Proposed rule: No more than 4 students per Boston apartment

The Boston City Council wants to limit the number of college students that can occupy Boston apartments to no more than 4 students per apartment. This very serious decision was arrived at by behind-the-scenes meetings and negotiations until all the Councilors were unanimously in favor of it. Then the action was fast. The petition had its public hearing this past December 11, 2007, and the Council voted unanimously the very next day, December 12.

Obviously, landlords including the smallest of us were not consulted at all. The decision has two more steps of approval, at the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) and the Boston Zoning Commission, in that order. The process could take a couple of months up to a year. Speaking our minds to these bodies is our chance to influence the decision-making and stop this very ill-conceived idea of limiting student occupancy. Go to the Small Property Owners Association website: http://www.spoa.com/ and read more and get contact information for the people that need to hear from you.

Here is what would happen. The excess students would seek apartments in surrounding non-student neighborhoods, displacing families and long-time residents and bringing all the problems of students into yet more Boston neighhborhoods. A housing shortage would be created. People in these newly student-occupied neighborhoods would have to pay more rent and live more compactly with more persons per unit than at present. Meanwhile, in the current student neighborhoods, rents would decline since a cap on the occupants effectively puts a cap on the rents. Individual students in these four-students-only apartments probably would pay a bit more in rent, but the overall rent per apartment would decline. Tax revenues from the devalued four-only apartments would also decline as assessed values dropped. That drop would shift the tax burden to the non-student occupied properties, raising their property taxes.

All these miserable effects occur for what goal? To stop student noise, late-night partying, and excessive trash badly handled. Limiting the students to a maximum of four per apartment will not stop noise or partying or trash. It will all continue. But the Council's action does give permission to Boston's Inspectional Services Department to invade apartments, question individuals, and get them evicted.

The Council's action is attempting to get around a recent consent decree filed in the Federal District Court of Massachusetts. That consent decree throws out a common but incorrect interpretation of the state's lodging house law. That common but incorrect interpretation says that occupancies in all apartments are limited to no more than four unrelated persons, unrelated that is to each other. If four or more unrelated persons occupy, then supposedly they constitute a lodging house or a rooming house and the owner must either evict the tenants or seek a lodging house license and conform to special building code requirements for lodging houses. But the state lodging house law insists that tenants become "lodgers" only when four or more of them are unrelated to the "person conducting" the lodging house. If the owner rents to three individuals and they in turn bring in more tenants, it does not become a lodging or rooming house. In other words, families do not have this number restriction, nor do roommate situations where the roommates decide who lives with them, so long as the landlord does not contract with the four or more roommates individually.

Until recently, Boston's Inspectional Services Department has been enforcing the incorrect interpretation of the law. Now the City Council's action is targeting students and trying to get around this new interpretation of the law. There are legal questions in this action targeting students. It probably is an unlawful search and seizure and invasion of privacy to ask someone if they are a student (it's not illegal to be a student), and based on that status to evict them from their apartment (or force the owner to get a lodging house license, which would not be granted even if the owner wants it). The Council's action also is unequal protection of the law, since it targets students when other types of occupancy may have the same problems.

On the issue of overcrowding, the State Sanitary Code already covers it by requiring at least 150 square feet of space for the first person occupying an apartment and 100 square feet for each additional person. If the City Councilors think that is too crowded, then state law needs to be changed, not Boston's zoning code.

Again, please go to the Small Property Owners Association website http://www.spoa.com/ for more information and for contact information for the people who need to hear from you.