Around three-quarters of Athens city housing is rental property, yet many of the local lawmakers are landlords. The United Athens County Tenants fights to ensure the city’s tenants are represented and protected.
Zach Hess, a senior studying film and media production, rents off-campus with Emerson Properties. Emerson owns a few properties scattered around Athens. The problem is, its management is based in Texas.
“If we have a problem, or if we have to message them about maintenance or anything, it's a very long process, and it's not very good,” Hess said.
Though the first year of renting with Emerson was relatively smooth, Hess said the second year has been met with issues, including unannounced visitors.
“We've had maintenance come around without being notified on two or three occasions,” Hess said. “One time they tried to actually get into the apartment. They weren't able to get into the house, but we were woken up at 8:30 in the morning … which no matter where you are, it’s a scary thought.”
Many students face difficulties with off-campus housing and don’t know where to turn for aid. The United Athens County Tenants organization, founded in Athens six years ago, works to protect tenants’ legal rights and enforce local housing justice in Athens.
Damon Krane, a founding member of UACT, started the organization after losing his first mayoral campaign.
“In 2019, I ran for mayor on primarily a housing justice platform,” Krane said. “There were some other candidates that year who, like me, were tenants. That was Ellie Hamrick and Chris Monday.”
Though all three candidates lost their races, some campaign members stuck together to form UACT. The small group's first victory occurred in the early days of the COVID-19 Pandemic.
“There was an effort to pressure Municipal Court Judge Todd Grace to suspend eviction hearings at the beginning of the pandemic before the National Moratorium kicked in,” Krane said.
Efforts led by the UACT, and supported by the Ohio Supreme Court, eventually pushed a reluctant Judge Grace to pass a court order canceling all eviction hearings on March 23, 2020. This court order was especially meaningful in cities like Athens where a majority of housing options are made up of rental properties.
“The different studies I've seen put it at somewhere between 72% and 78%,” Krane said. “The vast majority of city residents are renters.”
Reagan Klinger-Neviska, another founding member of UACT, is also a renter in the city of Athens. Klinger-Neviska’s bad experiences with landlords helped inspire the mission of UACT.
“The idea behind UACT was letting people know what options they have and empowering people with information,” Klinger-Neviska said.
In August 2022, a ceiling collapse on North Shafer Street caught UACT’s attention. The organization had just won a lengthy battle with the city administration to gain access to 14 years worth of code enforcement records on every rental property in Athens.
“We said, ‘Wow, this could be a trial case, let's investigate this landlord's compliance record at all their Athens properties,’ and we put together a report on everything we found,” Krane said. “We found a lot of things, but to begin with, we found that Krause (Rental Properties) had failed 110 out of its last 113 regularly scheduled inspections.”
The full report, available on UACT’s website, detailed a 14-year history of negligence by Krause Rental Properties, managed by company President Joe Krause.
“To make matters much worse, Mayor Patterson twice appointed him to serve on the city zoning board where he helped make housing policy decisions for the city,” Krane said.
Last September, Patterson reappointed Krause for the third time. UACT quickly took action and, with the aid of Athens City Council, was able to get Krause to resign from his position.
“That was a big success because I think it was the first time the council showed they were willing to stand up to the mayor when it came to tenant safety and housing quality,” Krane said. “That’s a far cry from where things stood when UACT started in 2020.”
When UACT was founded, many of the city officeholders were landlords and homeowners. In 2002, a study led by the Student Senate's Off-Campus Housing Commission, sought out Athens’ best and worst off-campus rental units. The worst unit, they found, was owned by Guy Philips, then Athens City Council president.
“City government has been unrepresentative of the city population in multiple ways, but probably no way more so than when it comes to tenants versus landlords,” Krane said.
The power imbalance landlords have in the local government relative to the little power tenants maintain is what makes UACT important, according to Krane.
“One of the reasons why UACT gravitated toward getting local government policy passed was because we were trying to make up for what was such a long-standing lack of tenant representation,” Krane said.
UACT is currently going through a “rebirth,” Krane said, and the organization is currently looking for more members to join its movement.
“UACT is always open to incorporating more members now,” Krane said. “We would welcome folks reaching out to us through the contact info on our website if they're considering getting involved in this work themselves.”
