INC NEWS - A Great Day in Durham!!!

[Chuck Clifton]

To my City-wide Neighbors,

On Thursday a wonderful thing happened in Durham -- the Durham City Council
gave our housing inspectors the authority to inspect homes even without a
complaint filed by the tenant of the property (see Herald-Sun
article<http://www.heraldsun.com/durham/4-953557.cfm?>).
While it may not seem obvious on the surface why this is so important,
consider the consequences to most tenants if they report substandard
conditions in their apartment or rental home:  the owner / manager will have
to fix the problems and will pass that "improvement" on to the tenant in
increased rent -- even though they never should have been allowed to rent
the property without fixing these problems to begin with.  Imagine if you
rented a home and the furnace didn't work (in the middle of the winter) or
there was a hole in the floor in the kitchen through which rats would enter
from the unmaintained, vacant lot next door.  These are real conditions in
which so many tenants in Durham live.  As a past chairman of the Durham
Citizens' Advisory Committee and having taken walking tours of various
troubled neighborhoods (including Southside / St. Theresa's) I can attest to
the desperate need for these powers for housing inspectors.  With these
expanded powers, the City has taken the first substantive step in ending
these egregious practices of irresponsible property owners / managers.
Perhaps the next step is to construct a public database of which property
owners / managers have substandard properties and how many such properties
they have.  I believe the only way to truly right this wrong to the
oppressed low-income renters of Durham is to shed the full light of day on
those doing this to the most vulnerable of our citizens.

Please write to the Council and thank them not just for passing this
resolution but for doing it unanimously!

Kind regards,

Chuck Clifton
President, Long Meadow Neighborhood Association

"The biggest problem confronting the world today is the illusion
that our differences matter more than our common humanity."
~ William Jefferson Clinton
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