Dear Land of the Internets,

I have missed writing to you. I have written many of the blog posts on this website, and haven't been in this space since the summer of 2016. I've been in the background here at the TRC, and I have to say, I'm ready to have a voice again. 

GET READY WORLD.

To start this new era, I want to talk about Section 8 vouchers. These vouchers, known as housing choice vouchers to those who wish to be politically correct, allow a low-income person or family to pay 30ish% of their income as rent to a landlord, and a housing authority pays the rest. It's a great program, when it works - tenants can live where they wish, landlords have guaranteed payments from a housing authority. Win-win, right? But there are many flaws - there are never enough vouchers for all the people that really need them, and the governing policies can be pretty opaque. 

Additionally, and weirdly, it seems like landlords have super different perspectives on these vouchers. Some say: NEVER (hint: not super legal in Dane County). Some say: ALL I WANT IS TO MAKE HOUSING AVAILABLE TO LOW INCOME PEOPLE. Some say: I DON'T HAVE ENOUGH INFORMATION. (All are emphatic). So, this one's for you, guys. 

I was lucky enough to get some guidance from the City of Madison's Marketing Outreach Coordinator, and an attorney at Legal Action, and I'd love to share the fruits of my labors. This week's post is for landlords. In the coming weeks, we'll address Section 8 for tenants, and Section 8 terminations. 

Hey Y'all! HUD put out some new guidelines about using criminal history in housing transactions, and it looks like a big departure from where Wisconsin's been headed, lately. I'm walking through it today, on behalf of landlords trying to sort out what's what.

On June 1, I did this for tenants! Here's the second part, for the landlords. 

We get a bunch of phone calls here at the TRC. Right now, we've had some staffing changes, and we're a little bit behind (side note: do you want to volunteer for the TRC???). However, most of those piled-up calls are not folks who want to pick up the phone and connect about how great their tenant-landlord relationship is. It's tenants, landlords, roommates, friends, all struggling with a problem, and needing some information in order to resolve it. We love helping people, and we're glad to do this work.

But it's a nice change to go out into Wisconsin, teach the seminars, and help landlords and service providers who are trying to improve their skills. While they may have complex examples in mind, usually these folks that sit in our seminars do not have emergency-level concerns; rather, they are thoughtfully attempting to improve their skills. I love to see that. And I learn a lot from them.

Here are some tips from the landlords at this set of spring seminars.

We get a lot of opportunity to talk to landlords here at the TRC because of a couple reasons: 1. We serve them (did you know that landlords can come to us with their questions, too? It's true. And many do), and 2. We give seminars around the state twice per year (they're fun, you should come).

When landlords have questions for us about abuse in their rental, usually, they are frustrated. And it's not because the landlords are bad people - it's because they feel like they can't do anything about something awful that is happening inside walls they own. Walls that they own that are getting damaged because of the awful thing that is happening. Landlords have so many reasons to want abuse to stop, but that power doesn't sit with them - it sits with the tenants. And that's hard to live with.  Today, I'm talking about what a landlord can, can't, and must do in these situations where they know abuse is occurring for their tenants.

In the land of the small-time landlord, a broken lease is a difficult thing. The small-time guys are the ones who rent out a room in their home (so they can afford a mortgage); the ones who work full-time jobs besides landlording, so they can build equity for retirement; the ones who accidentally become managers of a deceased parents' home they aren't able to sell. This post is for the small time landlords out there.

There's a cost to being a landlord, right? You know that you need to do the repairs to make the place livable, and that's expensive. Taking the time out of your regular job to show the place to prospective tenants, that's expensive, too. Sometimes it turns out that a tenant is unable to pay rent, and that's a process, to figure out if there's a way forward or not. But what about those times when a tenant, after a finally-successful-but-wearying application process, moves in and realizes that for some reason, this isn't going to work? What about when the tenant breaks their lease?

One of the things that we're lucky to do here at the TRC is give seminars around Wisconsin on tenant-landlord law.  When we go out into the urban and rural areas of Wisconsin, we get to meet the neatest people! 

Right now, it's hard to be a well-informed landlord in Wisconsin.  The laws are complicated, and they're not getting easier.  But, while we're talking about how tricky it is, it's always really lovely to hear tips from landlords themselves who are dealing with the complicated rental environment with grace.  Here are a couple tips that I heard from landlords (for other landlords), from our most recent seminar in Tomah: