Dryer Hazards in Rentals - Another Close Call

Dryer lint found at rental

An alert reader, Stephanie, forwarded to me a link to her real estate blog wherein she described a near mishap with an incipient fire in a clothes dryer in her daughter's rental unit here in Bellingham.  You can read the entire account here.  To summarize, the renters were confronted with clothing that smelled like smoke after being dried in the rental's machine.  The renters notified the owner who sent out a maintenance worker.  The photo at left shows the enormous ball of lint that had accumulated in the dryer's ventilation system and that had nearly caught fire.  Such quantities of lint do not accumulate overnight.  The blogger offers more, "This is the second apartment in two years she has lived in to have issues with the dryer venting system.  Not a good record for rental owners and property management companies.  'Failure to maintain' is the leading cause of dryer fires." This is yet another fire tragedy, closely avoided, since the health and safety of renters are at the mercy of a totally unregulated rental industry.

Note that in this case the landlord, who may actually be a fairly attentive one, ignored the fact that this kind of maintenance must be done regularly to avoid a fire.  Lint related fires number more than 15,000 each year nationwide.  They kill 15 and injure another 400.  (You may wish to read this FEMA report on such incidents.)  This supports my contention, made time and time again in this blog, that landlords (even the good ones) are not experts at ensuring that their units are free from health and safety hazards.  Nor are tenants much better at determining whether or not their electrical, plumbing or ventilation systems are functioning properly or safely.

In the case of lint clogged dryer vents, we certainly do not want tenants moving dryer units to inspect and clean the duct work.  Many dryers are gas operated and moving the machine may damage the gas lines, causing leaks ... or worse.  In many units, the duct work is not even readily accessible to tenants and is tucked away behind walls or in crawl spaces.  The landlord may incur other liabilities if he demands that the tenant risk injury to perform such maintenance.  Having a licensed inspector perform regular checks of rentals for health and safety problems is just common sense.

These young women dodged a bullet as did renters over the last 18 months in fires such as the ones on Grant St., Ellis St., and Maple St.  Not so lucky were the renters on 24th St.who were severely injured in a fire that also displaced two WWU students who lived in the adjacent unit of the fire-ravaged duplex.

Yet, the noodle of rental inspection is still being pushed along as if waiting for some grand tragedy to befall some renters to serve as a call to action.  I have been speaking to this issue now more than 5 years.  A friend in the York neighborhood found evidence in the files of that neighborhood association that the problem of deteriorating conditions in rentals was surfaced in Bellingham twenty years ago.  I was at a recent retreat attended by council members and city staff, to include the mayor.  The only council priority that was placed in consideration for the 2013 city budget was affordable housing.  This is laudable pursuit - affordable housing, however, the part about keeping our present stock of barely affordable rental property in livable condition, as in inspections, did not make the 2013 budget.

In an email exchange with, Stephanie, my real estate blogger acquaintance, I determined that she supports inspections of rentals.  I urged her and I invite you to write to the mayor (klinville@cob.org) and to the council (ccmail@cob.org) to let them know that NOW is the time for action on licensing and inspection of rentals and that all those who live in this city deserve affordable and, moreover, safe housing.

WWU Students Again Call For Rental Inspections

According to an article in the student newspaper, the Western Front, there is a new student push for the licensing and inspection of Bellingham rentals.  You can read the article by clicking here.  Previously, the editorial board of the Western Front has come out in support of rental inspections.   Click here to read the 2010 editorial. The Associated Students had already published one resolution supporting rental licensing and inspections. You can click here to read the 2010 A/S resolution.  It is time for the city council to move on this important health and safety measure and create a robust rental licensing and mandatory inspection program.  Let the city council know that you are concerned about the health and safety of our renters who occupy over 50% of the city's housing.  You can reach the city council at ccmail@cob.org.  You can also call on our new mayor, Kelli Linville, to push for an ordinance.  You can reach her at klinville@cob.org.

Cause of 24th Street Rental Fire Still Undetermined

Determining the specific cause of the tragic New Year's Day fire in a duplex rental on 24th Street in Bellingham may take yet more time as the investigation has been turned over to an insurance company. [You can read press reports about the fire by clicking here, here, here, here and here.] Unfortunately, the insurer's report may not be ultimately divulged to the Fire Department or to the public. Moreover, threats of lawsuits often loom over such incidents as we have seen with the Maple Street fire in which the threat of a lawsuit made the victims unavailable to the Zonemaven for further information gathering. You can refresh your memory of that fire by clicking here.

