain the landlord-tenant funding infrastructure he created.

Whether it becomes permanent will depend largely on whether councilmembers can lobby state lawmakers and Congress for permanent funding.

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It’s a nightmare scenario for the city’s rental property owners.

A tenant who apparently believed her landlord shut off her electricity shot and killed him, according to Philadelphia police.

Hapco Philadelphia says being a rental property owner is hard enough these days without having to worry about being injured or killed by a renter.

And President Greg Wertman says anti-landlord sentiment at Philadelphia City Council has created a hostile environment for rental property owners.

“Landlords are always made out to be the bad guys.  And when that’s repeated enough, it’s no wonder there’s growing violence aimed at us.”

Vanishing affordable rental housing is nothing new to Hapco Philadelphia, which has been warning lawmakers about it for years.

And the recent deadly fire in Fairmount apartments owned by the Philadelphia Housing Authority underscores one of the many sad side effects of a lack of affordable places to live.

In a virtual national panel of fire chiefs, Philadelphia Commissioner Adam Thiel says there’s a bigger picture behind the loss of several families than just smoke detectors and sprinklers.

It doesn’t seem fair that Philadelphia runs out of pandemic rent relief funds while Texas left almost $2-million unspent.

And the Lone Star state now has the nation’s highest level of eviction filings.

If certain states have all this unused COVID emergency dollars, why can’t it be allocated to cities with a critical need, like Philly?