Chelsea is a city of renters. Roughly three quarters of its households rent, which is among the highest shares in Massachusetts. On Monday night the City Council adopted an order, without objection, asking the city manager to find out whether City Hall can help those households understand the leases they sign.
Order 2663, introduced by District 6 Councillor Giovanni Recupero, asks that “the City Manager work with relevant departments to explore the feasibility of providing assistance to residents in understanding the terms and conditions of their residential leases.” It was adopted by unanimous consent, and it commits the city to nothing more than looking.
Recupero’s case
He made the argument in the plainest terms available to him, starting with himself.
“I know we live in an immigrant community and all of us aren’t college educated,” he said. “There’s a lot of people, when they go in and rent apartments, can’t understand the fine printing. It happened to me. And I’m not the brainiest guy in the world, but it happens to even the brainiest guy. Unless you’re a lawyer you can’t figure it out.”
What he described is a constituent-service problem he has been handling informally. “I’ve gotten people call me and tell me that they don’t understand what it is,” he said. He wants the city to have somewhere to send them: “some type of an area or a department that, for people that have issues, they can’t understand what they’re reading or what they’re signing, they could go and help them and maybe make them understand.”
He also went out of his way to remove the stigma. “That doesn’t mean you’re ignorant. That doesn’t mean, you just don’t understand the words that lawyers use. And everybody is not a lawyer. So if you can help the people, why not try it?”
Taylor agreed, and added a condition
District 1 Councillor Todd Taylor, who had voted no on the previous item and who does not usually line up with Recupero, backed this one at length.
“Some of these leases are extremely tricky and they use a lot of language that you don’t know what it means unless you bring it to a lawyer and have them decipher it,” he said. He tied it to the council’s other housing work: “I think this also dovetails with our efforts to try to hold landlords accountable for their behavior.”
His condition was institutional. “The legal department should have some sort of say in how this is actually done.” He called the order “one of the more useful things that we could do,” and pointed at the money at stake for a tenant who signs something they have not understood: “It could cost you money as far as lots of fees, and if you’re late on your rent or whatever, there’s all kinds of things that could come up.”
The line the city will have to draw
The hard part is not translation. It is the boundary between explaining a document and advising someone about it. A municipal employee who tells a tenant what a lease clause means for that tenant’s situation is close to practicing law, and the city solicitor’s office represents the city rather than residents. That is presumably part of why Taylor wanted legal involved before anything is designed.
There are models that stay on the right side of the line. Plain-language guides to the standard terms in a Massachusetts residential lease, translated into the languages Chelsea actually speaks. Clinic hours staffed by volunteer attorneys or a legal services organization. Referral lists. A checklist of what a tenant should look for before signing, covering the security deposit rules, the late fee rules, automatic renewal, and who pays for what.
None of that is in the order. The order asks the city manager to explore feasibility and report back, and there is no deadline attached. Whether it becomes a service or a memo depends on what comes back to the council.
Related
Chelsea’s rental market is also the subject of the council’s work on who gets notified about new development, where the position of tenants in large buildings came up directly, and of the inclusionary zoning fight that ran through the spring.