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Killer house hadn't been inspected in 21 years
By adamg on Tue, 04/30/2013 - 6:37am
The Herald reports on the city investigation into the fatal fire at 87 Linden St., which city officials now say was being run as an illegal boarding house.
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Not inspected in 21 years
WTF is this city doing? 20 years since the last inspection makes me feel that the city is not immune to some of this blame. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that most of Allston is made up of rentals to transient students. Then again, our elected officials are far far away from being rocket scientists.
Someone in govt should lose their job and corrective actions need to be put in place otherwise we'll be right back here next fire.
That's not the problem...
"Someone in govt should lose their job"
That's not the problem...
It's not a question of inspections...there are municipalities in this country that tried mandatory inspections and apparently there are a whole bunch of constitutional 'warrantless search' issues that came up.
Here's one problem: The building might have been modified from its' original floor plan. This requires permits and inspections. It is illegal to do so without the proper permits. If you do work like that and don't follow the state building code and something goes wrong, you're screwed as in manslaughter screwed.
I'm thinking this landlord could do some time. It's all on the owner. Put her pic on a billboard and you will get the attention of the other landlords. It might smarten them up.
Voluntary compliance is about the only thing that will work for this problem. Oh, ISD can act on complaints from tenants, a complaint makes the search legal.
The victim was found in the attic. The attic was untenable before the FD got there. Now, for the unconfirmed stuff: Four people living in the attic. There's only one good way out, not two egresses. Three bedrooms walled off in the cellar. Same problem with egresses. There might have been an egress violation from the second to the first floor. If the existing building code rules were followed, this might have been prevented.
So, to sum it up...Do it right, landlords. That piece of paper in the front window with a 'B' on it covers your ass completely. Ya, you might not make as much money, but when your head hits the pillow at night, you know you won't be doing some serious time after something like this. Not to mention what your insurance company will think of the whole deal...
most of Allston is "illegal"
>The building might have been modified from its' original floor >plan. This requires permits and inspections. It is illegal to do so >without the proper permits
From my experience, I would bet that nearly half of the rental properties from Mattapan to Brighton would somehow fall in this category. These are century-old houses and date back to times when building permits were laughed at, so how is it proven that the current landlord has modified anything structurally, where it could have been done in the 1930s? I understand the issue with attic/basement egresses, but that is more of a common sense violation than a building code violation and could have been subleased out without the landlords knowledge (basically illegal roommates).
My own house in Brighton has a Bathroom where probably a closet used to be a hundred years ago. It has been bought, resold and inspected like this many times (but no record of any permits). Out of curiosity, I asked the ISD if I could have a copy of my house plans but I was essentially brushed off. Assessment dept told me not to worry about it, since they have it in their record. So I do not worry :)
Most of what you say is right.
Some mods are old, but if there's yellow romex wiring, plastic work boxes and sheetrock screws, it ain't too old. Egresses are certainly a serious cod violation and as far as subleases, well, that will all come out in the wash.
As far as old work, you can just ask to see the jacket. Everything they have will be in the file folder. It can make for interesting reading.
Could even be...
...a serious haddock violation...
Some of the dangerous modifications....
...such as cutting off access from a 1st to 2nd floor internal stairway were apparently approved when the house was converted into a 2-unit dwelling.
It's not the City's responsibility to seek out inspection.
Just as it's a vehicle owner's responsibility to have their car inspected annually and just as it's not the state's fault when a car that is uninspected or wouldn't pass inspection causes a crash. There are hundreds of thousands of housing units in the city, it's just not possible for the City to inspect each and every unit annually. It's incumbent on the property owner to make sure that their property is up to code and to have the premises inspected between tenancies. Failure to do so can result in civil and criminal penalties. If it's found that this property was not up to code that the code violations led to the tenant's death, there's a decent chance that the owner will be facing criminal charges.
Suburban slumlord
Sounds like she's going need to sell those properties to pay her legal bills, by the time this is all done.
DIY landlords
So the BPD is spending time and resources investigating and breaking up DIY shows, but don't take the time to inspect houses, and stop slumlords from putting their tenants in danger. Seems like a brilliant allocation of resources that's really helping the greater public good.
BPD?
Why on earth do you think that the police department is responsible for building inspections?
sharpest tool
Cause he thinks DIY shows in basements with one exit are super smaht.
Point taken, so I'll revise
Point taken, so I'll revise my previous comment. The city of Boston, including the licensing board and inspection services (whom, "work closely with the Boston Police Department"), and the BPD should spend more time investigating the poor conditions of housing and the landlords who allow for it than the people who throw shows in those basements.
