Ann Arbor Rent Strike: Would You Rent From This Man?

Ann Arbor Rent Strike: Would You Rent From This Man?

By Nancy Neubrecht

  A trip to the office of Trony Associates at 512 Packard in Ann Arbor - currently the target of the city's first major rent strike in five years-  reveals a change in name, but not necessarily a change in policy.  An the end of the house's dimly lit hallway, leading to the office, a board" with white plastic letters reads: "S.S. Rental Co.". Letters that once formed "Trony Associates" lie scattered on the rug.

   R. Dewey Black, a 23-year-old, bearded Tennessean with a passion for cowboy hats and boots, who is a one-time Trony employee, bought the company from former owners Tony Hoffman and Ron Ferguson on November 18th, according to the City Clerk's office. According to that office, there it as been no official change

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in the company's name, despite the fact that Black now call the operation "Sunrise Management."

   Yet the official change in management and the unofficial change in name have done nothing to satisfy the long-standing demands of Trony tenants for needed repairs and adequate maintenance grievances which culminated in the rent strike by the Ann Arbor Tenants' Union (AATU) early last month.

    One of Trony / "Sunrise" 's tenants recently testified at a public hearing of the Mayor's Fair Rental Practices Committee that Trony does one of two things when asked tor repairs: "They'll either laugh in your face or never come over."

   Another former Trony tenant testified that the company charges people for damages without cause.

   Jonathan Rose, an attorney tor Washtenaw County Legal Aid, says, "Our office has defended numerous Trony tenants who we thought had had money deducted from their security deposits unfairly."

   Dewey Black, who was in charge of managing Trony property before he purchased the company, explains that poor service over the last few months existed "because I handled the problems the tenants had through the procedures they (Hoffman and Ferguson) had set up."

   At the beginning of December, in what appeared to be an effort to forestall the imminent AATU rent strike, Black made what seemed to be an abrupt change in policy. He sent out a public relations release entitled: "Good Afternoon and Another Michigan Football Victory." In it, he listed several changes in administrative practice, including:

*Checkouts which will be made "as fairly as possible with minimum of deduction for wear and tear." Michigan State Law already states that a landlord cannot deduct any money from security deposits for damages incurred due to normal wear and tear.

*A 5 per cent interest rate on security deposits. This, according to several observers, indicates a feeble attempt by Black to upgrade his organization's public relations. Says one Trony tenant, '"That 5 per cent is not going to make up the difference for all the money he illegally deducts the from security deposits,"       

   But according to Black, "There's an old axiom: a new broom sweeps clean." He claims that the Tenants' Union has not given him a chance to prove himself. "Through associations [with Hoffmun and Ferguson]  I am already convicted by the union [AATU]."

   He added that his association with Hoffman and Ferguson is now limited: "I keep those two people in the office only to help me out with bookkeeping. . . It may not be very long before I don't need them in my office anymore.''

   Hoffman and Ferguson may no longer be needed around the office, but to what extent do they still have interests in Trony? The fact that the company's official name has not changed might reveal something. In addition, a survey of Black's actual holdings in the Washtenaw County Register of Deeds reveals that he actually owns titles to only three houses in Ann Arbor. The rest of Trony's 120 houses remain under the ownership of Hoffman and Ferguson.

   Black may or may not be buying out these houses under land contracts from the former owners. There is no way of finding this fact out. Just as there is no way of finding out to what extent Ferguson and Hoffman still make decisions for Trony.

   Although the grievances of several Trony tenants were personally documented by this reporter. Black still claims that '"the problem with tenants is that the ones who yell the loudest need help the least." He claims that 40 per cent of the problems listed by his tenants on a questionnaire he had sent out with his first public relations release have since been taken care of. Nevertheless, almost half of Trony's tenants decided to withhold their rents and join the Tenants" Union rent strike. Despite all the public relations releases; despite all the pledges of new management, with a new name, and young, "hard-working responsible landlord"

   "Trony Associates" and "Sunrise Management" mean the same thing to the Ann Arbor strikers.

Nancy Neubrecht is a senior in Journalism at the University of Michigan.