Are bad landlords a disease or a symptom?  That’s the question tacitly asked by the Boston Globe in a practical and depressing article entitled Sun, sand, and seediness:

From the Boston Globe: dangling light in John Murphy’s cottage

SALISBURY – Light bulbs dangle from sockets fed by fraying wires. Water leaks from an uninsulated ceiling.

[Love that gratuitous 'uninsulated'.  – Ed.]

And a kitchen wall has been charred by flames from the adjacent stove.

Probably the tenant’s culpability but unquestionably the landlord’s responsibility to fix.

Such is life in the tiny, two-room cottage that John Murphy and his 10-year-old daughter call home on Salisbury Beach, a former ocean playground on the North Shore that for decades has been mired in decline.

Bypassed by Interstate 95, and in decline ever since?

Salisbury, like many another town in New England, came to prominence as a summer day trip or week-trip during the heyday of the streetcars.  (I have been told that at one time it was possible to travel from Boston all the way to Portland, Maine, solely by streetcar.)

A big time a hundred years ago; Salisbury Beach in postcards

Murphy began complaining to town officials nearly two years ago when he moved into the home –

Why complain to the town (and not the landlord) after you move in?  Why move in if you’re going to complain to the town?

– which once was a summer rental but now is among dozens of similar structures used year-round.

Temporary housing or seasonal housing very often becomes permanent.

According to Murphy, his documented complaints went nowhere, despite the many obvious code and health violations in the cottage.

Why not withhold rent?

Why not move out?

There’s only one conclusion: Mr. Murphy cannot find anything better that he and his daughter can afford. 

“The town did nothing,’’ said Murphy, 43, an itinerant handyman who said he cannot afford to move off the beach and out of a place that rents for $650 a month.

We’ll leave aside what options Mr. Murphy might have, with his informal income and his single parenting, and instead ask, what duties does the town have?

Nearly everywhere else, beachfront property is the choicest cut of a community’s land. That’s not a guarantee in Salisbury, where the transient and the marginalized often live among boarded-up and falling-down remnants from a more prosperous era.

Be happy at Salisbury Beach!

Something about a declining resort is unutterably depressing.  As a town dies, the adverse selection of more affluent people and businesses moving out leaves a vacuum that is either partially filled by lower-income businesses, or not filled at all, leaving the buildings shuttered and silent.

Happier times behind?  Salisbury Beach

Slums are economically rational, and may arise any time there is insufficient return from reinvesting in property improvements.  Slums, therefore, are prevented only by government action, and Salisbury’s government is moved to act.

Now, motivated by mounting allegations from beach residents of landlord neglect and bureaucratic negligence, Salisbury officials have begun to turn their attention toward living conditions on the long, narrow beach.

“The town does not have a stellar history with complaints of building-code violations at the beach,’’ said Town Manager Neil Harrington, who has held the position for six years. “There’s no sense in sugar-coating it.’’

Harrington keeps smiling

Salisbury is also trying to increase economic development, which it must if it intends to grow its real estate tax base.  As I put it in the un-growing city regarding the Ohio industrial city of Youngstown:

A town is a business that sells quality of life and competes with other towns to attract real estate tax payers. It spends its revenue on infrastructure that enhances quality of life and enables it to attract more workers and real estate tax payers.  Some towns are so attractive, relative to their rural competition, that they attract millions of newcomers without even trying, and these towns become megacities by growing vast economically rational but unplanned spontaneous communities called slums, where the housing demand has overrun the infrastructure capacity – and the problem of fixing slums’ overrun capacity is, I believe, the greatest demographic challenge of the 21st century, the century of cities.

Because towns compete, some lose. This is less of a problem when a region or nation’s population is rising, because even losing market share (like Galveston did after the 1900 hurricane and Old New Orleans had been doing even before hurricane Katrina) can be absorbed in people terms through population growth.

Salisbury clearly understands its problem, for it posts wonderfully detailed and complete real estate tax maps

If you download the .pdf, you can see everything down to the lot level

Town Manager Harrington is certainly dedicated:

Many complaints, Harrington acknowledged, appear to have died with lower-level inspectors without reaching the attention of their supervisors. One result, he said, was a broad sense of abandonment by the beach’s many poorer residents, who often were afraid to contact town officials or their landlords because of the possibility of eviction.

If residents complain to the town, will the landlord retaliate with eviction?  That’s illegal, to be sure, but residents understandably have grounds for concern.

“It was deplorable,’’ Harrington said.

The beachfront neglect, mostly concentrated in the southern end of the neighborhood, is a far cry from the area’s halcyon days that began a century ago.

Sun and sand less than an hour away

Mill workers from Lawrence and Lowell would flock to the beach on their days off, attracted by fresh air, surf, and the pushcarts, concession stands, live entertainment, and amusement rides that blossomed to serve them.

Twenty-five minutes east, the beach!

Eventually, show-business stars such as Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, and Sammy Davis Jr. performed there.

A hoppin’ place in a hoppin’ time

But by the early 1970s, Harrington said, increasing mobility and a craving for newer forms of entertainment started a long, inexorable decline.

