ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, June 21, 1996 TAG: 9606210028
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
WHEN housing fails to meet minimum health and safety standards, people die.
Most Roanokers know this. They know of the January deaths of Goldie Christine Duncan and her four grandchildren in a Southeast Roanoke house that had been cut up into apartments without the required firewalls and that lacked the required smoke detectors. Roanokers of longer residence may recall, too, the freezing death more than a decade ago of an elderly tenant in her ill-heated Northwest Roanoke home.
Sad to say, as many as 5,000 units in Roanoke's older, center-city neighborhoods do not meet minimum standards. Meeting those standards is required by law, but enforcement is difficult without systematic inspection of rental properties.
The new rental-inspection law adopted by City Council this week is a significant step forward. The step isn't as long as it could be, or should be. But it remains an improvement over the status quo that official neglect and private greed long conspired to preserve.
The most important retreat from earlier plans for the new law is abandonment of the notion that inspections should be required every two years regardless of whether a unit is occupied or not. About this, however, the city may have had little choice. State enabling legislation appears to authorize mandatory inspections only when a unit is vacated.
That's the only time an inspection - good for two years - will be mandatory. But voluntary inspections at other times will be encouraged. For inspections at a mutually convenient time before vacancies occur, the city's inspections fees will be waived. Landlords who take advantage of this incentive, however, may not be the landlords who cause the problem.
The city also shied away from proposals to require landlords (a) to submit lists of their rental property and (b) display the two-year certificates of occupancy on units that have passed inspection. On these, the city yielded not to the restrictions of state law but to the wishes of some in the landlord lobby.
Most of the information that the city won't get from the landlords is available by other means; ownership of real estate is, after all, a matter of public record. But it isn't clear why city taxpayers in general, rather than landlords in particular, should bear the costs of compiling the information.
Resistance to the display requirement is even harder to understand. Why would a landlord not want prospective tenants to be aware that his or her rental property has passed a maintenance inspection? The requirement would have posed little burden on landlords, except perhaps on those who'd just as soon not have too many questions asked about property without such a certificate. Councilwoman Linda Wyatt's suggestion that such certificates could be posted less publicly inside properties, perhaps on electrical boxes, is worth trying.
These faults notwithstanding, something clearly is better than nothing. The rental-inspection plan as passed is not wholly defanged. And the city's new commitment to upgrade housing is in itself significant.
The proof will be in the consequences. If the new law, combined with more consistent enforcement, steadily improves the city's housing stock - a measurement that should be carefully monitored - then the aim will have been met. And not just homes but lives may be saved.
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