Landlords and several homeowners are on the losing side of the legal spectrum after a judge rejected their lawsuit against a city ordinance that places limits on homeowners near Syracuse University.

The ordinance requires new rental properties to have one off-street parking space per bedroom in the Special Neighborhood District, which extends from the Euclid Avenue area by SU to Westmoreland Avenue.

The ordinance only affects homes that residents want to convert from owner-occupied to rental properties, not homes that are already rentals.

A judge in the New York state Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that the ordinance is valid. Approximately five landlords in the Syracuse Property Owners Association and five homeowners brought the lawsuit against the city of Syracuse, said Joseph Tupper, the association’s president.

Some homeowners are extremely upset by the decision because they feel they should be able to sell their homes to whomever they please, Tupper said. Few houses can fit the ordinance’s criteria, he said, making it difficult to sell to landlords.

‘Most of these homes don’t come close to having that many parking spots,’ he said.

The Syracuse Property Owners Association has spent more than $100,000 in legal fees battling various forms of the ordinance since 2007, Tupper said. Landlords sued after the Syracuse Common Council initially passed the legislation in 2007. A judge called the law invalid in January 2009, citing that a proper environmental review procedure had not been performed.

But the city addressed the environmental concerns, and the Common Council voted in favor of upholding the law last year. The judge’s ruling on Thursday approves that decision.

Tupper said an appeal appears likely, as he feels the landlords have a strong case. The appeal could deal with the uniformity issue of treating owner-occupied homes and landlords the same, as well as what Tupper called ‘extremely weak’ data the city presented for the ordinance’s environmental impact, he said.

‘We felt it was terribly incomplete, that it was inaccurate,’ Tupper said. ‘It was extremely difficult to understand the origin of some of the numbers.’

The landlords did win a victory after the city removed a part of the ordinance that would have allowed on-demand inspections of houses, Tupper said. Landlords are not opposed to good code enforcement but to unwarranted searches, he said.

In reality, the ordinance will probably have little effect on rentals in the Special Neighborhood District, where very few homes are owner-occupied, Tupper said. The houses near SU are predominately filled with students.

The city enforced the ordinance while it was in court, said Nancy Larson, an attorney in the city’s law department.

To follow the ordinance, residents interested in selling to landlords could modify their homes by knocking down a wall, removing a door or making sure that not all rooms in a house are used as bedrooms, she said.

The city is not trying to penalize homeowners, but rather trying to make sure the houses and available parking spaces are suitable to the number of people living in each home, said Kathleen Joy, majority leader of the Common Council.

‘Now there could be 10 cars per house on a street, and if you get a hundred houses there on a block, you’ve got 1,000 cars,’ she said. ‘The streets were not designed for that.’

As more student housing becomes available with the construction of Dineen Hall for SU law school students and Centennial Hall, Joy said the Common Council is discussing whether the rental properties in the Special Neighborhood District could ever turn back into owner-occupancy homes. They probably will not, Joy said, but the residence halls will draw students away from the rental properties.

In February, Common Councilor-at-Large Jean Kessner proposed shrinking the size of the Special Neighborhood District where the ordinance is enforced. She emphasized that as students move to housing under construction, the city needs to make sure the unintended consequence of homes turning vacant and landlords not being able to sell does not arise.

‘As students move — what they leave behind — will that cause problems in the neighborhood?’ she said. ‘We need to look ahead.’

Kessner, who voted in favor of the bedroom and parking ordinance, called the most recent judge’s decision a win for the city.

‘I don’t hear any rumblings that the landlords are going to sue again,’ she said. ‘So maybe this will settle it for a while.’

mcboren@syr.edu

Published on March 21, 2011 at 12:00 pm