In 1992, after watching crime, especially drug dealing, increasing in rental housing, Timothy Zehring, a Mesa, Arizona, police officer, started the Crime Free Multihousing Program (CFMH). It has spread to more than 2,000 cities in 48 states, five Canadian provinces, England, Nigeria, and Puerto Rico, plus more, as an answer to or tool for eliminating crime in rental properties.
It worked and continues to work.
As publisher of the Rental Property Reporter, along with the late John Campbell, I was part of implementing the program in Portland, Oregon. I wrote the training manuals for the program. The eight-hour program gave landlords the skills to screen applicants, manage properties to discourage criminal activity, and generally make rental housing nicer places to live for residents by using CFMH.
After completing the three phases of the CFMH program under the supervision of local police, landlords and property managers become individually certified and their properties become certified. They get a certificate and window stickers announcing that the property participates in the Crime-Free program.
Their website lists the following benefits:
• A stable, more satisfied tenant base. Increased demand for rental units with a reputation for active management
• Lower maintenance and repair costs. Increased property values
• Improved personal safety for tenants, landlords, and managers
From the start, I have believed the program would benefit not only landlords, but their tenants and the communities where their properties are.
Landlords who take the training come away with confidence in managing their properties, something I know has been a problem. As I spoke around the country, landlords told me they didn’t know how to manage their properties so bad tenants couldn’t infect them. CFMH helps with that. Portland landlords who did the training gained skills that enabled them to ensure the tenants they rented to were quality and to know how to deal with problem tenants and their guests. They also learned how to screen applicants and under what circumstances they can reject an applicant without running afoul of the Fair Housing Act. Plus, they learned simple methods of hardening their properties against crime by using Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED).
Questions have arisen, though, that cast doubt not only the effectiveness but the “fairness” of the program. Has it resulted in crime decreasing? Does it illegally discriminate against protected classes?
As long as landlords do the policing, the managing themselves, it works as intended. Problems have arisen when local governments decided they should make Crime-Free Rental Housing the law. Now some communities have had problems with what critics call unfair evictions and illegal discrimination.
For example, a Reuters article reported on Dec. 19, 2022, Herperia, California, enacted an ordinance in 2015 that required landlords to evict a tenant “if the sheriff’s department notified them that a tenant had engaged in criminal activity.” A 2016 investigation, though, reported that the actual purpose of the law was “what one city council member called a ‘demographic problem.’” That “problem” was Hespria’s increasing Black and Latinx population, said the Department of Justice. The “deeply flawed” ordinance ended up tearing families apart because tenants had the audacity to call the police for help too often. I guess calling for help qualifies as criminal activity. Similar ordinances around the country have resulted in scrutiny because of perceived or actual unfair treatment of minorities.
As the Reuters article said, “Sheriff’s deputies often demanded tenants’ evictions based on the conduct of a guest and when women called to report domestic violence. Black renters were nearly four times as likely to be evicted under the ordinance than white renters, and Latino people were about 30% more likely to face eviction, the DOJ said.”
In one case in Hesperia, a woman and her three children were evicted on the demands of the local police because she had called 911 to report that her husband was beating her with a television cable. Some city ordinances include the provision that excessive calls to 911 can result in eviction under the ordinance, even though that may not be part of the landlord’s lease language, only local law.
Government isn’t much good a managing rental property, as has been proven over and over by how well HUD has done managing its rentals. Plus, when government gets involved in rental management an entire additional set of issues factors in. Individual landlords and property managers for the most part have only to deal with the Fair Housing Act. When government gets involved, the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) comes into play, too, adding structural and demographic requirements absent from the Fair Housing Act. When landlords rent to Section 8 tenants, for example, that also falls under the ADA. Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act covers all recipients and subrecipients of HUD financial assistance which includes government programs administered by the Federal Government.
Local police, if their city has enacted a Crime-Free Housing law, can be overzealous taking basic management away from the property owners and managers. An issue a landlord may already have dealt with, such as a guest committing a crime in the home of one of a landlord’s tenants, could require an eviction even though the landlord has already resolved the problem.
Therein lie the concern and complication, government getting involved. The Reuters article cited Timothy Zehring saying that “he advises cities against adopting ordinances because enforcement then falls ‘under color of law,’ which could expose municipalities to lawsuits.”
Statistics go to support the claim of illegal discrimination and thus liability because at least 80 percent of people evicted in California’s largest cities, including Sacramento and Los Angeles, were non-white. Data from other cities around the country report similar evidence of discrimination.
Deborah Archer, president of the American Civil Liberties Union and a professor at New York University School of Law, and cited in the Reuters article, said all this attention is “a helpful step” and should prompt more cities to repeal their programs. Will that repeal result? No way of telling if or when.
In the meantime, it continues to be up to landlords to get the training, get certified, and take complete control of their rentals, not allowing the cities to interfere in their management. No one can substitute our taking charge of our own properties because we know each of our properties, our tenants, and the situation around our properties.