The smaht line was pretty clever. Bravo.
chew gum
and walk. I say do both, as it is their damn job.
The second someone starts charging for DIY Show, it becomes a commercial venture. There are loopholes around that if you're, well, smaht.
(online "donations", merch sales, ect and then just having a "get together")
But the real problem, as in the house above, also shows why its dangerous. The renters and owners will be fraked if anything ever goes wrong and might even be liable for criminal charges. Thats some baggage no one wants, especially if it was one of their friends who was the unlucky one.
Revise this....
I love that your whole response is based on how this incident somehow affects a small group of morons who feel that their rock and roll rights are being put down by "the man"
So what you're basically saying is "Why can't we just keep having the shows in some other non inspected Allston rat trap until one of them goes up in flames? It's not fair...wahhhh"
No.
You're still stuck on wanting BPD to inspect houses, WHICH THEY ARE NOT TRAINED TO DO AND IS NOT THEIR FUNCTION. Seriously, this is not hard to understand. Would you also like trash collectors to start making traffic stops? Maybe social workers should fill any pot holes they encounter. That'll fix our road conditions!
Rooming House
I had a friend who lived there in the late 80s and early 90s.
It was essentially a rooming house then - separate leases for each tenant, new housemates were recruited word-of-mouth, usually.
I don't think there were 19 people in there, however - more like 5-6 per unit (there are a lot of bedrooms).
Yeah, a number of Brokers
Yeah, a number of Brokers should be investigated and their licenses revoked. If there are individual leases Brokers should know better than to accept these terms. In fact, they should be alerting our Inspectional Services.
Brokers < Used Car Salesperson
Haha! Expecting brokers to do something moral. You made me laugh.
Worse
Perpetually hung over, recent undergrad grads.
You're not...
...from Allston, right? Well, time to leave Mom's basement and go play in the sun.
Students are afraid of brokers and landlords
A lot of students are intimidated by their brokers and landlords. They're afraid to complain or say no, for fear that their money will be stolen, they'll be victimized for angering the individual (especially after renting- your landlord has keys!), they'll get evicted and end up homeless during the school year, and they're afraid there will be permanent repercussions for reporting the landlord. So they keep their mouths shut, and accept the terms of these crazy leases in these dumpy apartments because "that's how it's done."
Brokers and landlords know this, and pile on high-pressure sales tactics and threats.
the bigger problem
so, let's say your landlord starts being shady and is not repairing things or doing things that are clearly and issue.. If you report and they say, hey you are right, this place is a disaster, then there you are stuck looking for a new place to live, having to deal with moving etc...
sure in some cases you can avoid disasters before you move in, but sometimes they pop up after you move in.
The way this all can be fixed (somewhat) is more inspections for rental places. If you are going to rent a place then you place should be looked at every X number of years, period.
Having police officers who have been called to these addresses for something like a burglary or loud party, be aware of certain concerns and have them forward those concerns to inspectional services (ISD).
These landlords and management companies charge some pretty hefty rents, they should be held accountable.
Not enough car owners
Archaic State law limits a residence to 4 unrelated people. The real enforcement of this is when car owners don't have a spot to park their cars, either space in the driveway or permits for street spots, which can be checked. Overcrowding is is harder to combat in areas without car owners.
The state law needs fixing. High density micro apartments and condos are already being pushed by zoning and developers, so apply the same density to houses. This actually helps lower housing costs while micro units are only to make more money for developers and Realtors. Go above 4 unrelated people and you need a rooming house or hotel license. The former looks very bad in community vs community statistics, so very difficult to get.
by request
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcNhDstL4-k
Educate the students
There should be no need for inspections, these places are being inspected by tenants and prospective tenants all the time, if there was knowledge of what's illegal, and a place for them to report it (that was well known), you could isolate the worst-cases pretty quickly.
But, most students, if they even think about it, probably reason that "it's only 3 / 6 / 12 months and it's cheap". I'm sure many more don't even realize that a walled off basement room with one exit shares more features in common with an oven than a dorm room.
More laws won't help, unfortunately, unless you can set up a system where landlords can't collect their rent unless they know the names of everyone living their off the top of their head.
There were 12 people crammed
There were 12 people crammed illegally into the house in question. I'm sure they were beating down the doors of the city code enforcement unit.
I get what you're trying to say, and I do think it's a good idea to make sure that tenants know what's a safe building and what's a fiery death trap, but telling impoverished undergrads (specifically the ones whose house just burned down killing one of them) that it's their responsibility to ensure that building codes are being enforced is some really pernicious victim-blaming.
