ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, February 20, 1996 TAG: 9602200051
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
ROANOKE housing administrators deserve plaudits for developing what seem to be sound and workable provisions for more regularly inspecting rental property.
Such certificate-of-compliance programs, which provide for inspections of vacant rental units before they can be rerented, are already working in several Virginia cities. Currently in Roanoke, units are inspected only at the request of the owner or the tenant.
As was shown by the deaths last month of four children and their grandmother in a fire in their rented Southeast Roanoke home, there are good reasons for the building code's insistence on such things as adequate heating systems, firewalls and smoke detectors.
The draft ordinance, to be reviewed at a public workshop March 7 and still subject to modification, makes common-sense distinctions. Serious health and safety violations would have to be fixed before a unit could be rerented; significant violations would not bar immediate rerental but would have to be repaired within 21 days; minor violations would not prevent issuance of a certificate of compliance.
Moreover, no unit would have to be inspected more than once a year, regardless of frequency of turnover.
Initial inspections would be free to landlords - a cost of business, in other words, that other city taxpayers would subsidize.
Finally, implementation would take place in phases, so the city can get an idea of how much time the effort requires of inspectors. For the program to work well, landlords should be able to expect a speedy inspection when a unit becomes vacant.
Despite the above concessions, some landlords remain truculent in their opposition. Perhaps they should be reminded that the program, while designed to increase the frequency of inspections, adds nothing to the code requirements with which landlords are already by law obliged to comply.
Constructive suggestions should be welcomed. Stubborn defiance should be disregarded: It probably reveals more about those landlords who display it than about the proposed ordinance.
LENGTH: Short : 45 linesby CNB