ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, February 4, 1996 TAG: 9602020061
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: F-2 EDITION: METRO
THE DEATHS last month of four children and their grandmother in a Southeast Roanoke firetrap underscored the urgency of the city's need for better enforcement of building-code standards in residential rental units.
The tragedy has shaken into action a municipal bureaucracy that had been foot-dragging for months on a proposed program for regular inspections of rental property. Such a program, requiring certification that a vacated unit meets minimum standards before it can be rented anew, has proved effective in Lynchburg and other Virginia cities.
The buck, however, stops not with the city bureaucracy but with City Council.
Despite warnings of a worsening problem - beginning as long ago as 1985, when an elderly Roanoke woman froze to death in her ill-heated rental home - council has never made stronger enforcement of health and safety standards a priority. If it had, for example, the number of city building inspectors would not still be woefully inadequate for the task at hand.
Nor has council been willing to make a point of taking on the slumlord lobby. That role instead has fallen by default to neighborhood leaders and anti-poverty activists.
Council can partially redeem itself for past derelictions by pressuring city officials to speedily resolve the necessary details, and then by approving establishment of a certificate-of-compliance program.
If council members' resolve still needs steeling, here's a point to keep in mind: Certificates of compliance are simply a way to enforce laws already on the books. They help ensure that landlords are meeting building-code requirements that they, by law, are already obligated to meet.
Those laws too often go unenforced now, because city inspectors currently can enter a rental unit only at the request of the landlord or tenant. Rental property most in need of upgrading to minimum safety and health standards tends to be owned by landlords least likely to request an inspection. And tenants who inhabit such property are often either unaware of their rights or too fearful of landlord retaliation to ask for an inspection.
Bad enough that five people had to die before the urgency of this problem was widely recognized. Even worse would be to do nothing about the problem after having been jerked into recognition of it.
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