Rep. Daniel Pae described himself as an advocate for his generation at the Oklahoma Capitol.
One of the biggest problems the 30-year-old Republican from Lawton said his generation is facing is the rising cost of housing, which has led to an increase in renters across the state.
“It’s a challenging housing market we have,” Pae said. “With our current Landlord-Tenant Act, there’s a lot of room for modernization, so I’ll keep fighting that good fight.”
Oklahoma’s Landlord-Tenant Act has seldom changed since its inception, and often favors landlords. Tenant protections have historically been limited under the act, and housing experts argue that, with rising costs and increasing numbers of renters, now is the time to re-evaluate those protections.
Pae is seeking to do that with House Bill 2015.
House Bill 2015
The bill would mark a major shift in tenant protections, giving tenants the ability to hold landlords accountable when they fail to uphold their end of the bargain.
The idea for the bill originated in a past anti-retaliation bill that would prevent landlords from retaliating against tenants who report health and safety issues. That bill stalled in previous legislative sessions, but Pae said he took the anti-retaliation vehicle and modified it for this bill.
“I’m a pretty pragmatic guy,” Pae said. “We modified the language down to essentially propose that within 14 days if a tenant reports anything health and safety related that’s compromising their unit, the landlord has to meaningfully begin making the repairs.”
Pae said that doesn’t mean they have to finish the repairs in 14 days, just that the landlord has to begin within the 14-day window after being notified in writing by the tenant.
If the landlord fails to do so, the tenant can bring an action.
Katie Dilks, the executive director of the Oklahoma Access to Justice Foundation, said this is a way to give courts more teeth, which she said has been missing since the act’s inception.
The History of the Landlord-Tenant Act
Oklahoma’s Landlord-Tenant Act, passed in 1978, was based on model legislation provided by the Uniform Law Commission. The commission is a nonpartisan, multistate organization that exists to advance model legislation at the state level to ensure consistency in law across state boundaries.
“The more disparity you have in state law, the harder it is and the more expensive it is to operate across multiple states,” Dilks said. “It is better for everybody when state law is consistent.”
That model legislation was the Uniform Residential Landlord-Tenant Act.
“About 20 states in total adopted it in whole or in substantial part, and Oklahoma is one of those (states) because we only X’d out the one part,” Dilks said. “But, we X’d out a pretty critical part.”
When Oklahoma adopted the legislation, the state removed a section that would have allowed a tenant to recover damages and obtain injunctive relief if a landlord failed to make repairs to the property or remedy problems a tenant may have. In other words, a tenant could have asked a judge to order the landlord to address the problems.
“We just took out one of the primary remedies,” Dilks said. “We took out the actual teeth.”
With that section removed, tenants in Oklahoma had only two choices for resolving problems. They could break the lease, or they could repair the problem and deduct up to $100 from rent for the repairs.
The repair-and-deduct remedy was modified in 2022 with the enactment of House Bill 3409. Now, tenants can repair the problem, and deduct up to one month’s rent.
“The tenant remedies section, Section 121, was not touched from its adoption in 1978 until that change to repair and deduct in 2022,” Dilks said.
Dilks said that’s not enough. She said that repairs on multi-family units can cost significantly more than one month’s rent, and the tenant is not the contact for a plumber when an entire building is experiencing sewage problems.
“The reality of deduct-and-repair is that it truly isn’t an option for most people who live in multi-family properties unless we’re talking about things like broken appliances,” Dilks said.
Oklahoma has also implemented protections for tenants experiencing domestic violence. In the 48 years that Oklahoma’s Landlord-Tenant Act has been in place, those are the only two major changes that have been made.
“It’s been a 50-year experiment, and it’s gotten us some very high-profile disasters,” Dilks said.
Eric Dunn, director of litigation for the National Housing Law Project, said that most states varied in how they implemented the Uniform Residential Landlord-Tenant Act, and that some removed specific protections, often due to lobbying. He said that legislatures tend to see tenants as transient constituents, whereas landlords are long-term.
“What we generally see is that landlord and Realtor associations in every state are going to have tremendous clout in state and local government,” Dunn said. “Landlords get pretty much what they want out of state and local government, and then it’s really only communities that have well-organized grassroots tenant organizations that are really able to get anything approaching a balanced law.”
Dilks said that although laws typically favor the landlord, a bad landlord can do more harm to a community than a bad tenant can do to a landlord.
She used the recent media coverage of Vesta Realty as an example of how a bad landlord can harm thousands of people.
“Vesta Realty has almost 10,000 units across our state and into Kansas,” Dilks said. “Ten thousand units is more than 10,000 people, so when Marc Kulick decides to systemically neglect maintenance and engage in behaviors that create unsafe conditions for tenants, he is one landlord, and he is impacting the well-being of potentially tens of thousands of Oklahomans by his actions.”
Dilks said the flipside is that if one tenant damages a unit, only one landlord is harmed
“I don’t want to minimize the impact if it is a smaller landlord, or if they are dependent on that for their income and their security,” Dilks said. “It is still important, but the scope of the potential negative impact is just wildly different when we’re talking about the bad actions of a single tenant, which could have bad outcomes for a single landlord, and the bad actions of a single landlord could have bad outcomes for all of their tenants, which could be hundreds or thousands of people.”
Dilks said Oklahoma’s laws to date have leaned toward holding bad tenants accountable, but not bad landlords.
Pragmatic Approach
“When it comes to the Landlord-Tenant Act, there should be fairness for both landlords and tenants,” Pae said.
Pae said that while drafting his bill and making changes, he met with service providers and heard stories from both landlords and tenants. He even attended eviction court to better understand what tenants were experiencing.
“I think housing is fundamental,” Pae said. “We have to get it right as policymakers.”
House Bill 2015 is not the first time Pae has tried to balance the scales of the Landlord-Tenant Act. Last year, he and Sen. Julia Kirt, D-Oklahoma City, attempted to extend Oklahoma’s eviction timeline with Senate Bill 128.
This session, he once again partnered with Kirt on Senate Bill 1209, a revised version of last year’s timeline extension.
Pae said he took a pragmatic approach to those bills and that reaching across the aisle and working with Kirt was in the best interest of Oklahomans. He said he has a finite time in office and wants to focus on problems that affect all of Oklahoma.
“I’ve always looked at governing like riding a bike,” Pae said. “When you ride a bike, you can’t lean too far to the left or too far to the right; you have to be balanced.”
Dilks said the protections proposed by Pae’s bill are consistent with those in Oklahoma’s neighboring states. She said Kansas adopted the Uniform Residential Landlord-Tenant Act with tenant remedies, and that while Texas did not adopt the same model legislation, opting instead to draft its own, the state kept similar tenant protections.
“That is an incredibly consistent protection across other states,” Dilks said.
Dilks said there’s a very narrow path for the courts to hold bad landlords accountable right now, but that House Bill 2015 would give judges more options to protect vulnerable tenants who may be experiencing uninhabitable conditions.
“It will give tenants, tenant advocates and judges a legal mechanism to act that has not existed in any meaningful way over the past 48 years,” Dilks said.
Oklahoma Watch, at oklahomawatch.org, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that covers public-policy issues facing the state.
