LANDLORDS VEX NEWTON OFFICIALS
Multiple-unit dwellings become a multiple-court battleground
By Tom Moroney

SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE
Copyright 1994 The Boston Globe.

NEWTON - Describing landlords Leon and Shirley Jaffe as thorns in the side
of Newton city government is like calling Boston's Big Dig a hole in the
ground.

For 10 years, Newton officials have tried to prevent the husband wife team
from running what the city says are illegal, overcrowded and often noisy
rooming houses in single-family neighborhoods.  And, during that same
decade, the Jaffes have refused to comply, creating lingering resentment
in city neighborhoods and a mountain of paperwork inside City Hall.

"Of all the landlords in the city, they are the most notorious," City
Solicitor Daniel M. Funk said last week. "No one is as consistent in
trying to avoid doing the right thing. They are milking the system."

The Jaffes, who live less than a half-mile from Boston College,
acknowledge their infamy with pride.

"We are a pain in the butt to the city for the simple reason that we
will not take any unconstitutional abuse from them," Leon Jaffe
said.

The constitutional argument is used often by the Jaffes. It stems from
city ordinance T-57, which limits to five the number of unrelated
adults who can live in one apartment unit without a special permit.

The Jaffes - owners of 12 rental properties in the city, three of which
have raised disputes - have challenged the ordinance on the grounds that
it regulates unrelated adults while imposing no regulation on large groups
of related adults.

In 1986, the Supreme Judicial Court, the state's highest, upheld Newton's
prosecution of the Jaffes. The couple eventually paid more than $12,000 in
fines.

But, even in the face of such legal setbacks, the Jaffes acknowledge that
they have gotten back into the business of renting to more people than
allowed under the ordinance.

"You have to understand, we are doing everything we can," Funk said in
explaining why a city like Newton, that prides itself on efficiency, has
so much trouble restraining the Jaffes.

Zoning administrator Harold Hewett said he has shown up the morning after
a party at a Jaffe house to find toilets uprooted from bathrooms and
planted on lawns or Jeeps parked in the shrubbery. Assistant City
Solicitor Michael D. Baseman said that the word around Boston College is
that "the Jaffe houses are the Animal Houses. If you want to party, those
are the places to be."

Officials call the Jaffes' constitutional argument a smoke screen that
hides their bottom-line desire to make as much money as they can from
their 12 rental properties, a sum estimated by the city to approach $1
million annually.

Leon Jaffe said his methodology is, indeed, "a marketing decision."

"We are a business. But we think we have found a niche, providing housing
to young people, not just students. These are people who need a place to
live just like anyone else," he said.

With regularity, city officials said, the Jaffes cut up a large home into
two or three units. Then they place up to eight adults in units designed
for three or fewer. In one ease, officials said, five renters were sharing
one three-bedroom unit only to come home one night to find the dining room
partitioned into a fourth bedroom and rented to a sixth tenant.

Jaffe said he tells his tenants to behave. But, at the same time, he said,
"we're not any tenants' keepers. If the neighbors had come to us - and
they don't, by the way; they only go to City Hall, where they have been
brainwashed into thinking we won't listen - we would talk to them."

One neighbor, Mary Malany, who has lived in West Newton, across from a
Jaffe house on Winthrop Street, for 10 years, said she is unconvinced by
Jaffe's overtures.

"My sense is that the Jaffes know how to use the legal system for their
own personal gain very well," she said.

In July, Malany said, she saw Shirley Jaffe showing a large Victorian at
58 Winthrop St. to a group of prospective tenants after the Jaffes had
been told by the city not to rent the house to large, unrelated groups of
adults.

Malany went outside, where she said she stood on the sidewalk and urged
the tenants not to rent. The Jaffes sued Malany for slander and
interference in their business. At a court hearing, Malany agreed to stop
talking to prospective tenants if the Jaffes sent her copies of any leases
signed by new tenants, Malany said.

