Syleethia Holesome was at church one Sunday, absently listening to her friends, when her eyes wandered to a house across the street. It looked old and run-down. She had always assumed it was condemned. Then she saw a little girl come out of the house and start to play.
“You just don’t see that every day, and if you do, what are you doing about it,” Holesome said.
She decided to take action.
Tonight, she and other Bowling Green youth will speak their minds about fair housing in a program called Voices4Justice.
Poor property management and code enforcement like at the house Holesome saw is one of five major impediments to fair housing in Bowling Green, according to a 2003 Bowling Green City Government report.
Kaleidoscope, a community youth art program, hopes to raise awareness about housing as part of a larger campaign to address the issue.
Kaleidoscope decided to focus on housing after Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, a community grassroots organization, surveyed Bowling Green citizens and held public forums to see what issues they felt most affected them.
Citizens repeatedly mentioned housing.
Bowling Green has no uniform residential landlord tenant act or substantially equivalent fair-housing act to protect tenants from unfair or discriminatory landlords.
Scott Crocker is an attorney with Kentucky Legal Aid, a state organization representing low income people in civil lawsuits. He said that the rights of landlords and tenants aren’t well defined in communities without URLTA.
Linda McCray, director of the Bowling Green Human Rights Commission, met with Mayor Elaine Walker on Wednesday to discuss a substantially equivalent fair housing law. The law would enable the Human Rights Commission to enforce laws equivalent to the federal Fair Housing Act, allowing them to do their own investigations.
Currently, the Human Rights Commission is too small to do its own investigations and has to outsource them to Lexington or Louisville.
This can make investigations take years, McCray said.
“People give up,” she said.
Kentuckians for the Commonwealth is planning a public forum in April about URLTA. This would standardize behavior between landlords and tenants as well as give them greater access to legal solutions for disputes.
KFTC would then push for URLTA legislation in the city commission. If they felt it couldn’t pass, they would make it an election issue in this fall’s campaign, said Dana Brown, the KFTC member who began surveying her neighbors to find out what issues they faced in the community.
Even if that fails, Brown said she’ll continue to push the commission to pass some kind of fair housing legislation.
“I personally can’t live my life knowing my neighbors are living with injustice,” Brown said.
This isn’t the first time that people have tried to address housing in Bowling Green.
In 2003, a substantial equivalency law came before the commission but was struck down.
Joe Denning, who served on the commission at the time, said that he didn’t feel that Bowling Green had a need for the additional resources, and that the local institutions already in place could deal with those concerns.
McCray said that some landlords didn’t like it because there would be local enforcement.
“A select few own a lot of property, raking in good money, not maintaining it, and openly discriminating with very little consequence,” she said.
The city commission also struck down an effort to pass URLTA in fall 2007, citing “controversial issues,” the Herald previously reported.
Brown said that URLTA was introduced along with a more radical act from Tacoma Park, Md., and that the commission confused the less intense URLTA with that law.
“I’m very optimistic just because of the fact that URLTA is very fair, giving rights to both landlords and tenants and it alone by itself is not as controversial.”
City Commissioner Bruce Wilkerson, who owns six rental homes, said that the issue lay with URLTA’s all or nothing nature.
“Rather than subject people to the bad parts of it, we thought it best not to pass it right now and continue under the current statute,” Wilkerson said.
Wilkerson took issue with a provision that entitled tenants to damages that triple the amount of actual damages.
He said that could invite litigation.
That provision only applies in two cases: if the landlord cuts off utilities or if there are squatters on the landlords’ property.
If URLTA passed, Wilkerson said he would stop renting residentially and focus on commercial properties.
Caution tempers McCray’s optimism about success.
“I’ve been down this road before and I don’t think it is going to happen in one fell swoop,” she said. “Change happens in increments.”
Kentucky Legal Aid works with tenants to prevent unnecessary evictions contrary to lease agreements or in violation of a Kentucky law that requires 30-day notice.
Low income tenants who have other housing issues can call Kentucky Legal Aid, who will direct them to other organizations.
If the complaint deals with maintenance, it goes to Bowling Green’s Housing and Community Development’s Code Enforcement.
Without URLTA, tenants can’t sue their landlords if they’re not maintaining their property, said Mark Esterly, an attorney with Kentucky Legal Aid.
If it deals with discrimination, it goes to the Bowling Green Human Rights Commission.
If someone feels they’re being discriminated against, they call the Human Rights Commission who sends the investigation to the Kentucky Human Rights Commission or the Lexington Fair Housing Council.
The Human Rights Commission has three employees who handle all accusations of discrimination in housing, employment and access to public accomodations for all of Warren County.
“We’re pretty much overrun with complaints,” McCray said.
Reach Greg Capillo at news@chherald.com.
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