Councilors Outraged at Lack of Rooming House Regulations

responded to the rooming house at 179 Boston St. a total of 54 times in 2010 and 2011.

In two years, calls from the location ran the gamut from medical aids to reports of harassment as well as alleged assaults and disputes, according to Salem Police reports.

Rooming, boarding and lodging houses can be found throughout the city, and there has been a history of complaints from neighbors and city officials about alleged dangerous, disruptive and illegal activities.

Last fall, when neighbors showed up before the Licensing Board to oppose re-licensing one rooming house, they were told the city had no guidelines that regulate the operation of such residential facilities.

Ward 2 Councilor Michael Sosnowski has set out to change that. As the new chairman of the council's subcommittee on ordinances, licenses and legal affairs, he has assembled a subcommittee that includes several other councilors, members of the licensing board, the police and fire departments, the building inspector, the health agent and several citizens to study the issues and develop a series of guidelines that the city council might adopt to regulate rooming houses.

The hearing on the issue, which has touched a nerve with many residents and city officials, may be expanded to include all council members, Sosnowski said.

Sosnowski said this issue is not limited to a single house. He said, "This situation applies to houses all over the city. No one sticks out."

The subcommittee on rules and regulations for boarding, lodging, rooming and sober houses, chaired by Ward 7 Councilor Joe O'Keefe, will meet on the issue at 3 p.m. Thursday in the Council Chamber's ante-room on the second floor of City Hall.

“There are people who legitimately need these facilities,” Sosnowski said. “We don't want to get rid of them unless they are chronic offenders.”

But from his preliminary research, including a recent public hearing, it appears that in some of the houses, which he said are financially profitable to the owners, about 90 percent of the residents are what the councilor described as “habitual abusers of the system.”

A separate category of rooming houses is the sober house, where residents who are addicted to drugs and alcohol live in a supposedly clean environment.

Some residents of sober houses, experts say, deal drugs. Once that starts, Ward 6 Councilor Paul Prevey, who is also a parole officer, said, it often spreads among the other residents.

A challenge for the city in trying to regulate the sober houses is that they are protected by federal laws, the councilor said. That limits the regulations that the city can impose on the houses.

Sosnowski concedes that there is probably a shortage of licensed rooming, boarding and lodging houses in Salem. A judge in Lynn has been sending people to live in a Salem rooming house that is not even licensed, he said.

Sosnowski said he wants to give the licensing board a set of guidelines that it can use in determining if these houses should have their license revoked.

All residents interested in the regulation of rooming houses are invited to attend the meeting.