A landlord registry in Springfield will vastly increase rents for many low-income tenants.
Consider this scenario: A man buys a house in 2016 for $45,000. It has a family living in it who were paying $650 a month to the previous owner. The new owner keeps them on as his tenants at the same rent. His property taxes are $1,678 a year and his casualty insurance is $452 a year.
In 2018, the family separates, quits paying rent and are evicted. The landlord spends two years remodeling the property, completely gutting the kitchen and bathroom in order to repair structural termite damage. He spends about $25,000 on the repairs and remodeling, which included a new furnace, central air and a new hot water heater.
Despite all that spending, the market rate for rent has only increased to $700 a month by 2020, so he rents the house to a family at that rate. His property taxes are now $2,008 and his casualty insurance is $653. So he’s getting virtually no return on the $25,000 he spent to maintain the property.
By 2026, his property taxes are $2,369 and his casualty insurance is $1,304. The market rent should be $1,300, but his tenants are still only paying $700. Why? Because the landlord is not a greedy jerk. He’s not comfortable raising the rent on a family who has been faithfully paying their rent every month, even though his expenses have gone up.
It’s not that, on some level, the landlord isn’t greedy. If the tenant moves out, the landlord will not be re-renting the house at $700. He will be re-renting it at $1,300 – the market rate. There’s no conflict in advertising a house for rent at the market rate. It’s not the same as telling a family currently living in your house that you are raising their rent from $700 to $1,300 just because the market will bear it.
But, as long as the family from 2020 is still there in 2027 and beyond, they will probably be paying well below market rate for the foreseeable future – unless a landlord registry is implemented. A landlord registry vastly changes things for the landlord, which results in the costs being transferred to the tenants.
First off, there is the annual registration fee to fund the inspection. The recent Illinois Times cover story (“Housing is a human right,” Oct. 1) mentions similar ordinances have resulted in fees of around $75 to $200. That is not very difficult to absorb, but the fee is the tip of the iceberg. The real cost is in fixing the inspection findings.
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“Housing is a human right”
In 2016, I was cited by the city of Springfield for chipping paint on the eaves of a two-story house. I wasn’t comfortable dangling from a 30-foot ladder to strip and repaint the eaves, so I called several professional painters. The lowest bid was $6,000. It might seem like a lot, but the nature of the house prevented the work from being done via a man-lift and thus the painters took into account the hazards of the work.
I wasn’t about to pay $6,000 to have my eaves painted, so I spent nearly $6,000 purchasing scaffolding and did the painting myself. But, one way or another, it cost me $6,000 to address the chipping paint.
A landlord who spends thousands of dollars fixing deficiencies that, in the past, were just lived with, is going to be passing those expenses onto the tenants – even though it’s not the tenants who are forcing the items to be repaired.
That family paying $700 a month on a house that can fetch a market rate of $1,300 month will soon be paying significantly more under a landlord registry. A $6,000 expense averages out to $500 a month. Add that to the $700 a month rent and the tenant is paying $1,200 a month. If they don’t like it, they can move out and the landlord will find a tenant at $1,300 a month.
I bought my first rental property in Springfield in 2003 and currently own 22 houses. So far, city inspectors have never been inside one of my properties. I can only imagine what will occur once they start inspecting houses that are more than a century old.
In the March 18, 2021, issue of Illinois Times there was an article highlighting the blistering porch paint on one of my rental properties and pictures of chipping ceiling paint. After five years, I still haven’t repainted anything. But the tenants are paying just $550 a month even though in 2022 I spent $15,000 replacing their roof and the market rate for their property has climbed to $1,300 a month.
Under a landlord registry, I will likely be required to address the paint – but I won’t be bearing the cost of that. If my expenses go up dramatically, the rent will need to go up.
It’s not easy looking a tenant in the eye and telling them you are raising their rent because they are below market rate and you are a greedy jerk who wants more money. But it is very easy to tell them that you need to raise their rent by $200 a month because the annual city inspection just cost you $2,400 in repairs, even though the tenants never asked for the inspection or the mandated repairs.