I'm not blaming them
I'm saying there's a good chance they didn't even realize it was an issue. For all of the safety lessons they try to teach college students, they tend to send them to off campus housing without even the slightest bit of information. Make the universities offer a 30 minute presentation on living on your own, make sure they understand the dangers of not having two exits, what a carbon monoxide detector is for, how much weight a porch can support, why you shouldn't put a grill on a balcony, and then send them out there.
It's akin to corporate whistle blowing. The landlords are never going to work with the inspectors, and they're going to hide as much as they can, but they can't hide faults like this from informed tenants.
Paging Councillor Ciommo?
Ciommo is a whackjob and a hackjob.
He's on the take from all these landlords and has anyone in Allston/Brighton even ever seen their city councilor?
Real change in All/Bri will come from sincere landlord evaluation and a true city council member to stand up to the greed and indiscretion of absentee landlords.
It's sickening.
Go away Ciommo.
What a lot of the comments here are missing
...is that most of these students don't want to live in these conditions, but it is all that they can afford. I lived like this on Mission Hill in 2005. We crammed 9 people in a 3 bedroom apartment so that we could afford rent. It wasn't safe, we knew that, but that was the only option I could afford.
Maybe not at this house, because it seems to be a well known boarding house, but a lot of the times students knowingly/illegally have more people living in the apartment than are listed on the lease. When they know the landlord is coming over, mattresses are hidden to make it look like less people live there.
I blame situations like this entirely on the lack of affordable housing options in Boston.
I would have loved to have
I would have loved to have gone to college in Boston and live in Boston at the same time, but there was no way I could afford it. I wasn't born into a wealthy family that could pay for me to go to an expensive college and pay for me to live in an expensive city. My part-time job certainly wasn't going to cover even a fraction of the cost of going to BU or Northeastern and living in Boston. That's just the way life is. Did I bust my ass in high school to get into BU? Yes. However, I settled for U.Mass. Lowell and commuted from my mother's house 20 miles away. That's the reality for many of us. We have no choice but to live within our means. I did fine. I'm doing well now. Would I have gotten a better job right out of college had I gone to BU? Probably. However, no college degree from any university is worth putting yourself in a dangerous living situation such as these students were living in and countless other students are currently living in. Tuition is ridiculously expensive as is living in Boston. What's even more absurd is that these universities are building luxury dorms when students can't even afford the crappy dorms that already exist! It is not the responsibility of the city of Boston to house students -- it is the responsibility of the universities, the students, and if the students are underage, their parents. Colleges and universities are in the business of making money. That's the bottom line. Making money comes first. Blaming the city of Boston for this horrible situation is ridiculous. Hopefully college students will start demanding more affordable housing from the universities they are forking over tens of thousands of dollars to every year. Time for students to find their voices and start getting their money's worth from these schools. Shame on the landlord. And, if someone started this fire through negligence such as not disposing of a lit cigarette properly, shame on them as well. RIP to the victim.
You shouldn't have to be wealthy
...to live in the city. This is a larger issue than just students, and the policies of the city bear most of the blame for it. It's not good for Boston if only the wealthy can afford market-rate housing. And the main reason this is becoming the case is due to lack of supply -- the fault of bad planning, bad zoning decisions and excessive catering to NIMBYs.
Yes, the universities need to provide more housing, but they too are often blocked by NIMBYs. And the city must allow more housing development in general, to accommodate a growing population and demand. It needs to face down the anti-city, anti-density, and anti-development crowd and tell them to back off. The city needs to invest in its infrastructure, and then put it to good use through growth. And that all needs to be done regardless of what happens with the colleges.
Technically no, they are non-profit organizations, and they benefit tremendously from that status in terms of tax exemptions. Of course we know that despite the non-profit status they seem to be means of generating wealth for the administrators.
In all honesty
I sincerely doubt that you would have had a better job coming out of BU. UMass Lowell is highly regarded, in no small part because it is an affordable place for those who really want a good college education and are likely working hard to make the most of it. That's one reason it is climbing in national rankings of public and private universities.
I say that as an MIT alum (and UML graduate alum) with a kid who is considering UML. I'd very happily send him there.
at the end of the day
the responsibility lies with the City of Boston and their Inspection Services office. I can almost hear them now defending themselves by blaming lack of funds. Maybe they should take the meter maids from the Boston DOT who spend their days creating revenue by writing parking tickets (which includes under cover police cars and National Guard trucks) and instead have them walk the streets in Allston and other neighborhoods looking for obvious violations and let the IS department know. When is the Mayoral election?
Here's a simpler solution
Require an apartment to pass a City inspection before a tenant signs or renews a lease. Won't solve all the issues, but it should reduce the more serious ones.
