RUCO Facts and Figures

Greensboro's RUCO (Rental Unit Certificate of Occupancy) ordinance was adopted by the city council in 2002. Its purpose was to reduce the number of substandard apartments in the city by requiring all rental units to be inspected in order to receive a certificate of occupancy. The ordinance also requires that a 2% sampling of apartments in the city be inspected annually. Thus RUCO is a proactive rather than a complaint-based system, although tenant or neighbor complaints can still trigger inspections.

The Triad Real Estate and Building Industry Coalition (TREBIC) and the Triad Apartment Association and the Greensboro Landlords Association opposed the ordinance, claim that it doesn't work, and are now lobbying the city council to return to a complaint-based system.

But RUCO does work, and it works very well.

In the first year of RUCO inspections, the number of substandard housing units reported in Greensboro increased dramatically, but this was not because housing was getting worse. It was because RUCO was uncovering hundreds of substandard apartments that lay hidden in the complaint-based system. The figures support the contention of the Greensboro Housing Coalition that many tenants are afraid to report problems because they fear reprisal by their landlords. But as RUCO inspections progressed throughout the city, landlords stepped up maintenance, and the number of substandard units was more than cut in half from its peak:


Even more dramatically, RUCO inspections have reduced the number of housing-related complaints by 80%:

Not surprisingly, when landlords know that the RUCO inspector might show up, they get their properties up to code without waiting for someone to complain.

Landlords also respond to complaints far more quickly under RUCO than they did under the previous ordinance. More than half of violations were not fixed even after a month under the old system. But now almost 60 percent get fixed on the same day they're reported, and nine out of ten are fixed within 30 days. That is because of the ordinance's one-two punch of fines for non-compliance and the threat of lost rental income if one's CO is revoked.

(source: "Ensuring Housing Quality: Proactive Minimum Housing Code Inspections
of Rental Properties in North Carolina Cities" by Carol Cooley Hickey).

If proactive inspections are repealed in Greensboro, experience in Asheville, NC shows that the number of housing complaints will probably rise again to previous levels. Asheville enacted an ordinance similar to Greensboro's RUCO program, and under it the number of housing complaints declined steeply. But under pressure from Asheville's landlords, the ordinance was repealed, and housing complaints quickly jumped back up:

(source: "Ensuring Housing Quality: Proactive Minimum Housing Code Inspections

of Rental Properties in North Carolina Cities" by Carol Cooley Hickey).

Proactive inspections also improve safety. In Asheville, after the repeal of the proactive inspection program, residential fires doubled.

(source: "Ensuring Housing Quality: Proactive Minimum Housing Code Inspections

of Rental Properties in North Carolina Cities" by Carol Cooley Hickey).

One feature of the RUCO ordinance that the apartment industry especially hates is its sample inspections. They argue that it is a waste of money, and inspections should be focused on the "real problem properties" that can be identified from a visual inspection or from tenant complaints. As Marlene Sanford, president of TREBIC put it in a News & Record article, "We've spent $3 million inspecting luxury apartments."

But Marlene was not telling the truth when she said that. The total cost of RUCO over its first eight years is $2,865,682, and in that time it has uncovered thousands of substandard housing units. I doubt that those were luxury apartments, and even if they were, they obviously needed to be inspected.

So far this year, 13 percent of apartments visited during random sampling failed inspection, according to Dan Reynolds of Greensboro's inspections department. Violations occurred in all kinds of apartments in all parts of town. Eighty-one percent of the violations were related to electrical problems or smoke alarms. These problems are not visible from the outside, and even the tenants may not know about them. They would never be discovered if the apartment industry gets its way. The fact that about one in ten apartments in Greensboro have problems that jeopardize the life and safety of the tenants is apparently not a concern to TREBIC.

Landlords also complain that up to a third of violations are "caused by the tenant." But this figure includes dead smoke alarm batteries, which the apartment industry considers to be the tenant's responsibility (though for the life of me I can't figure out why). However, I doubt that saying "it was the tenant's fault" will console anyone for the loss of life or property in the case of a fire.

The hostility toward tenants that I've heard expressed at many RUCO meetings seems odd to me. You would think that tenant damage is something that professionals would have built into their business model, and at any rate it has no bearing on the landlords' responsibility to maintain their rental property. You never hear anyone in the auto rental industry claim that they shouldn't have to submit their cars to safety inspections because those darn renters just keep wrecking them.

Regulatory Capture

Though I haven't gone into detail about the history of the ordinance, it's important to note that the apartment industry has steadily chipped away at it over the years. One way they have done this is to capture its regulatory body, the RUCO board. Here is the language from the ordinance:

The board shall be composed of fifteen (15) members serving three-year terms and representative of the following: One (1) member from each of the five council districts; one (1) council member, one (1) inspections staff member from the city's engineering and inspections department; one (1) staff member from the city's housing and community development department; one (1) member from each of the following organizations or representative successor organizations having similar interests: Triad Apartment Association; Triad Real Estate & Building Industry Coalition; Greensboro Landlords Association; Greensboro Housing Coalition; Greensboro Neighborhood Congress; and two (2) citizens at large. In making appointments to the board, the city council shall make due effort to assure a fair balance between the number of members representative of landlord/owner interests and those representative of tenant/occupant interests. All members shall have one (1) vote except for city staff appointments who shall serve in an advisory capacity and be appointed by the city manager to serve at his discretion.

