Former Councilwoman Annie Dickson described to the Council at our Tuesday meeting how she had watched her neighborhood decline and watched abandoned houses being boarded and left unattended for years. That was the low point and the area has since rebounded. I know and honor the effort she and her neighbors have expended for years to keep their neighborhood healthy. When she was elected to the Council from District 2 during the mid-1990's, she brought her neighbors' hopes for sustaining their homes and investments, a universal concern. She advocated enforcing minimum housing standards for Garland. I agree that there must be a basic level of maintenance to protect our neighborhoods and homes, primarily for reasons of health, safety, and welfare. It is why, coincidentally, I asked the Council to consider the International Property Maintenance Code at our work session on Monday, which has been assigned to a Council committee for review.

As part of her testimony to the Council on Garland's Rental Housing Inspection Program (sometimes just referenced by its section in the Health Code, "32.09"), she described an odd left-turn. What had started as a discussion of minimum housing standards for all homes—life and safety issues—morphed to an assertion from the Code Dept that the primary problems with substandard housing were in the rental housing segment. Based on that testimony, a Rental Registration Program was born. Almost 6000 houses were initially registered. Over time, it was judged that effort was not doing much to address the problems of substandard housing.

A couple years ago, the previous Council approved a Rental Inspection Program of mandatory inspections, exterior and interior. The program inspected and cited deficiencies that went well beyond minimum housing standards and stretched to the realm of esthetics. Inspectors were hired for the job that had been trained and licensed to inspect for new home buyers that wanted to know every deficiency, dent, and divot before investing large sums for their new home. Applying that training to this program resulted in rental houses having to be perfect to pass the inspection.

Surprisingly, most Garland rentals did very well, extremely well. The average score was 87%. Inspectors were doing several inspections each per day, and then having to go back to reinspect two or threes times for generally minor deficiencies. Only about 1% of the homes were being identified that had a serious concern.

It would appear that there were generally few problems in Garland with rental houses. However, no one could be sure because only 1700 houses were registered and inspected, significantly below the 6000 houses voluntarily reported only a few years earlier. Most of those were exterior-only inspections. (Another group of Garland citizens felt compelled to sue their Council to block unconstitutional interior searches. The court agreed and the Program had to be modified.) A nagging suspicion has remained that slumlords have evaded the registrations and inspections, that a huge pile of substandard housing remains undiscovered.

The purpose of the hearing was to consider revisions to the Rental Inspection Program and the recommendations of a Blue Ribbon Panel of Garland residents that had been established to review the program. Testimony was given by numerous speakers, primarily for the real estate community and how the program was a tremendous burden.

At the conclusion of the public hearing, it was time for Council to decide how to proceed. Several issues were pertinent for me, including:

• Any assertion that government has the right to demand entry to your home without probable cause sufficient to convince a judge to issue a warrant,
• The Three Strikes Rule—existing Code ordinances had not discovered the elusive slumlords, the Rental Registration Program hadn't discovered the slumlords, and the Rental Inspecton Program hadn't discovered the slumlords, and
• The Inspections program had been a failure in everyone's eyes: the Code Dept and Staff, the landlords, most of the Council, and apparently with renters

Councilman Randall Dunning moved that the program and ordinance be repealed. While I voted in support, there were not enough on the Council ready to give up the slumlord search and the motion failed. For me, there was no data that showed a problem existed that couldn't be addressed under other ordinances, there was a group of citizens that were being targeted for substandard housing but were overwhelmingly proven through the program to be just the opposite, and there had been no attempt to "test drive" the proposed solution before passage to see if it would find what all the other efforts had missed.

After lengthy discussion and a number of amendments to the proposed Ordinance, a new program was born that will inspect rental properties annually on the outside, and inside between occupancies. Provisions were made to exempt the properties that have been inspected under the current program, to provide education, certification, and incentives to landlords, and to pursue the recommendations of the Blue Ribbon Panel, such as seeking better data mining results to identify rental properties.

One outstanding provision was to sunset the ordinance. If it's still not working, why have it? The original suggestion was five years and I argued for two. The Council ultimately accepted three years.

I will continue to have reservations about the program. It just doesn't strike me as having proven its purpose and it hasn't demonstrated any success. The new program certainly gives significant incentives to register, which should theoretically whittle down the invisible pool of rental properties until the true core is exposed, if it exists.

I know that substandard housing does exist. However, I don't think of the situations reported to me by constituents since I was elected, any were identified as rentals. Substandard housing exists but those properties may never be discovered and corrected by focusing on rentals.

Back to where this posting started: minimum housing standards throughout the community. I agree that we should attempt to address any substandard housing, whether rental home, owner-occupied home, or apartment, as long as we are focused on life and safety issues. Like having smoke detectors. I just think we'll have more success with education and a positive approach, and with getting the community involved.

Those wishing to review the meeting to better understand the latitude of discussion and the Council's decisions can do so at the City of Garland website, and finding the CGTV Department. Since the meeting ran over seven hours, I suggest starting at the last segment for this topic.

[Return to Website]

2 comments

Comments:

Comment from: Deborah Morris [Visitor] · http://realkids.com

Well said. Thank you, sir, for listening and considering the facts and realities of this program instead of going along with the continued rhetoric. This program has been a disaster from the start. Hopefully the revisions will ease the worst effects enough to at least slow the exodus of investors who contribute substantially to Garland's economy.

As for smoke detectors, as a long-time Disaster Team Leader with the Dallas Area Red Cross, I've spent many nights wading through the charred ruins of houses and apartments where lives were saved due to smoke detectors... and others where lives were needlessly lost due to their absence. Since in my experience the vast majority of house fires are caused by cigarettes, decorative candles, unattended stoves, and faulty portable heaters (in about that order)--none of which are normally landlord or house related--I'm probably over-diligent about plastering my rental property with smoke detectors. I'd far rather lose a house than a tenant.

05/03/07 @ 17:48

Comment from: joe [Visitor]

Mr. Athas you are a fine example of a civil servant, may God forever bless you in your endeavors. I will make sure the common man knows your name.

05/07/07 @ 14:31

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