RUCO task force plods forward

City of Greensboro inspections employees Dan Reynolds and Lori Loosemore are flanked by advocates Marlene Sanford (left) and Donna Newton.

During a RUCO task force meeting today, Greensboro Neighborhood Congress advisor Donna Newton said she would take a proposal back to her membership floated by representatives of the real estate industry to scrap sample inspections for multifamily housing and replace them with an ordinance change that would give city inspectors the discretion to inspect all units if exterior violations were found in 25 percent of units.

Newton said she planned to consult her membership by e-mail so that she could have an answer at the next task force meeting, which takes place on Friday at 1 p.m. at the Greensboro headquarters of the Triad Real Estate and Building Industries Coalition, or TREBIC.

“I think if I can get back to them they will seriously consider that on multifamily housing in the place of sampling on multifamily housing,” Newton said. “My read is that they are not going to willingly give up RUCO certification of single-family houses that are new on the rental market and they will still want sampling of single-family housing.”

Exterior conditions such as junk cars, overgrown lots and graffiti are considered probable cause for city inspectors to check the inside of dwellings to see if they meet code. The task force could not reach a consensus on whether the 25 percent threshold for exterior violations would give the inspectors license to look inside all units in a particular building or inside all units of an entire apartment complex. Industry representatives favored the more limited scenario while tenant and neighborhood advocates leaned toward the expansive option.

Beth McKee-Huger, executive director of the Greensboro Housing Coalition, expressed disagreement with a statement by Bobby Akin, president of the Greensboro Landlords Association, who said that conditions outside a residence generally provide a good indication of whether there are problems inside.

McKee-Huger said she has observed situations where the RUCO ordinance was effective in compelling landlords to correct violations that were not apparent from the outside of the building. She said the housing coalition helped a woman who had been attempting to get her landlord to fix an air conditioner for six months because her child suffered from asthma. The house held a RUCO certificate, McKee-Huger said, and the threat of the certificate being revoked was instrumental in getting the landlord to cure the code violation.

Task force members wrangled over their mandate during the meeting today. The RUCO Advisory Board voted earlier this month to have the task force explore an option drafted by TREBIC President Marlene Sanford that calls for eliminating “most proactive inspections and the RUCO certificate and substantially expanding” a section of the ordinance “to target the problem properties.” Task force members on the industry side argued the RUCO Advisory Board had already instructed them to eliminate proactive inspections; Newton and McKee-Huger said they could not agree to that.

The task force has not yet defined “problem properties,” but industry representatives contend they comprise only 7-10 percent of the total number of units inspected by city staff.

Newton said her organization’s membership would like to see staff more aggressively target single-family houses, suggesting that neighborhoods are under new stress because of houses that have recently been added to the rental market because of the ongoing mortgage crisis.

“Say I can’t sell my house and I put it on the market, most people do not know what it would take to make that house safe for habitation,” she said. “Particularly for single-family housing — we have a lot of property owners that I suspect live in housing that is not safe for habitation — particularly for single-family housing, I think that initial RUCO inspection before it goes on the rental market is critically important. And now particularly because we have so many new rental houses going on the market…. the person who owns them might be in California, or Timbuktu or Canada.”

Among those in the audience for the meeting were Mayor Pro Tem Nancy Vaughan, who made the initial request for the task force to review options for making the program more efficient, and Assistant City Manager Andy Scott.

“We think this will ultimately come to council,” Newton said, “but the congress is going to be in there actively fighting for sampling and proactive inspection of single-family housing that comes on the rental market.”