Will an economy built on sand wash away?

In an effort to reverse that slide, Salisbury officials are planning to upgrade health-inspection services, insist on eliminating longstanding code violations, and get the message out to landlords and tenants that the status quo has changed at Town Hall.

Salisbury beach’s real estate is in a downward spiral.  Dwindling demand has lowered the economic base, and the real estate tax base.  That’s economically evicted reinvesting landlords, and created a vacuum that, as the sun breeds maggots in a dead dog, breeds a different kind of landlord.

For Murphy, a turnaround cannot come soon enough. His landlord, Vo Son Hong of Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood, was cited last month for 13 dangerous conditions and code violations.

As an absentee landlord, Mr. Hong lacks the accountability of more local landlords. 

Murphy said Hong routinely ignored his complaints, including during the two months when his gas heat was turned off because of a leak.

Armed with his fistful of code violations, however, Mr. Murphy is now in a position legally to withhold rent, or even potentially to make repairs himself and offset the repairs costs against future rents owed.  

Wonder what it’s like inside?  (Note the blurry FOR RENT signs.)

A typical Salisbury Beach cottage (not Mr. Murphy’s)

Another of Hong’s tenants, Melody York, who lives with her 12-year-old daughter, echoed Murphy’s allegations that the landlord ignored routine maintenance and subsequent complaints. Leaks, poor wiring, and a lack of insulation in her two-bedroom cottage mirror much of the living conditions in Murphy’s home next door, York said.

“This place is just falling apart, piece by piece,’’ said York, 33, who is moving from the house in July after nearly two years there.

Yet the downward spiral is not arrested merely by fiat.  By driving landlords to renovate their properties and maintain them at a minimum habitable level, do you drive the apartments out of business?  Or, by doing nothing, do you allow their unjust enrichment by exploiting people who have few options?

On a downward trajectory: pink slide, Salisbury beach

What can the town do?  Shrink, as Youngstown is doing?  Revive itself with municipal initiatives, as Revere Beach has been trying? 

Despite the problems at the beach, Harrington sees a promise of better days ahead. Nearly all the bars, arcades, and discount stores clustered near the center of Salisbury Beach are under agreement for a proposed mixed-use development that could dramatically change the beleaguered face of the area.

Their amusements are prehistoric: miniature golf, Salisbury Beach

Or get leaner and better through consolidation of some functions?

“We’ve been kind of limping along in our health department,’’ said Harrington, who served two terms as mayor of Salem in the 1990s. “The situation really has not served us all that well.’’

One step toward meeting those goals could be taken tonight when the Board of Selectmen is scheduled to consider a regional health agreement with Amesbury and Newburyport, its neighbors to the west and south. Under the plan, the three communities would share a health director.

Three towns united against the New Hampshire border

[Another factor in Salisbury's decline, unmentioned in the Globe article.  It's the last beach in high-tax Massachusetts, adjacent to the first beach in low-tax New Hampshire.  Much of the northern growth is occurring in Seabrook and Nashua and other towns just over the tax line from Taxachusetts.]

For Salisbury, which does not have a full-time health agent, the arrangement would be an immediate improvement.

Health and housing are inextricably linked:

The regional accord would help Salisbury move toward implementing a plan approved in 2008, under which comprehensive building inspections would be ordered to bring all housing up to code.

Here is an essential function of government: to insist on minimum standards of habitability.  This is especially important in a declining demography.  When there are more houses than households to rent them, then the landlord community has a reverse-auction, with owners competing to go lower on rent, and hence racing to the bottom on lack of services and maintenance.  That’s economically rational, and unhealthy for the town. 

With mandatory inspections of rental housing looming, beach residents might soon have new leverage at Town Hall.

That plan, which Harrington believes is the first of its kind in Salisbury, has not yet begun because of plummeting municipal revenues and unfilled positions.

The government action costs money, and will produce no short-term benefits.  That it is essential for the town’s eventual recovery makes finding the money now no easier.  Triage is never pleasant.

Tough to fight when your revenue base is eroding

As an example, the town has seen a drop of $500,000 in state aid for its fiscal 2010 budget of $18 million, Harrington said.

Nevertheless, when it comes to rental, the town needs to cull the herd, driving out of business the bottom percentiles of properties, and bringing supply and demand into balance by removing supply.

The inspection plan would require all rental housing at the beach to be checked for violations before each summer season. All other rental housing in this town of 7,800 residents would be subject to inspection when tenants change.

Such a move will shrink the supply, and improve the supply.  Those actions will benefit all renters, and those landlords who survive the cut.

“The town has not fulfilled its obligation at the beach,’’ Harrington said.

I like the man’s candor and clarity.

“That’s a longstanding historical situation that we’re going to try to rectify.’’

Still, Harrington said, the old perception of Salisbury as a Wild West place where connections were king will take some time to disappear.

“We have a long way to go,’’ the town manager said.

At least there’s a plan.

A man with a plan: Neil Harrington of Salisbury, MA

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