Housing inspections ensure a safer city

As many know, Hamtramck’s housing market is red hot.
Investors and want-to-be homeowners can’t snatch up our housing stock fast enough. It’s a great market for sellers – but awful for would-be homeowners, who are overpaying unheard-of sums of money for otherwise modest houses.
We’ve seen single-family houses sell for as much as $180,000 and even more. That’s insane, but the demand is there.
This intense focus on housing highlighted a proposal by the city administration: to require all houses that go up for sale to first go through an inspection before being occupied by new owners.
On the face of it, it sounds reasonable, but city councilmembers and the mayor had strong objections.
The most vocal objection was about too much nitpicking by city code inspectors, who can’t seem to stop finding new violations after the first, and even second, inspections.
(House inspections are generally only required when it involves purchasing a house via a bank loan, which is required by the loaning institution. Houses sold privately from one person to another are not required to be inspected.)
We understand the frustration, and why the city council ultimately rejected the proposal.
But there is still the issue of how best to ensure housing stock is safe for the buyers, and that a family won’t find themselves in a death trap after, for example, their ancient electrical system or furnace starts a house fire.
Many of the houses here are around 100 years old, and many have badly outdated original electrical wiring. The codes from 100 years ago were far looser than they are today, and the power demands far less.
And, as we all know, when a house goes up in flames in a Hamtramck neighborhood, more often than not there will be one or more others that also get damaged, due to how close the houses are to one another.
Certainly, there must be a compromise in requiring inspections. We urge city officials to reconsider this inspection requirement process, and then come up with a system that is fair, and not onerous to either potential home buyers or sellers.
Posted Nov. 22, 2024