The zoning ordinance so hotly contested by the Jaffes requires a special
permit for apartments where there is a group or "association" of persons
living together, which means they are not blood-related.

In 1989, an amendment to the ordinance, inspired by the city's stand-off
with the Jaffes, further defined an association as a group of five or more
unrelated tenants.

The Jaffes have never applied for a permit and, even if they had, Jaffe
said he is convinced that the Newton Board of Aldermen would not grant
one. The result has been a protracted legal battle.

Today, there are six active court cases between the city and the Jaffes or
Jaffe tenants. Two cases date back to 1988 and concern large homes rented
out to students, primarily from Boston College. The four other eases arose
from complaints generated by the city this year.

Evidence of this battle is piled high inside City Hall: Boxes crammed with
documents, cabinet drawers stuffed with papers and, often arriving in the
mail, another wave of correspondence from the Jaffes, known by those who
must open and read it as Jaffe-grams.

Three of the four 1994 cases involve the two properties named in the 1988
cases, while the fourth case involves the first property ever purchased by
the Jaffes in Newton, the Victorian at 58 Winthrop St.

Both sides - Newton officials and the Jaffes - state that at least one of
the six cases holds out the possibility of a victory that would silence
the other side once and for all.

For Newton, it is the 1988 complaint against a Jaffe home at 39-41
Algonquin Road. The city's Zoning Board of Appeals ruled at that time that
the Jaffes needed a permit after residents had complained about noise and
parking problems generated by college students living there.

In 1993, Middlesex Superior Court Judge James F. McHugh upheld the Zoning
Board ruling. "By any definition, the students who were living in 39 and
41 Algonquin Road during the relevant period were no more a 'family' than
are the Boston Red Sox," McHugh wrote.

Jaffe, through his lawyer, Daniel M. Blackmon of Hyannis, appealed the
ruling to the state Massachusetts Appeals Court, which is probably months
away from issuing a decision, Baseman said. But if the city's decision is
upheld, it would give Newton the legal ammunition to go back to the judge
for an injunction against the Jaffes, Baseman said.

The Jaffes, for their purposes, are hopeful that the most recent case,
filed by 11 students at 22-24 Crosby Road against Newton, would give them
the edge.

In court documents filed during the spring, the students charged that
Newton's ordinance is unconstitutional because it requires the city to
identify relationships among tenants. Those relationships are usually
established by city inspectors who ask a series of questions that the
students say are a violation of privacy.

The students, who declined comment, are represented by Blackmon, the same
lawyer Jaffe uses. Jaffe denied he is paying for the students' lawsuit,
but said he supports their effort "to protect their rights."

Jaffe said the students' case has a precedent. College students in nearby
Waltham made the same argument in the mid-1980s and were able to get a
similar ordinance stricken from that city's books. Waltham City Solicitor
Robert Brophy confirmed what Jaffe said.

Jaffe has also contended that Newton has singled him out for
punishment when scores of the estimated 1,000 landlords in Newton do
the same thing.

But Walter Adams, commissioner of Inspectional Services, said Jaffe
properties are investigated only after complaints of noise or
rowdiness are received.

"There are probably many groups of unrelated persons who are living
peacefully and in harmony with the city of Newton for which we have never
received any kind of complaint," he said.

Jaffe and his wife were so determined to prove their selective enforcement
argument that, in 1987, they presented city officials with a four-page
typewritten list of 149 properties where they said other landlords were in
violation of the same ordinance.

The city followed up on the information and brought about a dozen of the
landlords to Newton District Court, according to Baseman. In one Case,
Shirley Jaffe testified for the city in a show cause hearing against the
landlord. The local newspapers did not miss the irony in the situation,
reporting that the city and the Jaffes had briefly found themselves on the
same side.

But none of the landlords involved was fined, Baseman said, because they
all agreed to stop violating the ordinance.

"Most people can work things out reasonably well," Baseman said. "A lot of
this is about being bad neighbors. The Jaffes make no effort in this
regard and this is why we have problems."

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