There's a lot to cover here, and this post is long, so skip on down if you're not interested in the housing inspections issue.
First, Steve Meldahl wrote:
>Mpls inspections is a model and some of their inspectors sit on National boards?? . . . I would like to know the names of the ones who supposedly sit on these National boards.<
I actually got the names; and then decided not to post them, as these are civil servants, not policymakers. They don't need their names posted here. I'm told, though, that Steve, as a property owner who knows a lot about inspections issues, knows most if not all of them.
As for Minneapolis being a model, the original Mpls housing code was the model for the national inspections code (check with the Henn. Tech Coll. inspector training program).
Steve also wrote:
>I would be happy to share the reams of documents that I obtained from one of the Mpls Inspections supervisors that I know that shows just how incompetant and disorganized this department really is - according to their own internal reviews!
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My suggestion for Steve here is that he should consider his source, who well may be a disgruntled former inspector. I'd also suggest he seek out *current* information--they're public documents, after all.
Thanks also to Ron Leurquin, who covered some of this in his post on the subject.
For Dennis Plante, who suggested that provisional licenses are "forever, as long as the owner continues to pay the
licensing fees and no one else (living in the neighborhood) calls attention to the property for violations."
Provisional licenses are not good forever. But it does take a while to do a full inspection on nearly 80,000 rental units. Just arranging for the property owner and the renter to be there for it is very time consuming. And it doesn't help that they're trying to do it with less inspectors due to money being shifted out of the department.
Thanks to Steve Meldahl on this one for pointing out that bringing a unit up to code often costs less in the long run than letting it run down.
Next, kudos to Wizard Marks for a good post on peeling paint and other issues. One quibble with it: The inspectors do indeed drive around and check for "environmental" issues such as weeds, tall grass, junk cars, and yes, peeling paint. So it's not only citizen complaints that trigger these citations.
Also: a fire escape is not required on a duplex; there must be a second means of egress other than the main door. There are various rules regarding window size and location.
Now, as to how many folks can live in a unit: This one is really complicated, as it takes into account square footage, family relationships and a few other factors. In some cases, 20 people could legally live in one unit and in others as few as two.
Finally...I can't figure out who posted it, but the poster suggested that I was talking out of both sides of my mouth when I said the Mpls program is a model, and that inspectors are offered bribes.
Please reread my original post. Yes, inspectors are offered bribes. The key point is that despite a very intense probing from the FBI, *there is no, none, not any, evidence that a Mpls housing inspector has accepted one* (in the last few years, anyway). Considering how often big city inspections departments become headline/sweeps month scandals, this is a very good thing.
Enough already.
--M. G. Stinnett
Jordan Neighborhood
who asked a lot of questions before writing this