Earlier attempts by fire investigators to gather information from the victims of the 24th St. fire were thwarted due to their medical condition. The initial fire marshal's report on the incident, that you can read by clicking here and here, lacked much in the way of detail that would allow the public to learn some definitive lessons from the tragedy.

In several exchanges with fire officials, I learned that there are still questions with regard to the condition of the baseboard heating element. Part of the cover of the baseboard heater was missing and not found in the debris. Also missing were some of the "fins" on the heating element. Aluminum branch circuit wiring was also found leading to the heater. Use of aluminum wiring is considered to be very dangerous although there was a time during the 1970s when this type of wiring was prevalent in homes. This particular home was built in 1975 according to county records. (Click here to read more on aluminum wiring) How many other Bellingham rentals, built in the 70s, have such wiring yet today? A ticking time bomb.

A defective heating element or one that was damaged or installed improperly is of great concern. Additionally, there were no remains of smoke detectors found in the debris after the fire, although fire department personnel were not specifically looking for them. [The one eye-witness report from the guest sleeping on the sofa indicated that he did not appear to be awakened by a smoke detector but by the fire itself.] The presence of such devices (in working condition) is an important fire safety concern for all renters as these detectors are a last line of defense. A blocked exit ( furniture against a window) may have also been a factor in the inability of some of the victims to get out of the home and in rescuing the fire victims.

Also displaced by the fire were two Western Washington University students who shared the duplex. Over a dozen WWU students have been displaced from their rentals in the past year because of fires. That, in itself should be a wake up call for a comprehensive rental safety and health ordinance requiring periodic inspection of all rentals by a certified code enforcement official. Such action can provide early detection and elimination of the threats posed by poor rental conditions and dangerous tenant or landlord behavior. Blocked exits, bad electrical wiring and faulty heating systems are on the checklist of most effective rental inspection programs throughout the country. That should be the case here in Bellingham with the passage of a rental health and safety inspection ordinance - with teeth.

Vermin in Rentals

We have already seen evidence of rats in Bellingham's rentals. My blog entry on a house on Grant St. covered that topic a while back. (Click here to read that horror story.) Now additional accounts of vermin in rentals are coming to our attention. A recent article in the Western Front spoke to the problems students are encountering in their dorms and rentals not only with bed bugs but also with the mites that cause scabies and bacteria that cause staph infections. (Click here to read the Front's story. You can also read about bed bugs, mites and staph by clicking here, here and here)

These critters; bed bugs, mites, and bacteria that lead to staph infections, are difficult to eradicate so that many landlords and renters unwittingly pass them on to the next iteration of renters. Given the filthy conditions reported by renters in last year's survey of rental conditions in Bellingham (click here to read that report), the story in the Front is not surprising. The comments from those who took the survey contain additional stories of rat and flea infestations.

Rentals offered to the public ought to be spotless before the renter crosses the threshold. Especially important are clean rugs, floors and kitchen/bathroom surfaces. These items should be on the checklist of any decent inspection program for the safety and health of renters. The city of Pasco has sanitation as a category on its inspection form (Click here to see their simple form - right click on image and then enlarge). Bellingham should consider no less.

A Tale of Two Space Heaters

Two recent area fires involved the improper use of space heaters. One incident took place on January 19th in Bellingham on Cedarwood Rd . The owner of a vacant house, who also owns several other small homes in Bellingham, attempted to keep an unheated crawl space warm enough to avoid frozen water pipes by putting a space heater underneath the home. In a similar fire in Ferndale, renters were burned out of their house after they placed a space heater under the home, also in an attempt to keep water pipes from freezing. You can read the Herald account of the fires by clicking here. The Fire Chief's press release on the Bellingham fire can be read here and the investigative report from the Fire Marshal here.

The commonality of these two fires is, of course, the improper use of the space heaters. Here we have an instance in which both a landlord and a renter were ignorant of safety issues. Critics of inspection of rentals for safety and health reasons often state that landlords have sufficient knowledge to care for their units and that renters can depend upon either themselves or their landlords to ensure rentals are safe. These two stories belie such contentions.

