by P.D. Lesko

Katie Waddle is a Ph.D. student in mathematics at the University of Michigan. She holds a B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Chicago, an M.Ed in Secondary Math Education from Stanford, and an M.A. in Mathematics from San Francisco State University. To state the obvious: Katie Waddle can count. She signed a lease on an apartment on Aug. 25, 2023 and on Oct. 25, 2023 Waddle received an email from her landlord in which she was encouraged to renew her lease. She contacted the newspaper via email: “My housemate and I received the email below from our landlord…on October 25th, giving us four business days to respond.  We moved in on August 25th of this year [2023] This seems like a blatant attempt to probe the limits of the Early Leasing Ordinance [ELO].”

Thanks to the ELO, renters in Ann Arbor who sign 12-month leases have six months before needing to inform a landlord whether the tenant intends to renew a rental agreement. Landlords are also barred from showing occupied apartments sooner than 150 days before the end of a lease. The ELO gives landlords the option of informing their tenants about subsequent lease terms 240 days (8 months) before the end of a lease. The ELO does not give landlords the right to solicit renewals earlier than six months before the end of a lease.

The Oct. 25, 2023 email threatened Waddle and the other tenants in her building: “If we don’t hear from you at all we will implement a much much higher rent increase. Once the even higher rent increase goes into effect. We will no longer offer the renewal rate.” The email from CMB Management went on to further threaten, “Now, on the flip side, if you for sure 100% graduating or leaving Ann Arbor or just plain planning on living somewhere else… Let. Me. Know. Otherwise, I’m going to send you a bunch of renewal emails over the next couple of weeks until I hear from you. Like, a bunch a bunch.”

Katie Waddle and her housemate Han Le live in an apartment owned by Ann Arbor Apartments; they pay $1,700 rent for a two bedroom apartment on Miller Ave. Dr. Carl Calfin, a dentist, founded his Ann Arbor Apartments rental company in 1992 along with his brother Norm. Calfin now owns 17 rental properties throughout the city and they are managed by CMB Management (which Calfin owns). Calfin is a relatively small property owner when compared to landlords such as McKinley and Oxford. Nonetheless, like McKinley and Oxford, Calfin’s company is subject to the Early Leasing Ordinance.

The coercive email Calfin sent out is yet another move in a game that Ann Arbor landlords have been playing since the ELO was passed in Sept. 2021.

Former Council Member Elizabeth Nelson, D-4th Ward was a lead sponsor of the ELO ordinance. She was quoted in The Michigan Daily in 2021: “Landlords are now generating waiting lists for apartments, having people pay to be on waiting lists, and telling tenants their rent will go up if they don’t commit now to renewing for the following year.”

According to city code, a violation of the ELO constitutes a civil infraction punishable by a fine of not less than $500.00 for the first offense, not less than $500.00 and up to $1,000.00 for each additional or subsequent offense, plus costs and other remedies available by statute. A tenant may also sue a landlord for a violation of the ELO for injunctive relief or damages, or both.

By sending the Oct. 25 email pressuring Waddle to disclose whether she intends to renew her lease, Waddle’s landlord, CMB Management, violated the City’s Early Leasing Ordinance. By threatening to send “a bunch of renewal emails” less than 240 days before the end of Waddle’s lease, CMB Management also violated the ELO.

The newspaper reached out to CMB Management and its owner Dr. Carl Calfin to ask about the company’s Oct. 25 email sent to Waddle and her fellow tenants. Dr. Calfin has not yet responded.

Landlords Exploit Loopholes and Ignore the ELO

Katie Waddle and her fellow CMB Management renters are by no means alone in being threatened with huge rent increases if they don’t renew less than 90 days after they signed their leases.

Since the Sept. 2021 passage of the Early Leasing Ordinance, Ann Arbor landlords have been exploiting loopholes in the language of the ordinance. In Nov. 2021, The Michigan Daily reported on one such loophole:

In 2021, Jeffrey Lockhart was a graduate student at U-M. In Nov., one month after the city’s Early Leasing Ordinance was passed, Lockhart’s landlord (Oxford Properties) sent him an email which said, “leasing season is upon us.”

In 2021, shortly after Council adopted the ELO, The Michigan Daily reported:

“Engineering senior Nathan Nohr is currently a resident of Prime Student Housing, a local housing authority. In a statement to The Michigan Daily, Nohr said there is a waitlist process for current residents. According to Nohr, a reservation requires paying one and a half months of rent, which will give residents priority to sign in March — a move Nohr said is unfair. ‘Prime Student Housing notified current residents in September that we would need to resign our lease or else they would open up reservations for our apartment,’ Nohr wrote. ‘This circumvents the ordinance and still requires students to renew early in the year and now forces other prospective residents to make a hefty reservation if they want to make sure to get a place. If students decide not to act on the waitlist reservation they lose the rent reservation fee.’ 

Despite landlords pervasive violation of the ELO since shortly after its passage, Ann Arbor’s Mayor and City Council members have not closed the loopholes in the ELO or revisited the ordinance in light of the continuing complaints by renters.

City Council Protecting Tenants, in Theory

Chapter 105 of Ann Arbor’s Housing Code deals with lease agreements and entry to show residential premises. The city’s Early Leasing Ordinance was passed in 2021 to protect tenants from predatory leasing behavior by landlords. In Ann Arbor, landlords are eager to have their apartments rented for succeeding years. Landlords could do multi-year leases, but few do. Instead, in some cases (like Waddle’s) just weeks after signing a lease, tenants are pressured to renew their leases.

The Early Leasing Ordinance tells landlords when they can start asking current tenants to renew their lease. Prior to September 2021, landlords could start showing properties and signing new leases for the next school year 70 days after a lease was signed. The month the Early Leasing Ordinance was passed, the Washtenaw Area Apartment Association sued the city along with dozens of landlords.

The landlords’ lawsuit alleged that, “By enacting the (ordinance provisions) at the behest of certain University of Michigan students, the City has exercised its police power in the service of special, private interests at the sole expense of Ann Arbor landlords. The (provisions) simply serve (to) encourage off-books or black-market leasing activity.”

The apartment association, which includes 120 members who lease 16,000 rental properties in Ann Arbor, voluntarily dropped the suit In Dec. 2021.

When the suit was dropped, Mayor Chris Taylor said, “Our ordinance is an effort to level the playing field and I believe that we’re going to continue to do everything we can to ensure that folks are able to rent in Ann Arbor in a way that provides them with safe and secure housing.”

Calfin’s email to Waddle and the other renters in his 20 unit building on Miller Ave. was written as if the new ordinance had not been passed in 2021, and that leasing season begins in October.

Waddles lease renewal email was signed by “Keli.”

Keli answered the phone at Ann Arbor Apartments and said that she had, indeed, sent out the email received by Waddle and the other tenants renting from Calfin.

When asked why the tenants were being solicited to renew August leases in October, in violation of the city’s Early Leasing Ordinance, Calfin’s employee claimed that the lease renewal email had been “sent out by an automated system.”

The email provided to the newspaper by Waddle was sent from email@rentmanager.com. Rent Manager is a software suite of tools, including accounting, marketing, leasing and communication tools. The Rent Manager software doesn’t compose emails and then send them out; the users of the software do that.

The Early Leasing Ordinance’s restrictions don’t protect renters who sign leases for eight months or less. 

To file a complaint about a landlord who violates the ELO visit: https://www.a2gov.org/departments/build-rent-inspect/housing/Pages/Filing-Complaints.aspx#complaints