Sage, one of my favorite neighbors and a co-conspirator in community advocacy projects, is the person who immediately comes to mind when I think about an ideal tenant.
First off, she’s reliable, responsible and stable. She’s lived in her apartment for nearly seven years. She treats her rented space with the utmost respect — just as if it were her own. She looks in on tenants who occupy the three other apartments in her large Victorian house. She organizes efforts to clean up litter, create street art and plant flowers.
She also holds an elected executive position on the board of our volunteer-based community council, a strategic liaison between our neighborhood and the city-at-large. She rents a community garden plot and shares the space with a few kids from her block. She hosts events – a favorite being outdoor movies – on her front porch. She recycles. She meticulously maintains the lawn, plants and flowers that surround her apartment. She adds baskets full of blooms along the sidewalks on her block. She invites homeless folks to her holiday meals. She engages people. She rescues wayward animals. And she fights every day to keep her neighborhood safe, clean and healthy for all its residents.
Who wouldn’t want a tenant as committed, eco-conscious and community-minded as this? I figure that her landlord certainly must know a thing or two about enticing high-quality, socially responsible tenants. Or perhaps he is just very lucky.
Eager to find out how Sage’s landlord had marketed his space, I invited Sage to our neighborhood café to explore the term “green,” the assets that drew her to her apartment and opportunities her landlord could better leverage to attract eco-conscious tenants, while nurturing existing ones.
Here are a few of Sage’s thoughts:
• Clearly delineate green expectations for landlord and tenant and determine whether values are suitably aligned before formalizing the relationship by signing a contract.
• Maintain a two-way dialog about the importance of various eco-friendly assets on the property.
• Create a basic how-to resource for green assets so that best practices are followed by tenants for maximum benefit or safety (e.g., how to safely dispose of CFLs).
• Be open to minor alterations to the property, such as a tenant-initiated gardening project or rain-barrel installation.
• Make sure there’s ample space for recycling bins and requisite sorting somewhere on the property — ideally a porch, pantry or garage area.
• Encourage tenants in a multi-unit building to support basic eco-conscious behaviors, like recycling. Not all of Sage’s immediate neighbors inside the Victorian recycle, and Sage also lugs the bins to the street on collection day. Sharing that responsibility with her housemates would create a more equitable system.
Renting, as Sage explained, can be isolating. “Renters rent the inside, but not the outside,” she told me. “They don’t often make the connection to the exterior and the larger community.”
I can’t imagine my community without Sage in it.
Do you see community engagement as an advantage for your business?
