Jeff Levy, a private attorney based in Providence, has represented tenants and a landlord in a case brought by the American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island against the city of Providence, over its ordinance that prevents more than three college students from living together in a house that doesn’t include an owner.
This week, a Superior Court judge upheld the Providence ordinance, although expressed reservations about its effectiveness. Levy, who represented the case pro-bono for the ACLU, spoke to the Providence Business News about the impact of the case on property rights.
PBN: What was your initial response to this ruling?
LEVY: I wasn’t terribly surprised. We had a very lengthy oral argument in front of the judge last year. The case was extensively presented on both sides. I think the judge made it pretty clear at the oral argument that she was on the fence about the case. I thought in all likelihood it could go either way.
PBN: How does this affect property rights? You represented a group of tenants and the landlord. Does this decision affect property rights?
LEVY: Sure. The ordinance, if it is enforced, will absolutely affect property rights. It means someone including the landlord-plaintiff in the case, who owns a single-family home in Providence and rents it out to four college students, can no longer do that. He’s an investor. He bought that house with a specific purpose, to rent it to college students. He put a lot of money into it to renovate it. He did that with the expectation that he would be renting it to four students. It’s in the Elmhurst neighborhood. It absolutely affects property rights. It limits the amount of money he can rent the house for.
PBN: Have you any idea how many other rental houses this applies to in Providence?
LEVY: I don’t know the precise number. My guess is the number of houses is under 100. It affects single-family houses in areas that are zoned residential. It doesn’t affect multifamily houses. It also doesn’t affect single-family homes that are in areas zoned for multifamily.
That’s one of the problems of the ordinance. If you try to control for noise and parties and that sort of thing, and you only focus on single-family houses, you aren’t affecting the problem. What they’re doing now is they’re saying they’re trying to protect the values of single-family neighborhoods. They don’t want students. It lumps all college students together.
PBN: Does this impact the Narragansett case at all? They had previously tried to do something similar.
LEVY: It doesn’t in that a Superior Court case doesn’t have any precedential value for other districts. The decision from Narragansett was more than 20 years ago. There is a movement afoot in Narragansett I think to revisit this again. They also might wait to see if there is an appeal.
PBN: Have you decided whether to appeal the case to the Supreme Court of Rhode Island?
LEVY: That decision really belongs to the ACLU. … My own expectation is it will be appealed.
Mary MacDonald is a staff writer for the PBN. Contact her at macdonald@pbn.com.
