Victoria Love, the city of Jackson’s rental registration manager, scrunched her eyebrows together into a deep line, mimicking the confused expression she said Mayor John Horhn made the first time she introduced herself to him in 2024. He was a state senator at the time.

“I’m giving him my card, and he just pauses and looks at me and is like, ‘Rental registration? What is it that you do besides getting the rentals to register?’” Love said.

Love, in fact, does a lot more than registration. The former property manager sends inspectors out to properties, she collects and crunches data on Jackson’s landlords, and she works with rental owners to help them maintain safe, habitable units. 

Now, three years after a lawsuit from metro-area landlords and an industry organization called the Mississippi Apartment Association impeded the city’s implementation of its rental registration program, Love will finally be able to collect fees to fund routine inspections. 

The new age for rental regulation in Jackson comes after the city council passed an amended version of its rental registration ordinance earlier this month to incorporate court-mandated changes. These include lowering fees and eliminating a provision aimed at absent and out-of-state owners that required anyone operating rentals in Jackson to have a local agent residing in city limits. 

City officials hope the new registry will help inspectors identify and sanction bad-acting landlords, bringing some regulation to a rental market that has operated virtually unchecked for years. Under the ordinance, property owners who fail to register on time or whose units cannot pass inspection will face stiff fines. 

“So it’s not just the wild, wild west,” Ward 7 councilman Kevin Parkinson said. 

But whether the program will foster better living conditions for Jackson’s renters hinges on the city’s dedication to code enforcement, said Lynda Troyer, a local landlord who has rented property near the Jackson Zoo for more than a decade. 

When she first started working in Jackson, Troyer said the city had the authority under a 2006 ordinance to inspect properties during what’s called the “turnover” period when one tenant leaves and another has yet to move in. 

Lacking an adequate number of inspectors, the city struggled to show up to her units in a timely fashion, Troyer said, delaying tenants from getting in the door. 

“Nobody complied with it,” she said. “There were no real penalties for not complying and …. when the city couldn’t do timely inspections, landlords just quit asking for them.” 

The solution to a problem as complex as poor housing conditions in Jackson is repeated follow-up, Love said. The program has five inspectors and Love said she doesn’t expect to be able to hire more amid the city’s financial woes. But her ability to collect fees from landlords will go a long way to ensuring the program is self-sufficient. 

“You can expect true dedication to looking at the issue, going out and inspecting it,” she said. 

The new rental registry does away with inspections during the turnover period, instead requiring the city to conduct property reviews upon an owner renewing their annual registration. 

For smaller landlords, Love said the city will strive to inspect 20% of a landlord’s portfolio. Landlords with multi-family apartment complexes will have no more than 20% of their units inspected. If an inspector does not identify issues in the first 10% of units, the ordinance states they will have the option to declare the landlord compliant without inspecting the rest. 

To cover the cost of inspection, the city will charge landlords $50 for each single-family home examined and $25 for each unit in an apartment complex. 

In the newest version of the program, the city calculated these fees so that inspections were not generating revenue, which would constitute an “impermissible tax.” This is one of the arguments Troyer and other landlords made in their legal challenge against the original ordinance.

The Mississippi Apartment Association was not able to participate in an interview by press time but shared a letter of support for the new ordinance that it sent to the council. 

“The final ordinance reflects an approach that enables the City to meet its important rental housing goals while being mindful of the existing demands on property owners,” wrote Meghan Elder, the association’s executive. 

Earlier this year, a Hinds County Circuit Court judge ruled the city could not enforce the fees until it had determined how much it will actually take to run the rental registry program, the Northside Sun reported. 

Parkinson said he believes the fees might have to go up after a year of the city actually running the program. 

“Now, I suspect it’s going to be nowhere near the cost” of the program, Parkinson said. “But because we’ve never operated before, we don’t have any proof that’s the case.” 

Love has ambitious goals for the program: She’s working to set up a complaint form that tenants can use to contact the city after their landlord has failed to address their concerns, and she envisions educational classes for owners who don’t know city code. 

“You have 80-year-old women who it’s been their lifelong dream to rent a property,” she said. “They have these two rental properties and they really don’t know … you have to have a smoke detector in every bedroom.” 

Love also hopes the rental registry will help beget data on which landlords own the most challenged apartment complexes. She said her office regularly scrapes Zillow and monitors Facebook Marketplace to try to catch landlords who have failed to register. And she wants to tackle some of the city’s long-troubled apartment complexes, such as Pine Ridge Gardens, a Section 8 complex in southeast Jackson. 

While the city program’s inspectors will prioritize rentals that are not already examined through state and federal affordable housing programs, the city can inspect apartments if the rental division has “reasonable information and belief” of poor living conditions, according to the ordinance. 

Love said the city can kick off this process once it gets word that a complex has failed its federal or state inspection. In a situation where a complex has been a 30-year problem, Love said she thinks it’s unrealistic to expect a landlord to improve a property within their first year of ownership – especially when some out-of-state landlords are buying complexes sight unseen. 

“This just isn’t really the market for that,” she said. “You have to have someone here.” 

But as soon as a landlord fails their first inspection, or if enough Jacksonians complain, Love said it’s fair game for the city to take its own look. That doesn’t mean her approach will always be punitive, though, and Love has connected with local lending resources to help landlords find ways to afford costly repairs. 

“There has to be a little bit of grace,” she said. “They don’t get to get off the hook, but now they are on the path to being fully functional.” 

Jackson has more than 30,000 renter-occupied units, according to Census data. The version of the rental registration ordinance the council passed appears to be more lenient and less specific than similar laws in neighboring communities. 

In Ridgeland, for instance, Troyer said a tenant cannot put the utilities in their name until a unit passes the city’s inspection. But the city pledges to inspect units within a few days of a landlord’s request. The stricter rule also comes with less inspections, Troyer said, because her Ridgeland tenants stay in their rentals longer. 

“Because you’re not having as much turnover, you’re not having the inspection,” she said. 

Troyer predicts the ordinance will add to her costs of doing business in Jackson — which had already gone up in recent years due to a combination of inflation, insurance and a bogged-down court system that slowed the eviction process for nonpaying tenants. 

“People have a misconception that landlords are rich, but they are not,” she said. “I don’t know why. I guess because you own property, and everybody thinks property is worth something.”

Jackson needed the rental registration program, Troyer said, but she will have to pass the cost on to tenants — a challenge when she is renting in a low-income neighborhood. Along with her husband, who does the maintenance while she handles paperwork, Troyer said she owns less than 20 properties. 

“It all goes back to that affordability issue,” Troyer said. “You’ve got tensions of people trying to live on fixed incomes who can’t afford anything but $300 in rent – which there is nothing you can find for $300 that’s going to be good, halfway decent. But with their income, that’s it for them. So there’s all these tensions out there.”

When Blossom Apartments in south Jackson dramatically closed earlier this year, Troyer said she got a slew of calls from people who were looking for a one-bedroom to rent. She didn’t have any one-bedrooms — and no units available at the prices they could afford.

“There’s not enough federal government money, there’s not enough state money,” she said. “Wherever this money comes from, there’s not enough to help these folks on fixed incomes.”

Even when a crisis like Blossom isn’t happening, Troyer said she gets calls from people who can’t afford the rents she’s offering, even with housing vouchers. 

“It’s a whole masterpiece of problems.”