City Manager's Column: Rear in a Sling

If the Building Code issue has "gone south" on the City Council, then where did it take its turn southward?

To me, there was a key event.

The Council Committee that was assigned to work on the project conducted a series of meetings with various contractors to discuss what a code might cover. Throughout those first meetings and during the first several months of the process, there was surprisingly little opposition to the idea of having a code.

But, then it was suggested that the code should also be paralleled with another type of ordinance, namely, an ordinance that would deal with the inspection of rental units. At that point, a large group of landlords organized to oppose any such ordinance.

Ever since, the "Unspoken Issue," in my view, has involved rental properties.

The Council probably changed the newest draft of the building code ordinance so that it only covered new construction in order to show that it would not affect existing rental properties. Landlords probably continue to oppose it because they feel that the ordinance will be amended later to include rental properties.

I don’t discount the feelings of the people who have attended recent Council meetings in order to voice their opposition to the code. I also don’t discount the reasons that they state for their opposition to it. But, when you look into the audience and notice that several are landlords, you also have to conclude that rental properties are the "Unspoken Issue."

We have heard from some of our property owners that, instead of a building code, there should be an ordinance that addresses run-down and unsightly properties. This is where the building code issue began for me. I, personally, didn’t have citizens calling me to complain about newly constructed buildings, but, instead, my calls were about homes that people felt were a blight on their neighborhoods and a drag on their property values.

The two residential properties that I was called about the most were the house on S Clark Street that eventually had to burned down due to a cockroach infestation and the house on S Olive that’s just up the hill from City Hall, but has been, more recently, undergoing renovation under a new owner. Both were rental houses. Both are examples of homes that even some landlords have pointed to as examples of substandard properties that some ordinance should address.

But, did the owners of the properties on S Clark and S Olive feel that way? I doubt that they did.

The complaints about those properties didn’t come from their owners. The complaints didn’t come from their tenants, either. I doubt that anyone would ever freely state that they own or live in or rent-out substandard buildings.

In fact, it is probably more the case that the owners of houses like the ones on S Clark and S Olive tend to rationalize that, if someone is willing to live there, then these properties must be OK and any further expense made to fix-up such properties is unjustified. After all, that’s the market system, isn’t it?  In some cases, it might not matter how poor or unfortunate someone might be, but as long as someone is willing to live in such a place, it must be OK. And, any attempt to try to change this dynamic under the guidelines of a nuisance ordinance or a building code ordinance would be a bad thing. I have even heard some suggest that such ordinances would be "anti-poor."

It is easy to be against houses like the one that was on S Clark and the one that is on S Olive. They are examples of extreme cases that no objective person would ever admit were acceptable houses.

But, how do you write an ordinance that creates a minimum standard for properties like the ones on S Clark and S Olive that doesn’t catch other properties in the same net?

That is the "Unspoken Issue."