ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, September 6, 1996 TAG: 9609060021
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-10 EDITION: METRO
ROANOKE'S new rental-inspection program is finally getting into gear. Not exactly high gear, mind you. That would take more resources and toughness than the city so far is willing to attach to the initiative. Still, it is forward motion, in welcome contrast to the wheel-spinning that has tended to be the Roanoke Valley's response to housing issues.
This fall, inspectors plan to get to eight blocks of Elm Avenue between Jefferson Street and the Wasena Bridge, in the Old Southwest neighborhood that has been pressing several years for a rental-inspection program. Inspections of a 10-block section of Orange Avenue Northwest are projected for December. That's to be followed in early 1997 by a stretch of Bullitt and Jamison avenues, in the Southeast Roanoke neighborhood where a rental-house fire killed a woman and her four grandchildren and intensified pressure on the city to adopt the inspection program.
Not only will this leave a majority of the city's estimated 2,600 substandard units still unexamined. City officials acknowledge that the initially targeted sections do not include Roanoke's worst rental areas.
Given, however, the limited number of inspectors, some sort of prioritization was necessary - and the city's is defensible. First, the sections initially targeted are high-visibility and high-density. Second, the program's success depends not only on mandatory inspections when inner-city units become vacant, but also on landlords' enlightened self-interest in getting their properties voluntarily inspected and approved before vacancies occur. Such cooperation may be likelier, and the inspection and certification process speedier, where housing conditions are not the absolute pits.
The inspection program adds nothing to minimum maintenance standards that rental units already are supposed to meet. It does, however, provide an enforcement tool for ensuring compliance - and so is in line with one recommendation of a 1993 Roanoke Valley housing assessment. That study, conducted for the Roanoke Regional Housing Network by the nationally known Enterprise Foundation, said the city needs more personnel to enforce existing regulations on housing.
How far a couple of extra inspectors goes toward fulfilling that recommendation is arguable (not far enough, we'd argue), but it's a start. And the importance of this initiative shouldn't be underestimated in a city like Roanoke, where the question of moderately priced housing is less one of its availability than of its condition.
Still, that was only one of several recommendations of the 1993 report. Most of the others - above all, the study's call for a genuinely regional approach to what, after all, is a regional problem involving Salem and Roanoke County as well as Roanoke city - have resulted in nothing.
Roanoke's rental-inspection program comes better late than never, and better begun on a small scale than not at all. The shame is that an effort so modest looks so good compared with the valley's idling in neutral on the general question of affordable housing.
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