When a couple knocked on Rack- ham student Jeffrey Lockhart’s door on Nov. 4 asking if he was planning on renewing his apartment lease, Lockhart knew something wasn’t right. As a tenant of Oxford Companies, a popular Ann Arbor real estate com- pany, Lockhart said he was surprised to find prospective tenants outside his home asking about his plans to renew so that they can potentially take over his lease next year. Lock- hart said he received an email from the leasing company that said “leas- ing season is upon us.” “(Oxford Companies) wrote the email basically as if the new ordi- nance had not happened and that leasing season was now in early October, which it of course is not anymore because that is the whole point of the new ordinance,” Lock- hart said. In September, the city of Ann Arbor approved a new leasing ordi- nance to protect students from being forced into signing leases nearly a year before the lease was planned to start. Multiple stakeholders were involved in the development of the legislation, including the Graduate Employees’ Organization, Central Student Government, tenants and landlords. The new leasing ordinance ensures landlords are unable to show a property to new tenants until 150 days prior to the expiration of the current lease. Previous legislation allowed landlords to begin showing properties to prospective tenants 70 days into the current lease. In oppo- sition to the new ordinance, land- lords filed a lawsuit in September against the city of Ann Arbor. Now, many tenants are saying that landlords are finding loopholes in the new ordinance and pressuring students in current leases to renew their contracts much earlier than the accepted time period. Engineering senior Nathan Nohr is currently a resident of Prime Student Housing, a local housing authority. In a statement to The Michigan Daily, Nohr said there is a waitlist process for current resi- dents. According to Nohr, a reserva- tion requires paying one and a half months of rent, which will give resi- dents priority to sign in March — a move Nohr said is unfair. “Prime Student Housing notified current residents in September that we would need to resign our lease or else they would open up reservations for our apartment,” Nohr wrote. “This circumvents the ordinance and still requires students to renew early in the year and now forces other prospective residents to make a hefty reservation if they want to make sure to get a place. If students decide not to act on the waitlist res- ervation they lose the rent reserva- tion fee.” As a GEO member in the union’s housing caucus group, Rackham student Lucy Peterson said the leg- islation was widely supported by GEO members since many in the organization have experienced their own issues with housing as graduate students. “From being graduate students living in the city for a while, a lot of us have experienced issues with early leasing,” Peterson said. “Grad- uate students have to handle a lot of precarity in their work because we could be needing to do research one semester, we could get a job and have to move. So the idea of having to sign a lease 10 months in advance is a huge burden on graduate students in particular.” Peterson said she believes some landlords are using bribes and threats to encourage tenants to sign the leases early. “(Some landlords are) counting on tenants being afraid and isolated and worried about their housing security to get them to renew,” Peterson said. “So landlords are free to use pres- sure, coercion, manipulation, bribes and threats in order to get their existing tenants to renew or to say that they’re not going to renew.” CSG President Nithya Arun, a Public Health senior, said she also received an email from University Towers — a popular student hous- ing apartment complex — saying they are ready to start signing leases for next year. She said that CSG has received many complaints from stu- dents who expressed frustrations about their landlords disregarding the new ordinance. “I immediately thought that the leasing period is not supposed to be open until March, so that seems like a violation,” Arun said. Lockhart said there is also a power dynamic that exists between landlords and tenants, making the effort to stand up for tenant rights difficult for some renters who do not necessarily understand the City Council rules. “If I didn’t follow local city coun- cil ordinance stuff and if I wasn’t paying close attention to this, I’d have no idea that I didn’t have to make that decision now,” Lockhart said. “These are the people that con- trol whether you have housing, how much you pay for housing, they have a lot of power and it’s very easy for landlords to make people’s lives mis- erable.” Arun said she and other CSG members felt very passionate about housing issues since they have also experienced issues with leasing before. Despite all the effort put forth by CSG, GEO and City Council to pass this legislation, Arun said the same issues are still prevalent. “A lot of shareholders spent time crafting this piece of legislation and making sure students would benefit from it and not be pressured to sign leases early, and now it almost feels like nothing has changed,” Arun said. Since landlords now have to wait longer than they did in previous years to sign leases for their prop- erties, many are offering voluntary waitlists for new tenants to join, according to Jordan Else, a landlord with Wessinger