The news that former Portland Mayor Ethan Strimling will finally get his day in court over a long-held dispute with his landlord, Geoffrey Rice, sole owner of the Trelawny Building, is good news. Rice has said that he wants to evict Strimling, his tenant because he was tired of being nickled and dimed by him.
To the contrary, Strimling claims that Rice wants to evict him because of his participation in the Trelawny Tenants Union. That is illegal – even in anti-renter Portland. It’s good news because the effort to hush up the issues between tenant and landlord will be made public – unlike the determination of District Court Judge Susan Oram who previously dismissed the matter with no public scrutiny of the issues. The rights of renters, or the lack of them, deserves better than Judge Oram was willing to give to us.
Despite a long-standing and public reputation for excessivelty high rents, the Portland City Council took no steps to offer relief to renters and stem Portland’s gentrification. This blogger was critical of former city council Jill Duson, chair of the anti-housing housing committee, for the city of Portland for not taking any steps to alleviate the situation. The Portland City Council still has not stepped up and done their due diligence on behalf of city renters.
Because the Portland City Council has been unresponsive to renters’ issues, once again, it has taken the Maine Democratic Socialists of America to step up and address renter issues. The group advocates that: Landlords must give 90-day notice of rent increases or evictions; and a restriction on short-term rentals. That proposal and others to make Portland Livable appears headed for the November 8 ballot for voters to approve.
“Rents on new leases climbed by 14.1 percent in the year, through June, according to Apartment LIst, an apartment listing service. While that is slightly less than the 17.5 percent increase over the course of 2021, it is still an unusually rapid pace of growth. Before the pandemic, a 2 to 3 percent pace of annual increase was normal,” according to an article on the front page of THE NEW YORK TIMES today, Tuesday, July 12, 2022.
Do you have a response to this councilors – or is it just your usual inertia?