Board of Aldermen Page 2
June 14, 2016
Secondly, | would like to than the Veterans who came and did the Pledge of Allegiance, | think Alderman
McCarthy’s idea of using that as a substitute or a pale substitute for the parade that was rained out was
really nice. | also want to thank Alan St. Louis for doing the National Anthem again.
The first item of business that | would like to discuss is O-16-003 related to the housing code. | think
there are a number of people who have expressed opposition to this over the course of a long period of
time. It’s gone to different committees twice and it’s come to the full Board of Aldermen now for a second
time. There seems to be many concerns but | don’t think they should be as concerned as they are and
that they misinterpret the intent and purpose and particularly the good landlords that we have nothing to
fear from this change and | will go on to describe why | think that is the case. First of all the background,
this started in the fall of 2015 when the T.V. report which | think was entitled “Motel from Hell” was
nationally aired regarding one of the single residence occupancy type places here in Nashua. The
pictures and story was quite shocking and as we began to look at that particular location and some
others in the city we realized that we have some facilities that are not being run in a way and conditions
that are not being kept in a way that they really should for the benefit of the tenants, the city or the
landlords. So in the last term the Board of Aldermen started a Substandard Living Conditions Committee
to look into this situation and see what we could do or recommend changes to try to improve the
conditions which exist at the “Motel from Hell’ and some of the other single residence occupancies like
23 Temple Street. We arranged a meeting at the soup kitchen to hear from tenants what their living
situations were and are. The reason we did it at the soup kitchen and was arrange by Alderman Tom
Lopez, he was not yet on the Board but he works at the soup kitchen and the reason that we arranged it
there because we thought that the tenants at 23 Temple Street and a few other places would be fearful
of retaliation if they were to speak out. So we held this meeting and a bunch of tenants came in and of
course there were representatives of 23 Temple Street there and other places even though most of them
didn’t speak and we heard from tenants about things like feces on the walls of public bathrooms, bed
bugs, clogged drains in public shared bathrooms that lasted for weeks without being corrected. A
woman who had to share a bathroom where she couldn’t turn on the water so she’d have to go down the
hall and there would be a bathroom down there where there were men in the bathroom and it just went
on and on and on. Then, after the hearing, one of the women who came into see us got an eviction
notice for rent she supposedly didn’t pay but it turned out that after an investigation and Alderman Siegel
became involved, showed that actually she had receipts showing that she paid the rent. It was
seemingly a retaliatory eviction. The next thing that happens is the eviction proceeding is filed in
Portsmouth. This is a woman without a car and no money. | think because of all of the attention was
able to ward this off. The Alderman O’Brien attempts to change the law so that a person like the woman
we are speaking about and she is disabled, could, and the retaliation came the same day that her son
died in the facility in the room next to her. So Alderman O’Brien tried to pass it in the State Legislature;
legislation that would require that an eviction such as that be filed at least in the town where she lives
rather than where the owners are located over on the Seacoast and unfortunately that failed. When |
came into office, really on the first day, | asked about this and the code enforcement people said
basically we are the property managers for 23 Temple Street and some other places because what
happens is they don’t do anything, they barely clean the place up and they just wait for us to inspect,
they don’t make corrections and they don’t fix code violations. They wait for us to inspect and when we
inspect and we cite them for two, five or ten violations then they correct them. Then we wait and if we
wait a week it will be a few violations and if we wait two months it will be many violations. They wait until
we inspect again then we site them and then they correct. They don’t even need a property manager
because we do it for them. So as we tried to figure out how we can correct this situation and it’s not like
they can’t afford it. The tenants tell us that they pay $500 per month in rent for 120 units so that’s
$60,000 per month out of one facility and the property taxes on that building are probably too low but
they are around $30,000 per year so it’s not like they can’t afford to be taking care of their properties but
they don’t. So what do we do about this? We have state enabling legislation that enables us to take a
couple of different approaches. One would be the approach that Manchester has taken which is to
require an annual inspection charging $25.00 per unit for every unit in the city. In our case we have
about 16,000 rental units so that would be $400,000 per year and using that money what Manchester
