In coming weeks, the city of Durham will kick off a housing safety inspection initiative designed to improve areas of substandard housing across the city. Although the inspections will be conducted throughout Durham, the program will indirectly target residences occupied by Duke students, especially those living in houses off of East Campus. While the inspections may cause temporary headaches for students, the overall result of increasing safety and health standards will ultimately benefit students and Durham residents immensely.
The inspection program is long overdue, as the dilapidated condition of many of Durham's residential neighborhoods proves. The inspection program itself is not the final word in housing safety, but is a reasonable short term response to the many safety and health ordinance violations in the city's residences. The initiative seems to be well designed, with appropriate mechanisms for violation identification, enforcement and advising in place.
The inspections will begin on Jan. 28 in Trinity Park off East Campus. While this will in fact mean that many Duke students will be the immediate targets of inspections, the inspections will actually prove to be a bonus for them in the long run. Many of the houses currently occupied by Duke students are in poor condition. Landlords rent the residences out from one group of students to the next each year, and given the rancorous lifestyle of many off-campus college individuals, the owners have little incentive to make meaningful and often costly repairs to the homes. The inspections will force substandard residences to be revitalized, and not at the expense of students. Residents may be responsible for damage they caused directly, but on the whole, students will be getting more than they give.
Several negative caveats do accompany the inspection program. Inspectors, though not explicitly seeking to cite students for alcohol or living violations, will do so if rules are observed being broken. A law stating that there can be no more than three permanent occupants in a single family home may be enforced, to the unfortunate detriment of some off-campus students. Individuals should be aware that this law exists, and that they may be forced to make alternative arrangements.
The city's inspection plan is ambitious, and although it targets Duke students at the outset, the initiative will eventually expand to cover every residence in all older inner-city neighborhoods. Durham should be praised for its efforts, and for taking meaningful steps to ensure the safety of its citizens.
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