ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, January 26, 1996 TAG: 9601260055
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-12 EDITION: METRO
IF THE CITY had moved faster in establishing a systematic program to inspect rental housing for building-code violations, would four young Southeast Roanoke children and their grandmother be alive today?
Quite possibly.
Granted, there's no guarantee that Mark Leftwich, 6; Clyde Leftwich, 5; Patrick Leftwich, 4; Nancy Leftwich, 3; and Goldie Christine Duncan, 46, would have survived the fire that killed them Saturday. But if Roanoke had a stricter compliance program, their chances of survival would have shot up like the flames that engulfed the house on Stewart Avenue.
If the triplexed house had had code-required smoke alarms and code-required firewalls between apartments, fire officials say, the family probably would have had time to get out of the house and escape the blaze.
And if the housing had been inspected for compliance with minimum code standards, the absence of smoke alarms and firewalls surely would have been cited, and the owners ordered to correct the deficiencies.
And if a systematic rental-inspection program had already been put in place, it just might already have reached the house in which the five died.
Of course, it takes a while for certificate-of-compliance programs like the one proposed in Roanoke to bring every unit up to code. But chances that the Stewart Avenue house would have been inspected by now are at least better than zero - which is the number of times it apparently had had a structural inspection either before or after its transition from a single-family to a three-unit dwelling.
Besides, the time it takes to get all units up to code is itself an argument to get moving on the program sooner rather than later.
Those responsible for the condition of the Stewart Avenue house - the property's owners are listed in Roanoke Circuit Court records as WTS of Virginia Inc., whose directors are listed in State Corporation Commission records as William T. Stone of Roanoke and Rupert J. Richards Jr. of Salem - should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. But after-the-fact prosecution is a poor substitute for before-the-fact prevention.
Another fact is that the house was never cited for building-code violations and the owners never told to correct the deficiencies. You can't cite code violations, though, until housing is inspected. And, currently, the city can't inspect rental housing except at the request of the landlord or tenant.
The point of certificate-of-occupancy programs is to get rental units inspected on a regular basis, as they become vacant, and to prevent their re-rental until deficiencies are corrected.
Some landlords don't like the idea. So what? For slumlords, tenant safety is not a priority. Before putting much stock in crocodile tears that rigorous code enforcement would throw poor families on the street, consider that Roanoke currently has 100 vacant public-housing units and twice as many beds in various shelters than in 1985.
1985 is the year that the death of 76-year-old Madeline Tate, frozen on a cold winter day in her ill-heated rental home, shocked Roanoke and touched off talk of eradicating substandard housing in the city. It didn't happen, just as the inspection program remains in limbo - despite having been proposed more than a year ago, despite having already been tried and found worthy in Lynchburg and other Virginia cities.
Cracking down on irresponsible landlords helps reverse housing depreciation, fight crime, and preserve and rehabilitate neighborhoods. Savings kids' lives, in other words, isn't the only reason to get cracking on a code-compliance crackdown. But it's a darn good reason.
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