Taking action against terrible tenants

South Evanston resident Kristin Doll made an impassioned argument for the rental licensing ordinance at Monday's City Council meeting that unintentionally revealed one of the biggest problems with the measure.

She said a family with a teenage girl had moved into an apartment near her condo. The girl, Doll said, had ambitions to form her own girl-gang and proceeded to terrorize the neighborhood -- assaulting neighbors and inviting over various hangers-on, who engaged in drug dealing and other unsavory activities.

The landlord, she said, initially told neighbors there was little he could do about the disruptive family, but after other tenants in the building moved out, he eventually managed to get the family to leave.

The story left me wondering: If I owned a rental apartment in Evanston, how would I avoid becoming that child's next victim?

The kid likely would does not have a publicly accessible criminal record. And if I called the old landlord who was trying to get rid of the family for a reference, he'd have every incentive to tell me they'd been OK, just to finally get them out of his building.

As far as I can tell, the only change the licensing ordinance would make to this picture is to greatly increase the cost and aggravation for a landlord who has the misfortune to rent to a disastrous tenant.

In addition to the existing cost of pursuing eviction in court, and the likely months of lost rent as the problem tenant refuses to pay up, the city would be empowered to order the property vacated for a minimum of half a year -- placing a small landlord with a mortgage at risk of foreclosure and bankruptcy.

Perhaps what the city really needs is to create a registry of problem tenants that landlords could consult and offer legal protection to landlords who face suits for failing to rent to tenants listed in that registry.