Boca may tighten rules on rentals

BOCA RATON — Adam Faustini said his neighborhood has become too much like the movie Animal House”: A trio of drunken young adults offering to strip naked, sounds of carousing into morning’s wee hours and a burn of tire tracks on his grass.

And that 12-hour span.

Mayor Susan Haynie says that for years now, a month doesn’t go by without at least one complaint that has the same ring to it: Crowded, single-family homes with rowdy occupants. So now Boca Raton is considering tightening the rules for landlords and tenants.

The specifics of how the city will crack down on overcrowded residences — and rowdiness — haven’t been spelled out yet, but the city already has some ideas to help stem the problem.

Right now, Boca Raton prohibits more than three unrelated adults from living in the same single-family house.

With the rules under consideration, though, landlords would have to register their properties and their tenants with the city, making the resident limits easier to police. And too many violations could result in landlords losing their ability to have tenants in Boca.

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“It’s a new dynamic for the city that we’re not sure how it’s going to work out,” said Mike Woika, Boca’s assistant city manager.

“There appears to be particular areas that are more prone to student rentals.”

One of the main neighborhoods the city wants to help quiet is adjacent to Northwest 20th Street, an area near Florida Atlantic University where many students rent.

Code officers spoke to the occupants of properties generating the complaints and found that many were students, Haynie said.

A neighborhood north of Spanish River Boulevard and another just outside Boca’s downtown also have been the focus of the same complaints, city officials say.

Haynie said she has received complaints of excessive noise, trash and the effects of having more than three unrelated people living in one house, each with an automobile.

Haynie said she started hearing about problems with rentals — particularly to younger adults — in the neighborhoods of single-family homes when the real estate implosion began about seven years ago.

People couldn’t sell their homes for what they owed on them, so they rented, she said.

The situation in some neighborhoods hasn’t turned around with the real-estate recovery, Haynie said.

Faustini, who grew up in the Caldwell Heights neighborhood he lives in now, went to the City Council with pictures of numerous cars crammed on one lot and spots of grass-bare areas on lawns and swales from illegal parking. “I tell a carload of people the party’s over and one of them says, ‘We were just going to strip for you guys’ — right in front of me, my wife and my neighbors,” he said, recalling what his Halloween was like.

“They ride over yards. They park in the swales. They pee on mailboxes. It’s the decay of a neighborhood.”

Jeremy Nantes, who has lived in Caldwell Heights for two years, said that he thinks the problem is when a landlord rents to three people and then those renters sublease to other people.

“You get this under-the-table subletting, so you get more than three people living in there,” he said.

“And that creates a bit of a mess with all these cars parked over the front lawn.

“There’s one house in the neighborhood that has more cars coming in and out than the Dunkin’ Donuts on the corner,” he said.

But rooting out this kind of a problem is not easy. Some of the new rules Boca is considering are similar to those in Gainesville — a smaller town than Boca Raton with a much bigger university, the University of Florida.

Gainesville similarly prohibits more than three unrelated adults from living in one rental house.

But just because six cars are parked at a home doesn’t mean there are six people on the lease, according to Pegeen Hanrahan, who served in Gainesville city government for 10 years until term limits knocked her out of the mayor’s seat in 2010.