Eugene’s $10 cap preventing landlords and property management companies from imposing high application fees on prospective tenants will remain. On Feb. 20, the Oregon Supreme Court denied Thorin Properties’ petition for review after the Oregon Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the city of Eugene in August for the enforcement of the $10 cap on rental application fees.
Housing advocates say the decision is a win for those with barriers to housing access, and want to take the cap to the state level — something the landlords strongly oppose.
The original complaint, submitted in November 2022 by Thorin Properties and Jennings Group, argued that the city’s rule was in violation of Oregon’s Residential and Landlord Tenant Act, which allows landlords to collect fees to cover necessary screening processes.
Jennings Group partner and CEO Darren Stone says he was “a little surprised” by the Oregon Supreme Court’s decision to deny review. According to Stone, the district court interpreted a landlord’s ability to recoup their application costs as outlined in ORLTA as a right, but the appellate court had a different interpretation.
“The appellate court essentially said that it’s not granted in Chapter 90, it’s permitted,” he says. “Therefore, a municipality can place restrictions on what’s permitted without pre-empting.” Pre-empting, in this context, means overriding or conflicting with a higher legal authority, such as state law.
Stone says that application fees are important in order for landlords to accurately screen prospective tenants to ensure that consumer protections are in place. These protections include disclosing how applications will be judged and deposit and rental fees.
“Some landlords don’t want to provide those types of consumer protections so they don’t charge application fees,” Stone says. “This way they don’t have to comply with the administrative burden of consumer protections.”
Eugene Tenant Alliance, a renter’s advocacy group, says it believes the $10 cap is critical for vulnerable populations facing housing insecurity.
“Application fees have the most pronounced effect on tenants who apply to multiple properties,” Adriana Grant, policy associate with Eugene Tenant Alliance, says. “Repeat applicants can tend to be those with barriers to accessing housing, like evictions, criminal histories, poor credit… and individuals from marginalized communities are disproportionately affected by these barriers.”
According to Grant, Black and Latino applicants are twice as likely to submit five or more rental applications when searching for housing compared to white people.
Eugene Tenant Alliance hopes to take the ordinance to the rest of Oregon as the nonprofit is currently advocating for House Bill 2967, which aims to take away rental application fees statewide.
“This [$10 cap] is a very big win,” Grant says. “But our work is not done, to say the least.”
This story received support from the Local News Initiative at the Catalyst Journalism Project, based at the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication. For more, see Catalystjournalism.uoregon.edu.
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