Justin O'Connor | August 11, 2024

When Buffalo created a rental registry in the mid-2000s to track the ownership of small rental properties, officials hoped the landlord licensing program would help improve the quality of the city’s housing stock by providing information about property owners and raking in revenue to fund inspection staff.

But today, the program is mired in problems.

The law requires the owners of one- or two-family rental properties they don’t live in to renew their registrations yearly by providing information to the city and paying a fee – $50 for single-family dwellings and $100 for two-family dwellings.

Currently, nearly 44%, or more than 10,400, of the roughly 23,943 properties on the registry, have owners who are delinquent on paying those fees. Almost three-quarters of those delinquent properties have not properly reregistered in several years, with almost 1,000 having been delinquent since 2016. But all of these properties’ registration statuses are still listed as active.

Cathy Amdur, the commissioner of Permit & Inspection Services, said the department uses summonses and, occasionally, Housing Court to try and enforce the law, but pointed to increasing inspection staff numbers as a potential route to future improvements.

Activists are more skeptical. They said the registry’s problems are, in part, another casualty of the city’s non-enforcement of its proactive rental inspection law. And one former permitting department employee said it will take an overhaul of the ethos in the department and its registry division – which is run by Buffalo Mayor Byron W. Brown’s brother-in-law – to improve the city’s property tracking.

Former employee’s perspective

John O’Brien worked for Permit & Inspection Services from June 2019 to December 2020. He was a grant-funded policy fellow helping lead the writing of the city’s lead hazard reduction grant and conducting policy research and data analysis for a rental inspection law, which was implemented in 2021.

He noticed the high registration delinquency rates, which, at the time, were in the mid-to-low 30% range.

O’Brien said maintaining the registry is a core responsibility for the city to understand the local housing landscape at a granular level, and the fee collection is supposed to give them some minimum funding for proactive rental inspections.

“The delinquency rates raise questions about the city’s own knowledge of the needs of the renter population and its ability to address those concerns in a timely and efficient manner,” he said.

O’Brien attributed the delinquency to a lack of enforcement mechanisms and some problems he observed in the division’s data handling.

The department uses mailers to pursue voluntary compliance from property owners before pushing things to the Bureau of Administrative Adjudication – which can issue summonses – or Housing Court, Amdur said.

O’Brien said the department itself didn’t have much of a way to pursue the fees.

“Before administrative adjudication and before Housing Court, there’s no risk in not paying, you know? You just get to keep your money,” he said.

Housing Court is an additional barrier, Amdur said. She said the court sometimes will tack registration delinquency onto cases where there are other violations present, but those cases can get dragged out.

“We work with the enforcement mechanisms we have, but when you have a case in court for a decade, that limits some of our abilities to hold people accountable,” she said.

O’Brien said, during his time, that Housing Court would often refuse to enforce the registry-related fines on top of other penalties.

The long time-frame for cases has been a problem with Housing Court since before O’Brien moved to Buffalo, he said, which is why the law was designed to primarily go through administrative adjudication to push compliance.

Amdur said administrative adjudication remains the the primary step beyond seeking voluntary compliance to enforce the law.

O’Brien also noticed during his time in the department that the registry division grew into the habit of entering registrants’ mailing addresses into a data field that didn’t update automatically when the property owner’s mailing address changes on the city’s tax assessment rolls.

Over time, O’Brien said, this could develop a lagged system where the department would only know a property has changed hands if they are contacted by either the former license holder who has received an erroneous bill, or by the new property owner seeking to register or reregister their house as a rental.

This could cause lags of one or more years, he said.

Amdur didn’t want to comment on what was happening before her 2022 appointment as commissioner, but she said that the registry division regularly updates mailing information using an information searching service and the city’s assessment rolls.

Still, the city’s tax assessment data shows more than 2,400 properties that are not on the registry, but that are designated as one- or two-family properties with year-round occupancy where the owner’s mailing address is completely different from the property’s street address, suggesting they are not owner-occupied. Amdur said the department does a similar analysis when they look at the assessment rolls.

Many of these properties may be eligible for the registry. Amdur was unfamiliar with the 2,400 figure, but noted potentially valid caveats: The assessment data itself isn’t perfect, there may be a lag in their updating and the properties may not be rented out.

In May, the city doubled the rental registry fees to fund seven new inspector positions after Amdur raised concerns that the city’s proactive rental inspection law was unfunded. Amdur said those roles, which will bring total inspectors to 10 if they are filled, have been budgeted for hiring, and that this additional staffing will help with compliance.

Amdur runs the department, but the registry itself is run by Michael L. Austin, the division’s director. Austin, who is the mayor’s brother-in-law, according to his mother’s obituary, avoided several interview requests, both via email and over the phone.

When asked about Austin’s qualifications, city spokesperson Michael DeGeorge said in a statement: “Mr. Austin was appointed the City of Buffalo’s first African American Director of Task Force Housing in 2022 and one year later, the City collected the fourth-highest total in Rental Registration revenue in the program’s history. Mr. Austin, who has worked in that department since 2015, has focused most of his time on continuing to update the City’s rental registration data base to ensure the most up to date information since becoming director.”

The registry and proactive inspections

In 2009, Partnership for the Public Good (PPG) – a local community think tank – published a report about the rental registry, noting issues with delinquency and enforcement, many which the data and O’Brien suggest have persisted. The partnership also took note of the high delinquency rates while compiling a report in December for the Common Council pushing for the registry fee increase and calling for better information-gathering.

Last month, the partnership along with three local housing activist groups and four tenants filed a lawsuit against the city accusing it of failing to enforce its proactive rental inspection law.

The lawsuit was spurred in part because the pace of the department’s inspections have slowed over the years. Since 2020, the department has inspected fewer than 5,000 of the 36,000 units that needed to be inspected, and has issued 458 certificates of rental compliance, according to Amdur’s 2024 report to the Common Council.

Last year, the department inspected 293 properties, down from 2,252 the year before.

Andrea Ó Súilleabháin, PPG’s executive director, said the maintenance of the rental registry is really the first step in the proactive rental inspection process.

An inaccurate registry, she said, hinders the city’s ability to combat the list of violations that the law is meant to combat to uphold health and safety, including chipping lead paint, sewer seepage into basements, rotting porches, broken smoke and carbon dioxide detectors, smoking electrical boxes and interior doors being installed as exterior doors.

“The individual tenants that are plaintiffs in our lawsuit have lived with all of those conditions,” she said.

Sarah Wooton, PPG’s director of community research, said these inspections can’t happen if the registry isn’t being maintained and if fees aren’t being collected.

“The city needs to know who the landlords in the city are, which singles and doubles are being rented in out in order to inspect those properties. If the list isn’t accurate, they’re going to be missing properties that should be inspected through the PRI program,” she said. “If they’re not collecting fees from those properties, that is a source of funding that could be used for the PRI program and that should be used for the PRI program.”