Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, September 27, 1995 TAG: 9509270044
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Why?
No single reason can explain the failure to solve a problem that no single reason caused.
But surely part of the answer is the absence of a plan. Where is the strategy? Where are the goals, and timetables for meeting them, the coordinated series of steps leading to those goals, a means of measuring progress, and of holding feet to fire when progress isn't made?
Other Virginia cities, most notably Lynchburg, have put reduction of substandard housing at the center of their planning, with dramatic results.
By contrast, Roanoke's efforts have been halting and ad hoc.
Soon after Ewert pledged a decade ago to eliminate unsafe housing within 10 years, the city hired two new building inspectors. That was a step in the right direction, but only a step. In a city of nearly 45,000 houses, mostly built before 1950, two is not enough. If Roanoke is to be serious about ridding itself of substandard housing, it must hire more inspectors.
Only now is Roanoke moving toward adoption of a certificate-of-occupancy program requiring vacant units to meet basic health and safety requirements before they can be re-rented. This, too, will be a step in the right direction, but only a step - and a belated one at that.
The city has put millions in federal Community Development Block Grant money into housing-rehab projects. But in after-inflation dollars, the yearly amounts are shrinking; moreover, the continuing availability of those dollars is in doubt. Planning should start now on how best to leverage local dollars for maximum result.
The death of 76-year-old Madeline Tate, frozen in her home on a cold winter day, triggered public outcry and Ewert's promise in 1985. Ensuring that such a tragedy isn't repeated is one reason for working to reduce and eventually eliminate unsafe and unhealthy housing.
But it is not the only reason. Housing blight also contributes to crime, by undermining self-respect and providing havens for drug trafficking and other offenses. It reduces property values in its vicinity, and it poses barriers to efforts to preserve and rehabilitate neighborhoods.
In that, the entire region - not just the city - has an interest, and needs to become cooperatively involved. A regional economy is affected by decline anywhere in its midst, especially in its hub. And the kind of social pathologies bred by blighted neighborhoods seldom can be kept in quarantine. The last thing the surrounding countryside needs is an invasion of Roanokers fleeing a no-longer-livable city.
That's not an immediate prospect, which is all the more reason to keep it from becoming one. Compared to its 1,500 substandard houses, the city has about 43,000 houses that aren't in need of major repairs in order to meet basic health and safety standards. This is cause for both optimism and apprehension.
Optimism, because housing deterioration in Roanoke hasn't reached an irreversible point. Apprehension, because the city has so much to lose if housing deterioration is allowed to continue festering and growing.
by CNB