Note the condition of this vacant property on Cedarwood to begin with. It is in very poor condition. Homes like these attract vagrants and vermin while their appearance depresses property values in the neighborhood. Moreover such dilapidated structures are a fire danger to adjacent homes, especially in this case in that the houses in this area tend to have been built close together. In this particular instance, two homes share a single lot with little space separating them.

Our city council last year was considering an ordinance that, had it been approved, would have had as its theme going after the "bad apples" so as not to "punish" all the good landlords. Exactly how these "bad apples" were to be identified was not so apparent. The owner of this vacant home has several other properties in Bellingham, although the one on Cedarwood happened to be empty. There is no indication that he is a "bad apple", yet clearly he operated unaware of basic safety. He may be, for all intents and purposes, a good landlord notwithstanding the fact that he lacks knowledge, an ignorance that could be a threat to those living in the other three properties he owns.

The fact is that , although the city council has refused to accept it, there is no way to find all the "bad apples" absent an inspection program that looks at all rentals. Any reliance on a renter complaint-based program is doomed to failure for that is the present state of affairs. The health department does not go after the "bad apple" restaurants nor do they rely solely on complaints or self-inspections. It looks at all restaurants and all restaurants pay into the system to finance these inspections. This is basic common sense that the public recognizes and supports. Nobody purposely takes his family to a filthy restaurant nor do we expect diners to check out the kitchen with their own punch list. We count on our local authorities to ensure that these establishments are safe and pose no health problem. Why should we expect less of landlords who offer their properties to the public for money?

Yet Another Rental House Fire in Bellingham

Blog entry deleted. See posting of 28 Jan 2012: A Tale of Two Space Heaters.

Western Front Editorial Again Calls for Rental Inspections

For the second time in two years the Western Front's editorial board has affirmed its support for an ordinance that would ensure the health and safety of renters in Bellingham. In a 6 January editorial, that also recommended that students obtain renters' insurance, the board stated, 'This editorial board supports rental licensing that would protect the students and families that inhabit Bellingham’s 18,000 rental properties." [You can read the board's complete editorial by clicking here. The Western Front's earlier, 2010 editorial on the subject can be found here.]

Students have good reason to be concerned. Here is the tally of near fire disasters in the last twelve months:

- A fire on Grant Street in the York Neighborhood burns. Three WWU students nearly perish. All four renters displaced. Click here to read more.

- A fire at the Daylight Building on State Street leads the fire marshal to discover that an apartment in the building has no viable fire exit for several of the rooms. Two students displaced. Click here to read more.

- A fire on Maple Street nearly kills three of the five renters, all of whom are WWU students. They lose everything in the fire. Click here to read more.

- A fire on 24th Street nearly kills an entire family in a rental home. Two students in an adjacent part of the duplex are displaced due to fire damage. Fire marshal's report pending. Read the Western Front article on the student victims here.

The tally? Thirteen students directly affected by serious fires, several of which nearly cost lives. All of these fires were electrical in origin as was another fire on Ellis Street that apparently did not involve WWU students. All of these blazes were largely preventable, especially had the city an inspection program in place.

These fires are not the only dangers facing students and other renters in Bellingham. Serious problems with mold, structural defects, blocked exits (24th Street fire!), carbon monoxide leaks, gas leaks, faulty heating systems, faulty plumbing, vermin, and all types of filth abound. I remind my readers of the survey done by a WWU student group last year that revealed the remarkable extent of the problems with conditions in rentals. (You can review the survey here.) I urge my readers to re-examine this survey and write to our council members (ccmail@cob.org) to ask them to enact an ordinance to license rentals and ensure the health and safety of the renters with regular physical verification of conditions by certified building/home inspectors.

More on the Maple Street Fire

Late last year a rental home burned on Maple St. (click here to read my original post on the fire) and five young women students from WWU lost all their belongings. Those present in the home also barely escaped with their lives. Two of the five women had been away at the time of the fire. Had it not been for two of the remaining three who heard the first floor smoke alarm, a third woman, who had been sleeping upstairs, might have died since she did not hear the alarm. Her comment to me (in an anonymous post to my blog entry on the fire) was "Not only was there not an extinguisher, I was the girl who didn't wake up. The fire alarm only went off downstairs, not in my room."

