Tag: Rental housing

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There are government agencies to ensure that the gallon of gas you pump at a service station is actually a gallon. Multiple government agencies assess—however imperfectly—whether the food you buy is safe for human consumption. Government agencies license barbers and hairdressers so you have some assurance they won’t accidentally cut your throat. Cars, airline flights, prescription drugs, amusement park rides, restaurants—almost anything or anyone to whom you entrust your body has some degree of government oversight for your safety and well-being.

Everything, it seems, except for rental housing.

Rent a house or an apartment and you must take it on faith that your new home won’t harm you or your family. That it’s not a fire trap because of faulty wiring, or a petri dish of mold and mildew, or that rotten floorboards won’t give way as you cross a room, or that cockroaches won’t be swarming your kitchen after the lights go out. In Staunton (or Waynesboro or Augusta County), there is no seal of good housekeeping from an inspector who has evaluated rental premises to determine that they’re decent, safe and sanitary. What you see is what you get, and if you don’t see something objectionable when you sign a lease, you’re on your own when trouble develops.

And it will. Not always, of course, but often enough. “Sewer leak in basement, decaying subfloor bathroom, broken/bowing flooring bathroom,” a city building inspector wrote in July last year about a single-family home in Staunton. “Electrical hazard—stove plugged into extension cord,” a Staunton inspector noted the previous month about a local apartment. “Gutters, paint, fascia, soffits, porches, windows,” reads a May, 2025 drumroll of nonspecific but failed inspection items at yet another single-family home.

Those and other reports, alas, came after the fact. They resulted from complaints, not as part of a proactive approach to identifying housing problems before someone was placed at risk. It’s as though we had decided that the best way to ensure a healthy food supply is to wait for people to get sick before inspecting food processing plants and agricultural operations. Or that public health is best served by letting pharmaceutical companies put whatever drugs they want on the market and then see what seems to work and what doesn’t—even if that means people die.

Put in those stark terms, most people will conclude that it makes sense to test and review for safety and efficacy before releasing any number of products and services on the market. Except for rental housing. Rental housing is the inexplicable exception.

THERE ARE LOTS OF REASONS to be concerned about the condition of Staunton’s rental housing, starting with its age. Roughly 40% of city residents live in rented quarters, which exceeds both state (33%) and national statistics. Staunton also has an above-average number of old homes: one-fifth of its housing predates 1939, and 41.6% of all Staunton homes are 65 or older. Age alone is not an indicator of problems, of course, but according to this year’s report from the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University, nearly 50% of renter-occupied units built before 1939 have repair needs, as do 46% of rental units built between 1940 and 1969.

Staunton’s approximately 4,600 renter-occupied dwellings therefore may reasonably be expected to include upwards of a thousand homes that need some amount of repair. That isn’t merely a matter of discomfort—it’s a health issue. Homes in disrepair can result in people getting sick, and rental homes are far more likely to fall into that category than owner-occupied dwellings. The 2025 Augusta Health assessment of community health needs, for example, found that 14% of local residents reported living in unhealthy or unsafe housing during 2025, a proportion “significantly higher” than in 2019. But a closer look at the responses reveals greater extremes: 19.5% of renters reported unsafe conditions, or double the proportion of homeowners. And very-low-income respondents were even more likely to fall into that category, at 31.4%.

The National Low Income Housing Coalition released in June a national renter survey that found 49% of the nation’s 46 million renter households were cost-burdened last year—and 26% were severely cost burdened, meaning they were paying more than 50% of their income for shelter. Moreover, two of every five of those renters lived in homes that needed at least one repair, according to the survey, while nearly 8% lived in homes with multiple physical deficiencies. Leading the list of top complaints: pests (cockroaches, mice, rats, bedbugs), electrical problems, and broken or missing essential fixtures, including sinks, bathtubs, windows, doors, locks and steps.

Alarming though that is, one of the coalition survey’s more illuminating findings was that despite these problems, nearly a third of renters avoid asking a landlord for help when they have a problem. (And more than a quarter of those who did complain said their landlord either responded but didn’t do anything or failed to respond altogether.) Why the reluctance to complain? Simple economics. Renters who wouldn’t raise their concerns said they feared the landlord would respond by raising the rent (18%) or would actually charge the tenant for fixing a problem (14.2%).

