Council Orders Review of Slum Housing Effort

Amid concern that the city is failing to carry out the promise of inspecting all apartments for a $1-per-month fee, the Council ordered a review of the program Wednesday as a first step to an overhaul.

Councilman Mike Feuer said the fee was adopted six months ago to pay for a new program that would inspect each of the city’s 750,000 apartment units at least once every three years, rather than the past practice of waiting for complaints before sending inspectors.

The idea of the program was to take a comprehensive approach to reducing slum housing in the city.

“We promised that units would get inspected on a regular basis,” Feuer said. “Unfortunately what has happened in practice breaks that promise and, worse, makes even less accessible the complaint-driven process we had before.”

Inspectors hired with the new fee have been spending much of their time responding to complaints, keeping them from the regular inspection program.

The council asked the city Housing Department to report on the cost, staffing needs and demand for responding to complaints, and where the fee revenue has been going.

Of the 17,500 inspections done during the last six months of 1998, 13,000 were in response to complaints. At that rate, it would take 21 years to do regular inspections on all city housing units.

Councilman Rudy Svorinich Jr., called the program a “fiasco” which has left “gaping holes” in the city’s inspection program.