Research has shown that some people; the hearing impaired, small children and even teens; do not respond at all or respond very slowly to smoke alarms. Given that the amount of time needed to escape from a burning home is measured in minutes, the obvious conclusions can be drawn. The report on the fire (click here to read the fire marshal's report) supports the fact that one of the residents was not awakened by the alarm.

Other questions regarding the fire and the general condition of the home are yet unanswered. I have yet to speak to the fire marshal, who is now busy preparing a report of investigation on a subsequent fire on New Year's Day. Unfortunately, any further details from the victims of the fire are now unavailable as I have learned that either the landlord or his insurance company has threatened to sue the tenants over the loss of the rental. My one phone conversation with one of the renters was, therefore, limited in nature and revealed nothing regarding either the fire or the general condition of the rental home. My contact with another individual close to the family also has been effectively limited by the threat of legal ramifications on an eventual suit. Unless this incident actually goes to court, we, the people of Bellingham, are unlikely to learn more about the fire. Similarly, insurance investigations on this property and on the same landlord's property on Grant St. that burned earlier in 2011 - click here to read about that- are not public documents. Again the public is denied information that affects the health and safety of all renters in Bellingham.

As for the terrible fire in a rental on 24th Street, which ushered in the New Year for our fire department, the fire marshal's report has yet to be issued. That fire, which seriously injured members of the MacGregor family, also appears to have originated with baseboard heating. This may indicate that there is a more generalized problem regarding electric baseboard heating. (Read a report from the National Fire Protection Association on selected baseboard heating fires by clicking here.) Furthermore, none of the press reports has indicated the presence of operable smoke alarms in that rental. I will have further information on that blaze later this month.

[See below for information on efforts to provide support to the victims of this most recent fire. This information was obtained from the Bellingham Herald article of 8 Jan 2012:

"- Volunteer to collect donations at White's storage unit outside her home, 1029 22nd St. Call 360-305-4419 for more information.

- People can donate money to the MacGregor Family Benefit Account at any Peoples Bank location.

- A local Girl Scouts troop is raising money to buy the family a desktop computer. Email troop41539@gmail.com or visit supportmacgregors.blogspot.com for details."]

Read more here: http://www.bellinghamherald.com/2012/01/07/2340668/bellingham-rallies-around-family.html#storylink=misearch#storylink=cpy

Maple Street Fire - Some Unresolved Questions

On the 30th of November a house fire at 718 E. Maple Street was essentially totally destroyed by fire. You can read the Bellingham Herald's account of this fire by clicking here. Five young women, WWU students, rented the home that the County Assessor's office records show is owned by David Hansen. Hansen also owns the home at 1404 Grant St. that was destroyed by fire earlier this year. (Click here to read about that incident) There is not yet a positive indication that this second fire was the fault of any one person, however, there remains some question about the fire's origin that must be answered by the investigation to determine if either the renters or the landlord carries responsibility.

Although the Zonemaven spoke with the fire inspector, Jason Napier, about the blaze, it would not be helpful to speculate based on Mr. Napier's initial thoughts. After the investigative report is released, the Zonemaven will comment further.

In the meantime, we might speak again about smoke/fire detectors. These alarms saved the lives of the renters in this case, however, the alarms are, as has been said in this blog before, only a last resort. In other words, the more important issue is the cause of the fire in the first place and the steps the renter, the landlord and the city should take to eliminate the root cause of these fires. Alarms are no substitute for enduring poor conditions in rentals.

We may also have a conversation about the apparent absence of a fire extinguisher in the rental unit. Extinguishers are not required in single family rentals in Bellingham because there is no control over these rentals whatsoever. Therein lies a great problem, the health and safety of all renters in this city. Our new mayor is supportive of treating these rentals as businesses. Businesses that deal with the public, i.e. renters, ought to conform to basic safety and health standards. An ordinance to do so should be a priority in 2012.

Infill Tool Kit Abuse - What Took So Long?

The Bellingham version of a bail-out is the Type VI rezone process which allows developers to ask for a rezone on their property. Couple this process with the infamous Infill Tool Kit and you have a recipe for disaster in a neighborhood. (Read the InfillTool Kit ordinance by clicking here) You no doubt remember the sham “academy” put together by Tim Stewart, our former Planning Director, to gain enough faux citizen involvement in creating the Tool Kit to claim that it underwent a “public process”. Shortly thereafter, Stewart, having ladled the Infill Tool Kit turd into the zoning punchbowl, skulked off to Mercer Island, leaving the citizens here to drink from the contaminated tureen.

