Advisory housing referendum passes … now what?

QUINCY — A crucial step has been completed, but for Brennan Hills and the rest of Q-RILE (an acronym for Quincy for Registration Inspection Licensing Enactment), the work is far from complete.

The organization’s ordinance proposal, which calls for the implementation of a comprehensive and proactive rental inspection program, passed during Tuesday’s consolidated election with 60.6 percent of voters deciding in favor of the non-binding proposal.

“It’s definitely happy times,” Q-RILE founder Brennan Hills said. “This is an absolute mandate to city government that a program like Q-RILE needs to be implemented. No longer can we afford half measures and delays.”

Q-RILE has worked for over two years to get this proposal on the ballot by raising awareness about Quincy’s housing crisis and collecting signatures for their petition. However, because the proposal is non-binding, the Quincy City Council still needs to pass it for it to be enacted.

“What’s next is pressuring the city council and being willing to offer any assistance that we can in making this happen,” Hills said. “With the resources and the tools that we have gained over the 2 ½-year process of getting this on the ballot and learning about how this program works in other cities, the connections that we have, I’m happy to work with anyone on city council who wants to bring forward any version of a program like Q-RILE.”

Hills was “cautiously optimistic” about the proposal’s prospects of getting passed. 

“I knew in my heart that people genuinely cared about this issue and were just as passionate as I am,” Hills said. “It’s just not everybody has the time or the ability to show the passion that I often do in front of the city council.”

While the proposal is designed to reward “good” landlords and prevent “bad” landlords from renting out unsafe properties, the Quincy Landlord Rental Association (QLRA), for which Conlon Carabine is a member, has warned of potential added housing costs if the proposal were to be enacted.

“Are there impacts on landlords and how they do business? Absolutely, and when I say, ‘How they do business,’ I’m talking about all landlords, specifically good landlords,” Carabine said. “There will be impacts on tenants in terms of cost. At the end of the day, there’s a cost to this. If the city is required to hire additional inspectors, where are those coming from? They’re going to have to be skilled tradesmen.”

Carabine said QLRA has made a conscious effort to educate voters of the potential repercussions of passing such an ordinance.

“My anxiety with this referendum was on the face of it,” Carabine said. “I don’t think anyone would oppose it just on the face of how it’s written on the ballot. What myself and a few other folks in the organization attempted to do was try to educate the public about the second and third order effects of that. I felt like we had some success in that, but clearly maybe not enough from our perspective, and that’s just how it works.”

Hills’ nervousness leading up to the election stemmed from how voters may interpret that information.

“There were a lot of people saying, and even threatening people, ‘We’re going to raise rent if this passes.’ I mean, that’s almost a direct threat,” Hills said. “I definitely thought that would impact the results tonight, and that may have. In their hearts, people really could have thought 70-30, but we’ll accept the 60.”

Hills plans on attending Monday’s city council meeting in an attempt to further persuade the city council to pass the ordinance. He also extended his congratulations to newly-elected mayor Linda Moore and invited any additional conversation regarding the ordinance.

“We are not done,” Hills said. “They will see us on Monday night, and we will be willing to have conversations with any council members or the newly elected mayor who I would like to congratulate.”

Carabine encouraged everyone involved to cross all their t’s and dot all their i’s before putting anything in effect.

“There are just so many second and third order effects of something like this if it goes into execution that I just hope people think through,” Carabine said. “That’s not just me as a landlord. That’s me as someone who lives in the community. We’ll see how it plays out.

“It’s such a complicated issue. This is step one in the Q-RILE saga, so we’ll see what happens next.”