The proposed landlord registry essentially removes a layer of choice away from both the tenant and the landlord. Currently, the tenant can choose to strip and paint themselves if they don’t like the condition of their premises. Or, they can just live with the chipping paint and continue paying below market rent. Or, they can move to a better-maintained property and pay market rent. Under the registry, allowing the landlord to defer maintenance and keep the rent low will not be a choice.
Hopefully, any ballot initiative will clearly advertise what is being voted upon: an increase to municipal staffing. A landlord registry sounds like a revenue-neutral concept, but, as the article makes clear, it will require increasing the number of city inspectors. For many tenants, a landlord registry will not be a godsend – it will be a disaster.
Lawrence Criscione is a Springfield resident and retired nuclear engineer. He has been a landlord in Springfield since 2003 and currently has 22 rental houses.
This article appears in October 15-21, 2026.
I don’t doubt that some of this is true– minor fixes that tenants may have hand-waved in the past could get caught in inspections and force more repairs, maybe even leading to higher rents for those places. But after the cost of replacing a roof, are you really balking at the price of the ceiling repair that should have gone along with it? Leaks mean damage and mold, not just bubbling paint. Even minor issues can lead to major problems– and leaving major problems unfixed is the reason people want the registry. This is just asking permission to keep some of your properties derelict and under-maintained in exchange for lower rents.
A roof leak needs to be fixed. Once the roof is fixed, rarely is the answer for a 90-year-old plaster and lathe ceiling to merely repaint the ceiling. The ceiling needs to come down and be replaced with drywall.
Demolishing a plaster ceiling in the kitchen of a house that tenants are living in and then hanging a drywall ceiling is not a simple endeavor.
The kitchen is due for a major remodel. It has knob & tube wiring, old wooden windows and plumbing bandaid-ed together by the previous owner.
Out of respect for the tenants, I have been allowing them to continue renting at $550/month. Once they choose to move, I will be doing a complete remodel of their kitchen and bathroom, repairing the ceilings damaged by the roof leak, and upgrading the electrical system. Once that is completed, I will be renting the house at whatever the market will bear
In the meantime, the tenants are welcome to strip and paint the ceilings. But I will not voluntarily be doing that work on a ceiling I intend to demolish. If forced to fix the ceiling, I will be evicting the tenants and repairing the house properly instead of bandaid-ing the ceiling
Perfection has a cost—a cost that the most vulnerable members of society will be forced to pay for even though they are not the ones insisting on perfection
I’m less than impressed that IT allowed for such a biased article with no perspective from tenants. I’d love to hear what the tenants at the 22 properties owned by Mr. Criscione have to say about their living conditions and his actions as their landlord. If he’s willing to write a public facing article admitting he is holding lower rental payments over the heads of his tenants instead of addressing issues, imagine what he tells them privately!
Even if anyone believed Mr. Criscione was a model landlord, we know better than to believe this is true for a majority of landlords in this town.
The city prevented someone from being unhoused when they claimed his self built tiny home wasn’t up to code. Why can we force people into being unhoused over zoning concerns, but not inspect rental properties that even Mr. Criscione admits have gone uninspected for up to 23 years. He is admitting that property owners in this town charge less to give them leverage over tenants who need fixes to their properties.
This article, signs claiming taxes will go up, are just efforts to scare the community out of their demand for accountability, and we cannot let these lies and threats scare us or change our votes.
We need to vote for and demand accountability, not listen to lies from someone who is clearly profiting as he has the financial means to own 22 rental homes. Those with the power and leverage to own over 20 properties in a city that is bulldozing our unhoused people from public view cannot be considered reliable resources for public policy decisions, as the lack of policy is how they were able to achieve their status to begin with.
Just to clarify, the piece we published from Mr. Criscione was a Guestwork column (op-ed), not a news article. That’s why it was written in first-person with no other sources, he was only presenting his own opinion/perspective. He wrote that in response to our recent cover story, “Housing is a human right,” which included interviews with a wide variety of landlords, tenants and organizations advocating both for and against the landlord registry: https://www.illinoistimes.com/news/housing-is-a-human-right/ — Michelle Ownbey, executive editor
I wrote an online comment on the Oct 1 article entitled “Housing is a human right”. The Illinois Times asked me if they could publish my comment as an opinion piece. I agreed and they edited it down to fit the space available for print. So the article is merely a slightly shorter version of my online comment (which can be found in the comment section of the Oct. 1 article).