There were those of us who fought the Tool Kit and thought that the city accepted that this device, although approved by the city council, was not to be used in single family zoned neighborhoods. “Yes, yes, three bags full” was the response, “Only for use in urban villages and the city center – multi-family zoned areas.” Unfortunately, one need go no farther than the present Sunnyland Neighborhood opposition to the rezone of the former DOT site to find an early prime example of the attempted misuse of the Tool Kit to provide for the financial well being of a developer at the expense of the desires of the people who actually live there.

So late in 2010 the owners of the 113 acres in the Samish Neighborhood known as Padden Trails filed for a rezone of their property from single family residential to multi-family residential. The land, located east of I-5 and south of Connelly at the very edge of the city limits, is characterized by steep slopes and wetlands. It was zoned in 1969 to accommodate about 246 single family homes, although this zoning to half-acre lots was apparently done by folks who would not know a contour interval on the map, if it them in the face. Be that as it may, since the terrain will not readily allow such use, the developers have sought to rezone the property and have used as justification, in part, the infamous Infill Tool Kit ordinance. In essence, these developers are attempting to make a silk purse from their sow’s ear purchase by asking the city to bail them out and ignoring the desires of the Samish Neighborhood and the realities of the inappropriateness (dare I say quasi-legality) of placing dense zoning in the form 292 single family homes (i.e., Infill Tool Kit types such as cottages and townhomes) plus 200 multi-family units, for instance condominiums.

Furthermore, the process for this rezone is a mess, in and of itself. In a comment to my article on this same subject on the NWCitizen site (click here to read that article and its links to the data) Wendy Harris made these cogent observations:

“This is an extremely poor planning effort. Just try to reconcile the Staff report, the zoning application and the supporting documents, including an Amended SEPA checklist. The final application is for 615 housing units, while the supporting documents are for 492 units. Why was a SEPA determination and Staff report drafted for units that do not correspond to the application?

The City references site plans and building schematics that were submitted in support of the application, but then admits that the site plan and schematics contain inadequate information for a substantive review, and have not been reviewed for feasibility or consistency with City Code.

If an area is too steep and environmentally sensitive to allow much development, as admitted by the City, it should not be rezoned residential multi-family. Note that even after the proposed rezone, this will remain a low density area. Infill is being used here not to increase density, as intended, but to provide for development “flexibility” and clustering (i.e., inappropriate development in critical areas.)

It is clear that the City did not want to say no to a project that the developer intended to develop in the future. Intentions do not vest...; only land use applications vest. The rezone is an attempt to justify development that is discouraged under current land use regulations.”

Given the relatively lower cost of these units, one might reasonably imagine reversion to rentals and the kind of degradation seen already in the Magnolia Hills development where investors swooped in after the initial cohort of owner-occupiers sold their homes (on small lots) and moved out or up. The area nowadays is a rental horror show, full of cars, trucks, boats, RVs and all such similar objects that seem to be prized in this city as lawn ornaments. Given the total lack of parking restrictions, the roads within Magnolia Hills can barely accommodate a single lane of traffic. Need we recreate that within Padden Hills?

All of the above observations are but a few examples regarding not only the inadvisability of this particular Padden Trails rezone but also the distorted planning process and inherent disadvantage of neighborhoods attempting to resist the monied interests during Type VI rezones. The developers can count on money, staff, attorneys, other paladins and their associated mountebanks whose normal paid workday is that of schmoozing city officials and preparing myriad documentation and slick promotional material at which altar the Planning Department appears to worship. The neighborhoods depend on unpaid effort and time with little or no financing except for voluntary contributions from those who already have jobs, families and related obligations. The city aids and abets this obvious imbalance. You should be worried, for this could be a show coming to your neighborhood soon.

The Planning Commission will meet to consider this rezone application on Thursday, December 1st at 7:00pm. Click here for more information.

[Note: For the purposes of disclosure, I am a member of the Board of Directors of the Samish Neighborhood. My comments above are in no way meant to represent the position of the Board of Directors or the members of the Samish Neighborhood Association. ]