Opinion & Comments: Landlords a Driving Force Behind Court Dissolution Efforts

I grew up in Brockport in the 1980s and 90s on Holley Street, in a house that stood where the new Village Boathouse now sits. Every school day, the bus came down, making frequent stops along the entire length from Main Street to Redman Road. We kids, and our siblings, parents, and pets, made Holley Street a neighborhood of its own.

I wonder how many stops that bus route has today.

There were rentals with college students, but having family homes among them helped keep their behavior in check. Other than the usual signs of college life, there was no real difference in my mind between their properties and other residential homes. It felt like growing up in a fairly normal American town.

That was before I became a student at SUNY Brockport myself, and got an inside view as a tenant of a Clinton Street property in 2001 and 2002. The house had been gutted and split into six 10’ x 6’ bedrooms. The walls were paneling tacked onto 2x4s, and there was a fist hole hidden behind a Charlie Brown poster in the hall. The bathroom was a horror. We each paid $280 a month in rent, and I can only imagine what they are charging today.

The landlord was a guy named Larry. He used to show up on our doorstep, bleary-eyed and aggressive, in the middle of the night, demanding rent in cash. When our refrigerator broke, he took weeks to replace it with another used fridge that he dumped outside our apartment for us to drag in. When we moved out, he refused to return our deposit for months until we finally settled for a pittance of the original amount rather than confront his lawyer. Larry was not a Village resident.

The apartment we shared a wall with was occupied not by students, but by a single mother with several infant children. We called Child Protective Services every time we heard her screaming at her poor, crying babies in the middle of the night, echoing through our paper-thin walls. Larry was unsympathetic.

In almost 20 years of living in Brooklyn (in some very not-nice areas), I never had an apartment experience as horrible as the one I had in Brockport.

There was no Village Court back then to take our complaints to. We were students anyway, and we had no idea how to advocate for ourselves if we could, and that is what makes college housing so predatory: The landlords are banking on the fact that students will put up with inadequate conditions simply because they don’t know any better. That goes double for struggling families and single parents forced to rent these houses when they have no other option. When the neighbors are gone, who’s left to complain?

Here’s the truth: The only real “student housing” in Brockport is on the SUNY Brockport campus—everything else is just sub-standard housing.

I cannot imagine any other community allowing these for-profit properties to exist in the state they do, with their permanent rental signs plastered all over their grimy facades. The effect on property values and the number of families fleeing those neighborhoods could have easily been predicted and is now very apparent to anyone with eyes.

With more rentals comes more landlords, and thus more power to their faction. It’s clear by the number of pro-abolishment yard signs sprouting up on their poorly kept lawns that the worst of the college housing landlords are a driving force behind dissolving the Village Court. They were the driving force behind efforts to dissolve the entire Village in 2010 and 2016. I wasn’t here for that, but I watched with keen interest as residents scrambled to organize grassroots opposition and ultimately defeated those measures—twice.

Unfortunately, the landlords are stronger than ever, and they are championed by residents who live in very nice houses in very nice neighborhoods tucked away in quiet parts of the Village. You may never have even seen these parts of Brockport. Their pro-abolishment yard signs stand proudly on beautifully manicured lawns.

I wonder how they would feel if one of those big, permanent “FOR RENT” signs went up on the house next door?

Of course, that would never happen because they just don’t live in those parts of the Village. Yet they ask you not to speak ill of the landlords and the rental scourge that has literally destroyed other Brockport neighborhoods, including the one I grew up in on Holley Street

Keep in mind, these are the same people demanding that not a nickel of your taxes go toward anything they consider unfriendly or redundant, but judging by their houses, you can easily tell Village taxes don’t really pose much of a financial strain on them.

I can’t knock success, but I guarantee that the Village residents fighting to keep the court do so despite the fact that a tax cut would actually mean something to their situation. They fight for the court because they understand its value.

People frequently call Village elections a beauty contest, but that belittles the democratic process and the importance—and value—of a local government. The fact is that all layers of government matter and serve separate functions for their electorate. Whether they function properly and in the best interests of taxpayers, or erode into dissolution, can only be determined by the voters who turn out in that moment, and the people of Brockport met that challenge in 2010 and 2016.

I believe this Tuesday, Brockport faces just such a moment.

Ben DiMatteo
Brockport