I don’t know what my tenants would say about me if you were to contact them—other than the comments printed in the March 2021 article, which are likely in line with your assumptions.
What I do know is that eleven have been with me since the pandemic, six of them for over a decade. I’m sure they all have their complaints about me, yet they choose to continue to rent from me. I assume a large part of it is because, after the steep rise in market rates following the pandemic and persistent inflation, they realize their rent is substantially below the market rate.
You portray me as “holding lower rental payments over the heads of [my] tenants instead of addressing issues.” An earlier commenter implied that I am just wanting to “keep some of my properties derelict and under-maintained in exchanged for lower rents.” I don’t dispute either of those characterizations. But I’m puzzled as to what is wrong with maintaining rents low.
Perfection comes with a cost. Monetary cost. And environmental costs. Forcing landlords to do band aid fixes is great for paint manufacturers, but selling more paint isn’t necessarily the best thing for society.
Maintaining my properties is a full-time job. I average one roof a year. I have four properties that are in such a state of disrepair—primarily from damage caused by tenant-owned pets—that I am choosing not to rent them until they are remodeled; even though I continuously get people interested in them in their current states.
My goal is not to have substandard housing. My goal is to, as tenants move on, remodel their properties and get the highest rent possible when I eventually re-let them to new tenants.
The point of my online comments on the Oct. 1 article (which became the opinion piece you commented on) was to merely point out that forcing landlords to fix the items we have chosen to defer is going to result in rent increases for a lot of tenants.
I have no idea what the landlord registry will require, but this I am certain: it will not require anyone to continue to be a landlord. If I am ordered to band aid a component I intend to eventually demolish, I will choose to no longer rent that property until I can properly repair it. You might not care that I remove a property from the market until I can properly address all its deficiencies—you probably even welcome it. But the tenant who I will be forced to evict in order to avoid city fines will likely not appreciate your crusading for perfection.
Perfection comes at a cost, but unfortunately the people demanding perfection are not the ones who will be bearing that cost—it will be the low-income tenants forced into paying higher rents. The money paid to handymen and hardware merchants will not ultimately be coming from the landlords; those costs will be passed through in the rents.
Regarding your comments on the tiny homes not being allowed, I agree with you. The city should not be precluding people from living in inexpensive, environmentally-friendly dwellings—any more than it should preclude people from living in old homes with cosmetic deficiencies.
Regarding me “having the financial means to own 22 rental homes”, I think you might have a misperception as to how lucrative being a landlord is. When you are young, you don’t make anything. All your profits go to mortgage payments. But when you are old, like me, the mortgages are paid off and your portfolio should be earning 6%—and possibly 10% if no roofs or unexpected major repairs occurred.
A 6% return on a million-dollar portfolio is $60k. That’s a lot of money for a passive investment—but being a landlord is not a passive investment. Twenty-two rental properties is a full time job.
Every week, I get unsolicited offers from hedge funds looking to purchase various properties of mine. They’re looking for fire sales, but even if they were offering market prices I would still turn them down. A million dollars in dividend stocks only nets you about $30k and I cannot live on that even if it would mean never again climbing onto a roof or squeezing into a crawlspace.
But someday my heirs will be liquidating my estate to a hedge fund. And if you think renting from me is bad, wait until a private equity fund buys your rental house.
Unlike me, hedge funds have attorneys on retainer. If a tenant is late on the rent, I work with them—even when they’ve lied to me in the past. Aside from not liking to be the one evicting someone from their home, evictions for me are a supreme hassle. But for private equity companies they are just a normal part of the business. Your sob story isn’t going anywhere with them.
And I don’t like raising rents on people. But hedge funds will tell you they have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to maximize returns—that is, to bleed from tenants whatever the market will bear. When a private equity firm is your landlord, your rent will be increasing every year.
But, on the flip side, hedge funds also have handymen in their employ who can paint over mold and plaster cracks all day long.
So, maybe our society will be better off when all the mom & pop landlords are replaced by the hedge funds and private equity firms. After all, have our grocery prices not gone down as small farmers have been replaced by corporate agriculture?