St. Pete City Council moves to help strengthen tenant rights for renters in affordable housing developments

After Florida banned cities and counties last year from regulating the ‘landlord-tenant’ relationship, gutting dozens of local tenants’ rights laws around the state, city leaders in St. Petersburg began brainstorming ideas to fight for more protections for residents who are being priced out of the city.

On Thursday, St. Petersburg City Council approved a new resolution that they hope will help accomplish that without running afoul of state law. The citywide resolution, approved in a 7–1 vote — with term-limited Council member and Florida House candidate Ed Montanari dissenting — basically asks the city administration to “consider” negotiating pro-tenants’ rights language into agreements they enter into with affordable housing developers.

The resolution was drafted by the city’s legal team, and explicitly notes that it “is not intended to regulate landlord-tenant relationships in any manner that would be preempted by Florida law.”

“I don’t think it can get any clearer than that,” quipped Council Member Gina Driscoll, in response to complaints from Montanari, who said he feels this resolution is “clearly preempted.”

St. Pete City Council member Richie Floyd, who spearheaded the proposal, denied this, arguing that the intention is to encourage developers to adopt protective language for renters, not require it. “We’re not allowed to regulate, we’re not allowed to require anything,” Floyd told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay in an interview. “This is asking the administration to seek this in negotiations, and report as to whether or not they were able to successfully get it.”

Staff on the city’s legal team also confirmed this, telling City Council on Thursday, just ahead of Montanari’s complaint, that remaining in compliance with state law was prioritized in the resolution’s development from the “get-go.”

“It only speaks to essentially a policy pronouncement to just consider it [the language] when negotiating the city's own resources, such as money or land, in these types of deals where, you know, nobody is forcing anybody to do anything,” said Michael Dema, one of the city’s attorneys. “Legal is confident that this would be the lightest touch possible,” Dema continued, adding that “it doesn’t veer into the regulatory realm where we're clearly preempted.

What exactly will they be encouraging during negotiations? Under the resolution approved, the city administration will be encouraged to ask local affordable housing developers to adopt language in their agreements that come from the city’s now-defunct ‘Tenants’ Rights’ ordinance.

That ordinance, known as the city’s ‘Tenant Bill of Rights,’ established basic rights for renters in the city, such as providing renters with a notice of a rent increase if that rent increase is greater than five percent (so, not a cap on rent increases — just a warning that a rent increase is coming). It also included an anti-discrimination policy for renters who use government vouchers (such as housing choice or housing vouchers for veterans) to pay a portion of their rent. Other disclosures from landlords for renters, such as providing renters with a notice of late fees, were also required under the law, which has since been repealed due to the state ban .

This new resolution, however — which will be limited to new agreements with developers the city contracts with— aims to re-establish some of those protections for, admittedly, a smaller pool of the city’s renters. It, in effect, “came from that repeal,” Floyd confirmed, while adding that the process of navigating the preemptive state law has been “incredibly frustrating.”

“Our ability to provide relief to tenants has been almost completely destroyed,” he admitted.

Council member Floyd, in addition to state Democrats in the Florida Legislature, housing justice activists, and lobbyists for several county governments, publicly opposed the state ban, which they argued unfairly tied the hands of local government leaders. Supporters, like the politically influential Florida Realtors association, said the ban would get rid of “burdensome regulations.”

“I was looking for a way to continue some tenant protection work within the balance of state law, and that’s where this came up,” said Floyd.

Although the state law was strongly backed by the Florida Realtors and Florida Apartment Association — two major and deep-pocketed industry groups that have complained of a “patchwork” of local regulations across the state — Floyd said that, so far, affordable housing developers he sought feedback from, and the city’s Affordable Housing Advisory Committee (which includes industry stakeholders) have been accepting of the idea.

“We’ve gotten a lot of feedback that said they're okay with this language being included,” Floyd shared. “So we anticipate it being included in a lot of affordable housing developments, and housing developments that get city subsidies in the future.”

The resolution won’t retroactively alter or necessarily change agreements that the city already has with developers, who are aiming to help fill an affordable housing shortage in a city that became a hotspot for double-digit percentage changes in rent prices during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since 2019, the asking median rent in the Tampa-St.Petersburg-Clearwater metro area has increased nearly $500 , according to Realtor.com market data — from a median rent of $1,256 for a studio to two-bedroom apartment in 2019 to $1,754 as of June.

Market data shows that rent price hikes in the Tampa Bay region have started to cool over the last year or two, but the immense spike in 2021 and 2022 has nonetheless left many working people who help run the community still trying to keep up — if they haven’t been forced to leave, bunk up with others, or been evicted due to their higher rents already.

The major spike in rents during the pandemic, Floyd said, came as a “shock” to the community, and today it’s settled into more of what he describes as a “depression.”

“It's just very difficult to live here nowadays, and so that's sort of the attitude that I'm hearing from around town,” he shared. “There’s still, like, a significant amount of people who want to see the city do everything we can to support tenants, and working-class people and even homeowners that are struggling.”

The city moved forward last year with a pilot eviction diversion program in South St. Pete, which aims to offer free legal aid for renters who are either facing or at risk for eviction. Floyd said an update on the results of that so far will be presented publicly in the near future (couldn’t definitively tell CL when), but so far it appears to be going well.

There are a number of similar programs across the U.S. as well, ultimately aiming to bridge the substantial gap between the majority of landlords who have legal representation during eviction proceedings, and the majority of renters who don’t.

While Floyd admits that the new resolution, effective upon its imminent adoption, “won't be as impactful” as the Tenant Bill of Rights law — which covered most all rental units in the city — he expects this focus on strengthening protections for tenants of the future affordable housing developments, focusing on those most strapped for rent money, will have an impact.

“Over the next, like, ten, fifteen years, we can be looking at thousands of units that have tenant protections similar to what the Tenants Bill of Rights provided.”