ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, March 3, 1996 TAG: 9603040034
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
HEAT IS RISING between Roanoke landlords and the neighborhood leaders who want the city to crack down on rental properties. They're all expected at a public hearing at 7 Thursday night in the Roanoke Civic Center's exhibition hall.
Nothing has brought Roanoke's inner-city neighborhoods together more than a January fire that killed a Southeast Roanoke woman and four of her grandchildren.
Nearly every week since the deaths, seven organizations near downtown have met to plan their campaign for Roanoke to start policing unsafe rental housing.
They call themselves the Leftwich-Tate Certificate of Compliance Coalition.
"Leftwich" for the four Leftwich children - Mark, 6, Clyde, 5, Patrick, 4, and Nancy, 3 - who died with their grandmother Jan. 20.
"Tate" for Madeline Tate, a 76-year-old woman who froze to death on a cold night exactly 11 years earlier.
"Certificate of Compliance" for the key document that may be required of landlords when they rent their properties.
More than drug dealing on residential streets, more than crime-plagued parks or anything else, the disgust over substandard housing has brought together neighborhood leaders from both sides of the railroad tracks. "This cuts across every boundary line, every economic level," said coalition leader Petie Cavendish from the Old Southwest neighborhood. "It touches everybody."
"Crises always bring people together," said the Rev. Greg Jackson, a leader of the Loudon/Melrose neighborhood group in Northwest Roanoke, also in the coalition.
Roanoke fire officials believe the blaze that killed 46-year-old Goldie Duncan and her grandchildren started in or around an electric heater the family was using to keep pipes from freezing on a 26-degree night. No charges have been filed against owners of the house, but no smoke detectors could be located, and there was no fire wall between two downstairs apartments - both violations of the city's building code.
To housing advocates, the fire and the long-ago death of Tate, who froze after she failed to add fuel to the wood stove in her rented shack, lend a moral edge to their campaign for the city to do what Virginia cities such as Salem, Alexandria, Lynchburg, Virginia Beach, Portsmouth and Norfolk already do - regularly inspect rental units in the oldest neighborhoods.
"I'm sick of people asking me how much it's going to cost," Cavendish said of increased city inspections. "How much did it cost to bury four little children? How much does it cost for police protection for places that have just become the dregs?''
In a draft released two weeks ago, the city proposed inspection of rental units before a vacant dwelling is rented. Unless there are violations endangering safety and health, a certificate of compliance would be issued and remain in effect for a year, so a unit that changes tenants several times a year would not require an inspection each time.
The city now inspects rental housing only when a tenant or neighbor complains or a warrant is issued against the owner.
The program would begin in a pilot area, not yet identified, and would eventually encompass the city's conservation and rehabilitation districts - Old Southwest, Hurt Park, Belmont, Gainsboro and other portions of Northwest Roanoke close to downtown. There are about 5,000 rental homes and apartments in those neighborhoods.
Thursday night at 7 in the Roanoke Civic Center's exhibition hall, the city will hold a public workshop on the proposals.
Cavendish and other neighborhood leaders think the proposals are full of holes. "It's written in a we-don't-want-to-offend-anybody kind of way," she said. "They've left holes big enough to drive a boat through. This does not give the tenants any more rights than they already have."
She wants more specific language on inspectors' right to enter rental property, and she objects to starting in a pilot neighborhood because the ordinance could face yet another political battle before it's expanded to the wider area.
"You're either going to do it," she said, "or admit you don't have the guts and don't do it."
When you ask who in Roanoke looks after tenants, about the only people mentioned are Legal Aid lawyers Henry Woodward and Nancy Brock.
Substandard rental housing, Cavendish said, apparently never held public interest here until now. Roanokers looked at it the way they once viewed racial segregation, she said - "This is the way it's always been; it's no big deal."
Through the old Neighborhood Alliance, which grew into the Roanoke Neighborhood Partnership, Ethel Watson Carter was a city-hired advocate for tenants from 1976 until about 1980. Now in her 70s, Carter said she drove across the city talking tenants into being respectful of rental property and landlords into fixing toilets, kitchens, roofs and floors.
She recalled being cursed by a landlord who later was shot and killed by a tenant. The city's rental housing is much the same as it was 20 years ago, she said. Day Avenue in Old Southwest was a constant source of problems, just as it is today.
Carter remembers the awful housing she saw around town. "One woman said, 'I'm afraid to sit on the toilet. There are roaches all over it.''' Carter didn't believe it until she saw it herself. Roaches crawled all over the bathroom.
Woodward has been at Legal Aid for 23 years and he, too, says not much has changed. "Same old properties, same old problems, same old gouging, year in and year out."
The proportion of Roanoke homes lived in by their owners has been steadily falling over the last two decades. Between 1990 and 1994, the number of owner-occupied homes fell from 21,118 to slightly fewer than 19,000.
Woodward and Brock have observed what landlords call "buying and bleeding" or "milking the property" - buying an old house cheap after the owner has died, splitting it into apartments and renting them as long as possible without making substantive repairs. When the properties are used up, they often burn down, and the owners collect insurance.
When houses are advertised as being "great investment property," Woodward said, that's landlord code for "you wouldn't want to live in it, but you can milk it."
Another common practice in substandard housing, the lawyers say, is for landlords to remove furnaces and replace them with electric baseboard heat, which is billed directly to tenants. Some of Brock's clients have been billed $250 to $600 in this winter's coldest months for such heat.
She is on a city committee, headed by city housing development director Dan Pollock, that is guiding the rental inspection program. Brock is pushing for a long-term housing plan, not just a superficial fry-the-landlords approach.
Whatever happens with rental inspections, Woodward and Brock said, Roanoke shouldn't simply drive poor people out of one neighborhood and into another.
The lawyers favor a comprehensive housing policy that provides for subsidies to neighborhood groups to help improve housing and for more rehabilitation than is presently being done. "The city is not into rental rehab - I've been told that flatly," Brock said.
Brock and Woodward say some landlords need to be punished, but they warn of the danger in cracking down on landlords so inflexibly that rents go up on fixed-up properties and that others are boarded up and abandoned. "It's an economic bind for everyone," Brock said.
Ted Koebel, director of Virginia Tech's Center for Housing Research, said it's easy to make villains of landlords, but "you have to have strategies that deal with landlords in different situations" - the greedy ones who milk their properties, and the mom-and-pop landlords inexperienced in dealing with tenants or inspectors.
Roanoke landlords appear to be ready for a fight. In a Jan. 26 letter to the members of the Roanoke Property Investors' Association, coordinator and landlord John Kepley said 86 people were on his mailing list for the group, formed last fall to oppose rental inspections. In November, when he had 70 members, he said landlords in the association owned more than 3,000 rental units.
Old Southwest landlord Roland "Spanky" Macher, who is not in the group, complained last week that city building inspectors have taken him to court and "been on my back" all winter. "The tenants are using the building inspectors as leverage not to pay rent," and this will become worse under the rental inspection program, Macher said. "Roanoke hasn't done s--- for 20 years, and they're trying to catch up. I think they wouldn't do anything right now if these people hadn't gotten hurt and died."
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