People with relatively comfortable incomes simply might opt, under those circumstances, to look for someplace else to live, but that’s a far less likely option for the economically disadvantaged. Not only is the local rental market extremely tight, with few listings and high rents, but more than three-quarters of all low-income renters are burdened by low or no credit scores, according to the coalition. A significant fraction, 15.7%, also have an eviction history—often for missing rent payments—which further limits their mobility.

So what’s a renter faced with substandard and even potentially hazardous living conditions to do? Most, unsurprisingly, will just suck it up and tolerate their situation, regardless of threats to their health and safety. A few—a very few—will complain to city officials, with mixed results, as noted in a section below. And the great majority presumably will nod in agreement with the coalition’s survey finding that “about four in every five renters (79.9%) agreed that rental homes should be required to pass periodic inspections conducted by an authorized agency to ensure those homes are safe to live in.”

Just don’t look for that in Staunton.

IT’S NO LONGER REVELATORY to observe that Staunton has a long tradition of a hands-off attitude toward housing issues. This remains true even where Virginia has loosened its regulatory grip, as with its provision in the Statewide Uniform Building Code that empowers state localities to adopt a rental inspection ordinance “to promote safe, decent and sanitary housing for its citizens.”

To be sure, only 18 Virginia localities, as assessed by Charlottesville Tomorrow in a recent series by  Erin O’Hare, have in fact taken up that offer. State history suggests that rental inspection is a political hot potato that most municipalities either quickly drop—as Waynesboro did three years ago—or that can take decades to enact. Roanoke, for example, took almost two decades to adopt an inspection program, in 1996, and did so only after an apparently preventable fire swept through a house divided into apartments, killing four children and their grandmother. The blaze broke out just months after a group of 72 landlords, owning a total of more than 3,000 properties, had banded together to oppose such inspections, declaring they would fight the city all the way to the Supreme Court to protect their property rights.

Adding to those difficulties are the law’s attempts to walk a regulatory tightrope by imposing various restrictions that discourage some officials from pursuing the idea. Most notable among these is the  requirement that an inspection program cannot be applied to an entire locality but only to a specified “inspection district” within a city or county—presumably a blighted or lower-income neighborhood deserving of such government scrutiny. Just defining such a district therefore can become a politically charged exercise, and even if that’s accomplished, the law is vague on just what kind of compliance can be required from the district’s landlords.

Yet whether these obstacles are worth tackling in Staunton in pursuit of a greater good is not part of any conversation. Instead, the city’s attitude was summed up by John Glover, before his recent retirement as Staunton’s Building Official, when he wrote in an email that such a program “has been explored in the past and staff decided it was not necessary.” A rental inspection program would require additional city staffing and possibly result in higher rents, “which is detrimental to affordable housing,” Glover contended, adding: “We think our complaint-based enforcement of the Virginia Property Maintenance code (which is optional in the state of Virginia) is adequate to ensure safe sanitary rentals to our residents. . . . This approach has proven to be very effective for many years.”

There are, however, at least three problems with these assertions, the first two already identified above. The first is that a complaint-based system is not prophylactic. It allows an adverse situation to develop to the point at which it creates a hazard, threatening health and safety, instead of seeking to nip such hazards in the bud.

The second is that a complaint-based system requires some of society’s most vulnerable members to call attention to themselves in a way that many will find threatening. As already noted, people with marginal incomes, often with physical limitations because of poor health or old age, are unlikely to risk losing their homes in the forlorn hope that the city will compel a remedy of their unsafe or unsanitary living conditions—and are even less likely to do so when a likely outcome is that they’ll end up on the street.

But the third and biggest problem with Glover’s rationale is that it’s made without any factual evidence to back it up. There are no city statistics about the extent or severity of housing deficiencies—indeed, the city still has no inventory of vacant homes, much less occupied homes that have serious deficiencies. A claim that Staunton’s approach to property code enforcement “has proven to be very effective for many years” is akin to saying that the city’s wolf eradication campaign has been a smashing success: we have no unaddressed problems of unsafe and unsanitary rentals, and we have no wolves. The statement is absurd on its face, but say it loudly enough and with sufficient conviction and you’ll win over those who are just looking for an excuse not to do anything.

