The City Council met last night (Tuesday, February 21) and, among many things, approved a new rental housing inspection program. The new program is one aspect of a four-pronged strategy to maintain and improve the overall value of our community housing stock.
The first prong was the Council’s adoption of an exterior maintenance code for all types of housing. This ordinance, which was adopted in 2005, provided the City with the legal basis to require property owners to maintain the buildings on their property up to certain standards. This ordinance allows the City to require a homeowner, for example, to paint their home if 50% of more of the exposed surface of the house has peeling paint.
The second prong of the overall strategy was the adoption of a new clean site ordinance. This ordinance requires property owners to maintain the general outdoor conditions of their land up to certain standards. This ordinance, for example, allows the City to require a homeowner to clean up junk in the backyard. If the homeowner doesn’t do it, the City will, and then require the homeowner to pay for it.
The final prong of the strategy is the adoption of a Point-of-Sale inspection ordinance for the sale of homes. Several other cities in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis and St. Louis Park are two examples) have such ordinances. The ordinances have a direct impact on the condition of housing in the communities where they require sellers to maintain or repair a home to a certain standard to enable it to be sold on the private market.
We don’t see the point-of-sale inspection program anywhere soon on our planning horizon, but I would expect our Council to consider it someday.
The City is concerned with the value of individual homes because the condition of a home can positively or negatively impact the value of adjoining properties in the same neighborhood. More often than not, when the City takes an action to force a homeowner to comply with one of our ordinances we make that homeowner unhappy, to be sure, but we also get the appreciation of every neighbor surrounding that unhappy homeowner.
Sometimes that’s what we have to settle for in city government.
