Proposal to exempt smaller landlords from Portland rent control qualifies for ballot

A proposal to exclude landlords with nine or fewer units from Portland’s rent control ordinance has enough verified signatures to be included on the November ballot.

The city clerk’s office announced Wednesday that staff had certified the 1,500 signatures needed for a citizen-initiated proposal to appear on the ballot.

A total of about 1,700 signatures were submitted but staff did not certify additional signatures once the 1,500 threshold was reached, said City Clerk Ashley Rand.

The referendum is likely to be the third citizen-initiated rent control question to go to voters within a year. It will now go to the City Council, which can send it to voters, adopt it outright or add a competing measure to the ballot. A separate, staff-created proposal to change the rent control rules is now expected to be delayed until next year.

“This category of units belongs to mom-and-pop owners,” said Chris Korzen, who is part of a group that gathered signatures to put the question on the ballot.

“These are people who aren’t looking to get rich. They’re just looking to get by, and in a lot of cases they’ve looked to keep rents low but are now stuck with rents that are well below the typical market rate,” he said.

Korzen said the proposal is similar to provisions in South Portland’s rent stabilization ordinance, which excludes landlords with less than 16 units.

The Maine chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, which wrote the rent control ordinance, will oppose the question, said Rose DuBois, chair of the DSA’s Portland campaign committee.

DuBois challenged the idea that a landlord with nine units is a small landlord.

“These are landlords with quite a few units trying to add a loophole to the law so they can raise rents on their tenants,” DuBois said. “It’s just incomprehensible how landlords continue to think the answer to the housing crisis is to continue to raise rents.”

The City Council is expected to hold a first read on the question at its July 17 meeting. Mayor Kate Snyder said the council will likely vote to send the question to voters without adding a competing measure.

“If someone were to bring forward a competing measure, that would be one thing,” Snyder said. “I haven’t heard of anything coming, but in order to schedule time for stakeholder engagement and council process, (the timeline) would be very tight.”

The council has also been asked by city staff to postpone work on a proposal from the Housing Safety Office, which came out with its own recommendations to change the rent control ordinance.

A first read of the proposal was held this week, at which time City Manager Danielle West said the request to postpone would be made at the next meeting to give the council more time to evaluate the proposal and answer questions. That proposal is likely to come back in the spring and could appear on the ballot in 2024.