IF THERE’S ONE THING at which Staunton excels when it comes to housing, it’s the city’s ability to avoid gathering data that might force some kind of reckoning. So if, for example, one were seeking to determine just how many complaints of violations of the state’s Maintenance Code have been filed by renters, under the city’s “very effective” complaint-based enforcement policy, the answer would be—a null set. The city does not “keep or document who makes the complaint,” according to David Smithgall, Glover’s successor as Building Official as of July 1, nor does it record who’s a renter. On the other hand, he added, the number is undoubtedly very low—on the order of 1% to 3%, according to an estimate from Matt Sheaves, the city’s property maintenance inspector.

As it turns out, the city keeps remarkably little documentation of any kind about its inspections, and the little it was logging became even more limited late last year, when apparently it changed the reporting format. So, for example, a request for all property maintenance inspection records for a 12-month period produces one kind of spreadsheet through early August 2025 and a second spreadsheet thereafter. The more recent, more concise spreadsheet no longer includes a brief description of the complaint, such as those quoted at the start of this report, restricting itself to one-word categories like “unsafe” or “sanitation.” The new format also  completely eliminates any reference to the source of a complaint, how a complaint was made or anything identifying the complainant.

Most critically, the newer spreadsheet identifies the name but no longer provides the address of the property owner.

That last point is important because it offers a way, albeit an imperfect one, to identify most rental properties. Any house owned by a limited liability company is all but guaranteed to be an investment property. So is a house owned by someone who doesn’t live in it. Fortunately, while those addresses are no longer conveniently provided in the building department’s spreadsheets, they can be obtained from the city’s GIS website. It just takes a little work.

So what can be gleaned from the city’s complaint investigation spreadsheets? Starting on Feb. 10, 2025 and ending Feb. 6, 2026, the city received a total of 187 complaints of possible violations of the maintenance code. More than half were for “grass and weeds,” and approximately a dozen were for non-residential properties. Stripping both those categories out of the spreadsheets and concentrating on the more serious alleged deficiencies leaves 77 residential complaints over those 12 months—and of those, 44 met the criteria of likely rental properties. In other words, far, far more than 1% to 3%.

How serious were the violations? Hard to say since last summer, because that information is no longer recorded, but the excerpts quoted at the start of this report from the first few months of this study suggest some can be very serious indeed. How have the violations been remedied? Also hard to say, because while some were marked as coming into compliance, others didn’t have an inspector assigned even a year later—even, in a couple of cases, two rental houses marked simply “unsafe.”

But here’s another notable finding to be extracted from this mishmash of data: plot the 44 likely rentals on a map, and 26 of them fit squarely within the confines of the West End study area. Which, of course, is where the preponderance of Staunton’s oldest homes are located. A potential rental inspection district for Staunton couldn’t be more obviously designed.

IT’S NOT A STRETCH TO STATE that 44 rental properties with alleged maintenance code violations are just the tip of the iceberg. Staunton’s aging housing stock suggests as much, as do national statistics, as does Augusta Health’s assessment—indeed, as does common sense. Yet building officials who one might think would be closest to the problem seem most deeply in denial, low-balling the numbers, cutting back on documentation and declining to question the obvious deficiencies in the city’s record-keeping.

The two main arguments against a rental inspection program that John Glover advanced—that the city would need more inspectors and that inspections might drive up rents—are from a standard playbook that is quoted by municipal employees every time such a proposal is made. Indeed, those were exactly the main points made by Waynesboro’s city manager in 2023, when that city’s chapter of Virginia Organizing was calling for a rental inspection program and thought it had the city manager’s support—right up to the moment he cut their legs out from under them.

Of course, both those arguments could be made about any program that safeguards the public. Programs cost money and staff to implement. Compliance requirements affecting the private sector often will increase costs that may then be passed on to consumers. Yet those increased costs, both public and private, are rarely as extreme as opponents would have us believe. And whatever incremental costs are incurred should be balanced against the benefits derived, although that’s hard to do fairly when those expected benefits are dismissed out of hand as negligible.

Virginia cities both larger and smaller than Staunton, recognizing that they have an obligation to their most vulnerable residents, have implemented rental inspection programs, from Colonial Heights (population 18,200) and Hopewell (23,100) to Winchester (28,000), Petersburg (33,000) and Roanoke (100,000). But if concern for one’s neighbors isn’t sufficient motivation to follow the path these cities have taken, maybe a more self-serving one will do the job: failing to ensure that homes are adequately maintained inevitably leads to urban blight and lower property values for everyone nearby, in an ever-widening gyre. Maybe enlightened self-interest can show the way where compassion falters.