What that boils down to is that of the RUCO board's 13 voting members, none of them must be actual tenants, and only one of them (from the Greensboro Housing Coalition) necessarily represents tenant interests, since the Greensboro Neighborhood Congress is mostly made up of homeowners. In fact, the Congress's current representative is himself a landlord who was fined under the RUCO ordinance. But three of the members must represent the rental housing industry. According to Jordan Green of YES! Weekly, six of 11 current voting members either own rental properties or work for companies that do so. There are no tenants on the board at all.

The foxes, having taken up comfortable residence in the regulatory hen house, have finished their hors d'oeuvres, and are now hungry for the main course.

GSO Housing Web Video

The Greensboro Housing Coalition has produced a mini-documentary on affordable housing. It gives you a pretty good idea of how minimum housing enforcement works in Greensboro.



The GHC has a lot to be proud of, and Greensboro should be very grateful for their work.

Via Chosen Fast.

Rent-Leveling the Playing Field

LTE writer Michael Silverman suggests that Greensboro establish a rent-levelling board to handle landlord-tenant disputes:

The board members consisted of three landlords, three tenants and three homeowners all appointed by the city council. The board also maintained an attorney. We met monthly in town hall, and after each meeting the public was invited to bring concerns before the board stemming from either tenant or landlord issues. The board heard all parties and made a legal binding decision either for or against the landlord or tenant involved. For the many apartment complexes within Greensboro, it would be a service to the thousands of residents if such a board were implemented in Greensboro.

I'd never heard of rent-leveling boards before, and my intensive research indicates that they're all in New Jersey.

I think it would be a good thing if renter-landlord problems could be brought into a hearing where tenants and landlords would have to show their faces to deal with disputes. As Greensboro rental law now stands, many landlords are able to maintain substandard property for years on end with few bad consequences for themselves, and landlords have almost no recourse against deadbeat or destructive tenants.

But the rent-leveling boards of New Jersey seem to have been established to handle rent increases in rent-controlled properties, and we don't have rent control here in North Carolina. I imagine that the Devil will be buying a polar fleece anorak from REI before rent control comes here. And I'm pretty sure that the city would need an enabling law from the NC state legislature before it could establish another quasi-judicial board.

Good Charlotte

"Greensboro is by and large a nice, well-run place to live," wrote a local blogger recently, and I was inclined to agree until I rode around looking for houses that Project Homestead had built.

Yesterday's tour gave me a very biased sample, but I saw that Greensboro has a lot of stressed neighborhoods with boarded-up houses like these. I was afraid to get out of my car to take these pictures. [NB: these houses were not built by Project Homestead. Read the link above to find out about the condition of PH houses.]



The city does a lot to provide basic housing in these neighborhoods, and has done some great infrastructure and planning projects like the East Market Street corridor.

But what does the city do to promote the community health of existing neighborhoods that don't need infrastructure repairs as much as help to make sure that lots are not overgrown, trash is picked up, and their streets are reasonably safe? With all the recent publicity about gangs in the city and the need for a comprehensive approach to them, this would seem to be a pressing issue.

What we have here in Greensboro is a single part-time employee who runs the Neighborhood Information Center out of the Glenwood Library. That person, Donna Newton, has been indefatigable in working with neighborhoods and the Greensboro Neighborhood Congress (an all-volunteer organization) to help with basic problems like crime, housing inspections, and getting appropriate city services.

But there's only one of Donna, and she works more than full time at her half-time position. We need much more.

In this respect, Charlotte has our butt kicked. For 12 years, Charlotte has run an annual neighborhood symposium. It provides leadership training for neighborhood organizations. It offers matching grants of up to $25,000 for neighborhood improvement projects, including planning. It works with neighborhood organizations to help enforce basic quality of life ordinances. It has a vision of what a model neighborhood is.

Greensboro needs a central clearinghouse and dedicated staff for neighborhood services, backed up by a firm commitment from all departments to enforce housing, zoning, trash, and transportation ordinances. It also needs a firm commitment from city council to provide the staff to enforce basic ordinances.

I propose selling off the Bryan Park golf course and transferring its annual budget to pay for these needed services. Seriously.

[Special note to RGW: I don't hate golf or golfers! I just think that this course belongs in the private sector.]

Focus, People

Large sections of Greensboro are under the control of roving thugs, and the Greensboro police are unable to provide basic protection to ordinary citizens there. Billy Jones blogs about this, and gets almost no comments.

City Council responds to the gang problem by stealing officers for a gang unit from other patrols. Shortly after that, when neighborhoods in the city's inner-ring neighborhoods report a stormburst of car break-ins, the response from the police department is, "we hope you can catch them in the act and call us, because we don't have staff to increase patrols." Gee, thanks.

At the same time, the city's enforcement of minimum housing laws is so ineffectual that the Greensboro Housing Coalition feels compelled to give a housing award to the landlord with the most housing violations in the city -- more than 30 --, because last year that landlord had 63 violations. Wow. Isn't that like giving a sobriety award to a drunk for cutting down to a six-pack a day?

These things being so, I find it pretty disappointing that Greensboro is currently obsessing over the termination of a police chief that happened almost two years ago, and which has zero chance of a resolution that will please aggrieved parties.

All reports agree that the GPD was dysfunctional before David Wray became chief, remained dysfunctional under him (and appears to have become more so), and probably remains so today.

Does anyone have a practical and concrete plan to ensure that the City of Greensboro can provide basic law enforcement and housing protection to its citizens?

Caveat: "fire Mitch Johnson" or "ban the Simkins PAC" are not practical proposals to solve these problems. A new city manager would face the same police and housing enforcement problems that Mitch inherited, and the Simkins PAC represents a permanent political constituency in Greensboro that will not go away.