That would require ISD to
That would require ISD to hire an actual army of inspectors and collect fines to pay for all of those inspectors. That would be inconvenient for all the slumlords, and shell holding corporations for investment entities like Harvard, which donate to local politicians.
Who to pay for inspections?
So, how many inspectors would you need on Labor Day weekend or September 1 in order to implement your idea? How many would you need the rest of the year? What do these inspectors do for work during the other 3 weeks in the middle of months? How much extra will it cost a kid signing a lease to get the inspection? How long after a failure is found will a kid have to sleep in a mini-van, pickup truck, or U-Haul parked on the street somewhere until slammed handimen get to fix his apartment?
apartment inspections
Here is a link to a article in the Globe from December.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2012/12/20/boston...
Poor people unprotected
So, section 8 housing is exempted, and those are often the worst properties. The article also fails to show how fees will pay for all the extra computer, clerical, and inspection work needed to implement the 5 year inspections. This also does not help anyone in Brookline, Cambridge, Somerville, Everett, Revere, Chelsea etc.
If you say so
My husband's cousin owns section 8 housing. Inspections are frequent and code is very strongly enforced. I don't think that is just Quincy, either.
Really....
That really big apartment complex on Revere Beach that's about 25 years old is mostly Section 8 at this point and these were big money condos when they first opened.
Good observation
Which brings me around to a point that needs to be made: we need to promote and allow much more, and more dense housing construction.
The problems of slumlords in Allston are in part the same as everywhere in Boston, demand for housing is high and rents higher. Get more built, and those luxury apartments of yesteryear will lose their luster and filter back into the normal price range, as people trade up to newer units.
Hell, more units means more in taxes and the possibility that we can start lowering rates due to the overall increase in taxable property.
the city is currently stuck in a zero sum game of trying to appease a small number of developers and NIMBY groups. It's hollowing out the citys economic potential, which will rise all boats (but increase uncertainty for those that fear this).
More Concrete Please
I say that with complete honesty.
Not only do we need more density, but we have a lot of sagging, dilapidated three deckers just begging to collapse/catch on fire.
Even if you were not going for density I would take this style:
http://www.dwell.com/
Over a boring old peaked roof, wooden house any day.
It galls me that you get editorial comment like the below from someone who has no appreciation for what a nice looking building is. Like those horrible City Hall detractors.
http://abnewsflash.com/?p=2091
"ugly building"
Colonoids
We still need architecture that is sensitive to energy use needs in the Northeast. I'm not sure that Dwell building makes it so, but we don't need to be slaves to the stupidity that is "Colonoids".
What's a "Colonoid"? It is a giant wooden building that is massively out of scale with anything that would have been built with wood in Colonial America, yet it is built now and furnished with "Colonial" details to appease foolish NIMBYs and dated housing codes. Like a 20-unit apartment building that is pretending to be a single-family saltbox to qualify as sufficiently quaint.
These not only look spectacularly stupid, they also tend to burn down spectacularly - see also Quincy and Danvers.
There's a reason that no sane Colonial would build something like that out of wood. We should heed those reasons.
What we need isn't more brutalism or mid-century modern: what we need is something like the Dutch have produced in recent years - an indigenous, climate responsive, site-appropriate form of architecture that is suitable for multi-family and multi-office dwellings.
These seem
to work well. Don't look so bad either:
They also have led to Brooklyn being one of the densest neighborhoods in the country. Ditto for the back bay/south end (although the 1% is chopping away at it by turning them back into 1 families).
It already is required
http://www.cityofboston.gov/isd/housing/rental.asp
City of Boston Code Ordinance CBC 9-1.3 requires property owners to have newly rented apartments inspected within 45 days of rental and certified by the Housing Inspection Division for compliance with the State Sanitary Code. Failure to comply is punishable by fines of $300 per month.
How is this not manslaughter?
Allston landlord cited after BU student dies in fire
http://bostonherald.com/news_opinion/local_coverag...
Why isn't this like elevators?
You know those badges of honor you can read in the elevator that come from the state and let you test your math abilities to see just how many other people that weigh the same as you you could fit in the elevator with you? Elevator inspection certificates...the state doesn't go around with a book of dates to test them all when their due date is up. The building owner has to call someone in to certify the elevator and update their inspection certificate.
So, why isn't this something done for rental inspections? You could have a small cottage industry of inspectors registered with the city or state who sign off on the certificates. Every rental would be required to display the certificate and have it renewed every 4-5 years or something.
We ride elevators for like 30 seconds of the day, but live in our apartments at least 8 hours a day. Why is one more well-regulated than the other?