Does not include rent control sought by tenants’ rights advocates

By VDC staff

Tenants get some protection, landlords get some protection in what’s being portrayed as a compromise bill about evictions and rental agreements.

On January 29, The Vermont House Committee on General and Housing unveiled a new twenty-nine page bill, H.772, that makes numerous changes to rental agreements and substantive changes to the rental eviction process. Sponsored by Committee Chair Representative Marc Mihaly (D-Washington 6), the bill makes compromises to strengthen protections for tenants while reforming the eviction process to encourage landlord confidence. 

“The theory behind the bill is pretty simple, rather brutally simple, which is to give each side what it most wants, regardless of the fact that the other side really doesn’t want what the other side wants. It really focuses on giving each side what it wants”, said Mihaly. 

Information for In Committee news reports are sourced from GoldenDomeVt.com and the General Assembly website. 

The bill broadens the scope of for-cause evictions and shortens the timeframe on the eviction process. It expands the conditions for evictions to include repeated late rent payments, refusal to allow access to the unit by the landlord, refusal to accept reasonable changes to the lease, and the tenant interfering with the health or safety of others. 

In the compromise, the bill eliminates no-cause evictions to ensure that tenants are only being evicted when they have committed an offense to have cause to break the lease agreement. The bill also makes changes to the way that landlords are allowed to raise rents, limiting rent increases to once per year and only in amounts that are reasonable. The only variation is in the event of a property sale. When a buyer purchases the property, they are restricted in the amount they are allowed to raise rents to a maximum of 3% above the consumer price index within the first year. 

When explaining how he crafted the compromise in the bill, Mihaly made specific reference to rent control policies, which have been the subject of recent media attention in places like New York City. “Tenants very much would like to see what I would call rent control, that is a control over rents generally, and there are states that have that, although most don’t. This bill does not contain rent control”, said Mihaly. 

This is not the only housing bill under the committee’s purview this session, and not even the only bill that addresses tenant-landlord issues. As reported by Vermont Daily Chronicle on January 23, H.688 introduced by Rep. Deborah Dolgin seeks to make similar reforms. Mihaly explained that his intent is to use his bill as a vehicle and common ground with the different housing bills before his committee this year. 

He finished his introduction of his bill by acknowledging his view of the problem that his bill seeks to address:

“I don’t have an answer to this problem. When you have a situation where there are really bad actors on both sides, and there are. There are terrible landlords and there are just terrible tenants. When you have a situation with really bad actors on both sides, the tendency for each side is to want to address the bad actors. But you have to be careful because most people aren’t bad actors. Most tenants are great tenants. Most landlords are fine, but if you aren’t careful and you address the bad actors, you can hurt the good actors by going too extreme by doing something that doesn’t make sense for the big middle. And so that’s a real problem when you’re trying to craft legislation where you have these extreme examples.”