Properties. Else has been involved with the Ann Arbor housing market as a resident, parent of a U-M student and now as a land- lord with her husband. The concept of the voluntary waitlist varies with each landlord, but the concept allows renters to reserve a spot in a certain building or unit in advance without officially signing a lease since leases cannot be signed at this time, Else said. Else said she is in support of the ordinance and that she feels that there is confusion about how the ordinance affects leases that begin in May versus those that begin in September. With the new ordinance, she said that new May leases can now be signed in early December and September leases can be signed in March. “I think part of why all this isn’t working great and has historically not worked great is there’s an educa- tion piece that’s missing,” Else said. An unknown individual splat- tered red paint onto the statue of Bo Schembechler in front of Schem- bechler Hall on the University of Michigan campus and spray painted “Bo knew #HailToTheVictims” at its base overnight on Nov. 23. “Bo knew” references the allega- tions that the late Schembechler, head football coach at Michigan from 1969 to 1989 and later athletic director, was alerted several times to former athletic doctor Robert Ander- son’s sexual abuse of football players and failed to take appropriate action. Anderson was the head doctor for the football team during much of Schem- bechler’s tenure. More than 950 former University students have come forward in recent years alleging Anderson abused them, most typically under the guise of medical examinations. An anonymous local resident took responsibility for the action in an email sent to local media and obtained by The Michigan Daily. “It is time for the world to know that Bo is responsible for the abuse of innumerable Michigan football play- ers,” the resident wrote. The resident wrote that the action was in solidarity with the “Hail to the Victims” campaign led by Anderson survivors, who have been protest- ing for the past few months to bring attention to the abuse and to hold the University accountable. Jonathan Vaughn, a former foot- ball player and Anderson survivor who has been protesting outside of University President Mark Schlis- sel’s house since Oct. 8 to ask for the University to take responsibility for Anderson’s abuse, told The Daily that the statue paint was not related to his protest. “Not in anyway!” Vaughn wrote in a text message. “I’m out here every- day fighting for justice why would I go and do something unjust?!” [sic] The University is investigating the paint incident, according to Univer- sity spokesperson Rick Fitzgerald. “We understand and appreciate the passionate advocacy on behalf of those who were abused by the late Robert Anderson,” Fitzgerald wrote in an email to The Daily. “But the vandalism to the University of Michi- gan statue of Bo Schembechler will be investigated fully in order to hold those responsible accountable for their actions.” Fitzgerald added that the Uni- versity is working toward “fair com- pensation” for Anderson survivors in confidential mediation. “We are working every day to make our campus safer for every member of our community,” Fitzger- ald wrote. A spokesperson for the Division of Public Safety and Security had no update to provide on the investiga- tion. A representative for Michigan Students Against Sexual Assault, a campus organization that has advocated for Anderson survivors in recent months, did not have any information or comment on the paint incident. The paint incident comes days before the Michigan football team faces Ohio State, in a rivalry that largely defined Schembechler’s lega- cy before allegations that he knew of Anderson’s abuse surfaced last year. Since then, many community mem- bers have called for a reevaluation of the place of Schembechler’s image on campus. Though the University has yet to comment directly on Schembechler, the huge “The Team, The Team, The Team” banner, quoting a famous Schembechler speech and tradition- ally unfurled in the student section at every home game, has not appeared at Michigan Stadium since 2019. Schlissel declined to answer whether he supported removing the statue or renaming Schembechler Hall, the football team’s main prac- tice facility, when The Daily asked him in August. “This Schembechler issue is too tied up in the litigation around the awful acts of Dr. Anderson to really act on right now,” Schlissel said. “We’ll see what happens down the road.” Daily News Editor Calder Lewis can be reached at calderll@umich.edu. The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com News 2 — Wednesday, December 1, 2021 The Michigan Daily (ISSN 0745-967) is publishing weekly on Wednesdays for the Winter 2021 semester by students at the University of Michigan. One copy is available free of charge to all readers. Additional copies may be picked up at the Daily’s office for $2. If you would like a current copy of the paper mailed to you, please visit store. pub.umich.edu/michigan-daily-buy-this-edition to place your order. 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PHOTO Senior Layout Editor: Sophie Grand CALDER LEWIS Daily News Editor Students concerned by practices such as housing reservations, bribes and threats ANN ARBOR Landlords find loopholes to Early Leasing Ordinance Read more at MichiganDaily.com KAITLYN LUCKOFF Daily Staff Reporter