Houston City Council considers 'high-risk' apartment inspection program

Houston City Council to vote on 'high-risk' apartment inspection program

The proposed ordinance would create a High-Risk Apartment Inspection Program to address and improve complexes with health, safety, and habitability violations.

HOUSTON - Houston City Council is considering an Apartment Inspection Ordinance. The vote was postponed Wednesday after the item was tagged during the council meeting.

The proposed ordinance would create a High-Risk Apartment Inspection Program to address and improve complexes with health, safety, and habitability violations.

What is the ordinance?

The backstory:

The measure was introduced by Council Member Letitia Plummer and cosigned by Council Members Carolyn Evan-Shabazz, Edward Pollard, and Joaquin Martinez.

If approved, the program would target apartment complexes with repeated health, safety, or high volumes of 311 complaints. It would also create an Apartment Standards Enforcement Committee (ASEC) that would collaborate with Houston Public Works, the Houston Police Department, the Houston Fire Department, and other agencies to help with enforcement and help tenants. Apartment landlords would also be required to undergo a training program on safety, maintenance, and tenants' rights.

Organizations express concerns

While the Houston Apartment Association said it agrees with the ordinance in concept, the association would like to see more stakeholder input and tweaks to the proposal.

"In its current form, we cannot support this ordinance," said Benjamin McPhaul, the vice president of government affairs for the Houston Apartment Association. "Some of our concerns centered around the ordinance including duplicative registration for high-risk rental buildings, relying on potentially unverified 311 complaints to identify them, and ignoring property size."

McPhaul gave an example of an apartment complex with 400 units being treated similarly to a 20-unit complex.

"Furthermore, this ordinance requires public notice of pending property sales, raising confidentiality and enforcement concerns. Often our property sales are kept confidential, so this requirement is problematic for our members," said McPhual.

Adam Oganowki with the Houston Tenants Union said, "I believe there are significant limits to this ordinance, some of which I understand have been introduced rather recently. Mainly Section 171 that limits only the top five properties reported to 311 to be labeled as high-risk rental buildings."

The other side:

"The reason we chose the five worst ones, looking at ten, safety, habitability complaints at a time, in a six-month period, allows us to truly fix the problem. And I know it may not be stringent enough for you, and for a lot of the residents living in these spaces, but we want to show good faith, and we want to show that we’re actually creating a better space for people to live," said Council Member Letitia Plummer.

Plummer said there are about 2,500 apartments that have challenges, and the city doesn't have the capacity to touch them all.