Code Attorney

A rental inspection ordinance that involves licensing landlords is a very effective tool in keeping property from falling into disrepair or worse.  It’s one of the best ways to keep a lid on crime in a multi-family building.  While many landlords oppose it at the beginning, successful ones eventually are won over as they see that negligent landlords have to raise their rents because they have to spend money on repairs.  This takes away a competitive edge that they have had since they didn’t spend money on normal maintenance.  Tenants benefit because they don’t have to be afraid of getting evicted if they complain about conditions as the local jurisdiction’s inspectors identify problem areas.  It’s unfortunate that in Illinois, a local jurisdiction needs to be a home rule community to enact a rental licensing ordinance.  There has been legislation proposed to allow all communities to pass these types of ordinances and I hope it becomes law someday.  It would make my efforts so much effective to have this option when addressing crime ridden housing.

Simon Goldstein with the Business and Professional People for the Public Interest shared a great resource with me. It’s a brochure that deals with police-code-community partnerships and it discusses the relationship between code enforcement and neighborhoods. Its opening paragraph is as follows:

Effective enforcement of building and housing codes is a key ingredient in many neighborhood revitalization efforts. Community developers have found that the long term success of their revitalization work often hinges on cleaning up or redeveloping problem properties that deter investors, frustrate existing residents and generally contribute to an environment of fear, disorder and crime. Law enforcement also understands the important relationships of crime, blight, and code enforcement. Under the rubric of the “broken window theory”, social scientists have documented the opportunistic nature of crime, showing that vacant properties and dilapidated buildings become magnets for crime. Applying the techniques of problem-oriented policing, more law enforcement agencies today use a place-based approach to tackle these neighborhood hot spots deploying special nuisance abatement teams with assistance from their code enforcement partners.

You can download the entire brochure at http://www.lisc.org/content/publications/detail/5648

In Victorville, CA a lender decided to tear down new homes and other structures that hadn’t been completed to avoid future fines from the local government for code violations.

Officials of Guaranty Bank of Austin, Texas, which took over the development last year, were unavailable for comment. But Victorville city spokeswoman Yvonne Hester said the bank decided not to throw good money after bad.

“It just didn’t pencil out for them,” she said. “They’d have to spend a lot of money to turn around and sell the houses. They just made a financial decision to just demolish them.”

You can read the entire story in the L.A. Times at this address

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-demolish5-2009may05,0,4930126.story

Local governments frequently use fines as a way to motivate defendants to come into compliance with the code. Sometimes buildings have to be torn down if they’ve suffered too much damage from being open structures. But, this is the first time I’ve heard of tearing down brand new buildings as a way of coming into compliance with the local codes.

Jake Slater, Director of the Department of Code Enforcement and Business Tax in Tampa, FL contacted me to comment on my most recent post about how code enforcement enhances law enforcement.  He told me that Tampa’s crime rate dropped -46% since 2003, an astonishing result.  He also asked me to survey my readers about studies conducted on the relationship between crime prevention and code enforcement.

I am looking at ways to more effectively track the performance measures for Code
Enforcement and would like to show the relationships between our systematic and
pro active code enforcement and the recently reported reduction of crime in the
City of Tampa.

In your travels and networking, please feel free to share my contact information with other local government officials

You can reach Jake at Jake.Slater@ci.tampa.fl.us   Also, please let me know about any studies that have been conducted in your jurisdictions on this topic.