In this assignment, I have focused on a new bill that just passed and is now waiting to be signed by the Governor. This bill aims to make it easier for tenants who want to sue their landlord if their residence is not fit to live in: Landlord and Tenant - Failure to Repair Serious and Dangerous Defects - Tenant Remedies (Tenant Safety Act of 2024)
“Establishing that a landlord that offers a residential dwelling unit for rent is deemed to warrant the dwelling fit for human habitation; authorizing multiple tenants to join as plaintiffs in a civil action against a landlord and authorizing a court to issue an order for separate trials or other orders necessary to prevent delay or avoid prejudice; providing that a court may order certain relief in civil actions relating to the breach of warranty of habitability, including actual damages, abatement of rent, and lease termination; etc.”
What is most striking about this bill: First, this bill was partly headed by and passed through a committee of delegates from Montgomery County.
Secondly, it was close to not being passed at all. The committee or its Chair had yet to receive it well. Still, the Enclave Tenants Association invited the committee chair to their side by inviting him to visit their apartment buildings. I ask you all to view the committee meeting, during which the experience of his visit so clearly marks the committee chair.
I plan to look at the existing data on housing and habitation in Montgomery County to understand how widespread this issue may be. Are there other units like Enclave Silver Spring in Montgomery County that tenants might find redress through this new law?
To do this, I found in Montgomery County’s database that Montgomery County conducts a “Troubled Properties Analysis”. This is a routine investigation of rentals and their fitness for human habitation.
They check for mold and other risks and dangers to life and limb. They also have a severity index that ranges from 1 to 5 and classify dwellings on a scale from compliant, at-risk to troubled.
Short about the severity index: The severity index is a function of how dangerous the housing unit is. The scale is 1 to 5 and comprises a weighted average of violation severity. A severity of 1 is low, and 5 is a risk to life and safety.
I hope to highlight where Enclave Silver Spring is on the severity index and how it scores in relation to other housing unit.
To my surprise, Enclave Silver Spring is by no criteria an outlier.
The experience of living in awful, mouldy, dangerous housing is awful, and hopefully this new law will make profiting off of such housing a little harder.
Structure of this assignment: I am currently trying out a new layout! Many properties had missing locations, and I used an API for that, which is not apparent here due to the program crashing too many times. Additional materials will be provided for those who are curious.
A majority of the data cleaning was done in this document:
Fetching cleaned “troubled housing dataset:
Reading layer `montgomery_troubled_housing' from data source
`/Users/gimle/Desktop/Data 110/Data 110: Project 2/montgomery_troubled_housing.csv'
using driver `CSV' License.Number Community.Name Street.Address
1 62427 The Veridian At Silver Spring Metro 1133 East West Hwy
2 17200 Seneca Ridge 19568 Scenery Dr
3 17632 The Point At Germantown 2 Observation Ct
4 17292 Summit Hills 8484 16th St
5 17550 Quebec Terrace, 1015 1015 Quebec Ter
6 82909 Solaire Wheaton 10914 Georgia Ave
City Zip Case.Number Longitude Latitude First.Inspection.Date
1 Silver Spring 20910 178097 -77.02778 38.98935 2023-06-15
2 Germantown 20876 177536 -77.23489 39.17687 2023-04-13
3 Germantown 20876 175575 -77.24749 39.19214 2023-03-29
4 Silver Spring 20910 178095 -77.03692 38.99519 2023-05-23
5 Silver Spring 20903 175593 -76.98841 39.00009 2022-10-13
6 Silver Spring 20902 177513 -77.05020 39.03523 2023-03-31
Inspection.Frequency Compliant Unit.Count Units.Inspected
1 3 1 457 110
2 3 1 71 58
3 2 1 218 63
4 3 1 112 269
5 1 0 4 1
6 3 1 232 62
Average.Violations.Per.Unit Severity.Index No.Violations.Observed
1 0.54 0.72 68
2 1.62 1.13 26
3 0.85 1.11 28
4 2.80 1.88 30
5 7.00 2.14 0
6 0.38 0.15 57
Infested.Units.Percentage Units.with.Mold Analysis.Rating Day Month Year
1 0.00 0 compliant 15 6 2023
2 0.05 0 compliant 13 4 2023
3 0.03 0 compliant 29 3 2023
4 0.03 0 troubled 23 5 2023
5 0.00 0 troubled 13 10 2022
6 0.03 0 compliant 31 3 2023Zip code dataset:
Reading layer `geo_export_36683266-22fc-450a-8b12-0aae59abf871' from data source `/Users/gimle/Desktop/Data 110/Datasets 110/ZIPCODES_20240411'
using driver `ESRI Shapefile'
Simple feature collection with 97 features and 4 fields
Geometry type: MULTIPOLYGON
Dimension: XY
Bounding box: xmin: -77.52768 ymin: 38.93424 xmax: -76.88764 ymax: 39.35426
Geodetic CRS: WGS84(DD)Cleaning zip_code dataset:
Group by zipcode
Joining the data:
library(dplyr)
Call:
lm(formula = Units.with.Mold ~ Infested.Units.Percentage, data = troubled_clean)
Residuals:
Min 1Q Median 3Q Max
-0.07265 -0.00697 -0.00697 -0.00697 0.44009
Coefficients:
Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
(Intercept) 0.006969 0.001595 4.37 1.44e-05 ***
Infested.Units.Percentage 0.099516 0.025780 3.86 0.000124 ***
---
Signif. codes: 0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
Residual standard error: 0.03901 on 664 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared: 0.02195, Adjusted R-squared: 0.02048
F-statistic: 14.9 on 1 and 664 DF, p-value: 0.0001244Link to a memorandum from the Department of Housing and Commmunity Affairs regarding the state of housing and troubled properties in Montgomery County from September 15, 2023:
The data is available here:
The session where the Enclave Tenant Association give their testimony:
Link to HB1117:
https://mgaleg.maryland.gov/mgawebsite/Legislation/Details/HB1117?ys=2024RS
Also I used Google’s API services to find and download missing location data.
Data cleaning documentation: