Housing Law Commons^™

Alleviating The Harms Of Substandard Housing To Wisconsin Tenants: Correlating Rent With Assessed Property Value, Ellen Matheson

Marquette Law Review

Like other cities across the nation, Milwaukee utilizes a mix of regulatory,

statutory, and common law tools to address the problem of substandard rental

housing. This Comment examines the efficacy of those legal tools, in the

process demonstrating that existing remedies offer insufficient protections to

tenants in need of habitable housing. This Comment then proposes a novel

legal strategy that is designed to ameliorate the problem of low-quality,

overpriced rental housing: amending Wis. Stat. § 66.1015 to permit

implementation of a “rent-value correlation rate”—giving municipalities the

option to cap monthly contract rent as a percentage of the assessed property

value. …