City Council discusses, fails to decide on house renting ordinance

An ordinance proposed to the East Lansing City Council that would allow homeowners to rent out their homes if they couldn’t sell could be thrown out at council’s next meeting.

The East Lansing City Council discussed the ordinance at its Oct. 27 work session and, based on information provided by Director of Code Enforcement Howard Asch, is considering starting over on it. The proposed ordinance, officially named ordinance 1212, would allow residents who are having difficulty selling their homes the option to rent to as many as two unrelated people until the home is sold.

The ordinance has been discussed for more than a year among council and various boards and commissions. According to various city officials, it’s been a point of conflict among council and the commissions.

Councilmember Nathan Triplett, who is the council liaison to the Housing Commission, said when the commission saw the ordinance earlier this month, members were very conflicted about whether to send it on to council for further discussion. At council’s Oct. 20 meeting, Triplett also said that because of the commission’s confliction, council would need time to discuss the ordinance at its Tuesday work session.

Asch presented data to council showing East Lansing has a fairly average housing market, and the region as a whole sees an average number of home sales, making the ordinance less necessary.

“It shows that we’re selling about the same number of properties this year as we did last year and it doesn’t seem to be a huge change,” Asch said.

Council members said they had seen anecdotal evidence that the ordinance was needed; however, they were unsure whether those numbers were great.

Triplett said he was unsure if the ordinance would help because of its extensive restrictions on who can apply to rent out their home. He suggested the ordinanced should be thrown out and started from scratch so the Housing Commission has more options to deal with the problems surrounding the ordinance.

The item was moved to next week’s council meeting for action. Councilmember Roger Peters said although he thought there had been some work done on the ordinance, he was not sure the one proposed would solve the problem for homeowners.

“I’m still interested in working on the problem, but I wouldn’t support this ordinance,” Peters said.

Mayor Pro Tem Goddeeris proposed looking into other aspects of homeowners problems, such as potentially looking into the city’s sabbatical policy for when homeowners leave their residence for an extended time, to solve for individual homeowners’ problems.