ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, March 8, 1996 TAG: 9603080098
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DIANE STRUZZI AND MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITERS
PATRICIA LEFTWICH was not just one of the crowd that came together to ponder a rental inspection program. The deaths of her four children and her mother in a recent fire put extra pressure on the city to take action.
Hundreds of landlords, tenants and neighborhood leaders filled 20 giant flip charts and two studious hours Thursday night with ideas about how Roanoke ought to run its first regular inspections of rental housing.
Tenants with stories of fires and roaches and darkened parking lots, and landlords with accounts of tenants who smash beer bottles on neighbors' walls and sneer when owners try to evict them, poured into the Roanoke Civic Center.
There were no mass testimonials from either side, however. The city administration split the approximately 350 people into 20 focus groups that huddled together in clusters of folding chairs all around the civic center's exhibition hall and the adjacent coliseum.
Firefighters, community planners and other municipal employees served as facilitators, jotting on the flip charts the changes residents want made in the draft of a rental inspection program the city released last month. City Manager Bob Herbert said a summary of the suggestions will be mailed to all who signed in. A follow-up meeting will be held at the civic center April 4.
Designing a program that is fair to both tenants and landlords will not be simple. Just ask Patricia Leftwich and her new landlord, Leon T. McGhee. The two exchanged ideas and concerns in one of the focus groups.
Leftwich's mother and four children were killed in a January fire at the house they rented in Southeast Roanoke. Their deaths led several neighborhood groups to join forces and push for tighter regulation of rental housing.
Leftwich said she had no idea there were possible violations of the city's building code in her Stewart Avenue home until city officials inspected the property after the fire.
"That's where education comes in," she said. "Educate all the tenants on what the codes and standards are."
Until the Leftwich fire, many landlords didn't know smoke detectors are required on each floor of a house, McGhee said. He has owned rental property in the city for 20 years and recently began renting a federally subsidized apartment in Southwest Roanoke to Leftwich.
He worries that restrictions will force good landlords out of the city and scare real estate investors from neighborhoods. He said he is concerned that the program will reduce the supply of housing for low-income people.
"I can only provide the buildings which the rent allows me to provide," he said after the meeting. "I can probably spend $50,000 on each building I own. But I would also have to double the rent, and people would have to move. There are a lot of [my] tenants who only make $500 a month. ... But the most important thing is: Would I live on the property? And I would."
Leftwich jumped in as soon as he took a breath.
"This is why I can talk with him," she said. "I live on a fixed income. He's a rare breed; some landlords don't ask themselves that."
She passed a handwritten note to McGhee about a problem in her new apartment: She needs a hot-water faucet. McGhee assured her it would be fixed.
McGhee said he purchased the house where Leftwich lives about three years ago. The structure had been boarded up, and McGhee decided to rehabilitate it. But he said if the new rental inspection program had been implemented, requiring an inspection each time an apartment changed hands, he never would have renovated the house. There would have been simply too many hoops to jump through, he said.
The question the city should be asking is "What can we do to make landlords want to come into an area?'' McGhee said. "This could do just the opposite."
LENGTH: Medium: 74 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: WAYNE DEEL/Staff Patricia Leftwich, who lost her fourby CNBchildren and her mother in a fire on Stewart Avenue Southeast in
January, makes a point to her new landlord, Leon T. McGhee, during
a discussion of rental inspections Thursday night. color