Jack Mosher spends his days flipping switches and flushing toilets.
As an East Lansing housing inspector, it’s Mosher’s job to make sure each of the properties holding the city’s 16,000 rental licenses are following regulations and meeting standards.
City housing officials hope a new Housing Guest Inspector Program, which was introduced last week, will give city officials and community representatives a chance to flip and flush along with him.
Guests will ride along with a housing inspector for two hours, checking for incorrect wiring, leaky roofs and bad smoke detectors in houses, apartments and duplexes.
“We felt that it would be a good opportunity for people who are involved in decision-making,” said Howard Asch, the city’s code enforcement and neighborhood conservation director. “They’ll get a chance to see the reality of what the inspector sees. Having another set of eyes gives us other viewpoints.”
With many of the rental homes being leased to college students, Asch said he hopes student leaders as well as city officials will participate and evaluate the housing inspection process.
“We want to make sure that we have the tenants’ viewpoints,” Asch said. “I would hope that we would have more student involvement in rental issues. Students make up the largest part of renters that we have.”
Electrical engineering graduate student Amod Khandekar said renting an apartment has been easy and inexpensive for him - but that doesn’t mean everyone has such a simple time.
“I have seen lots of houses that are too dirty for normal people to live in,” he said. “Students should go on inspections. There might be certain guidelines that we don’t know about that are required by law.”
Sam Singh, a member of the East Lansing City Council and a 1994 MSU graduate, said his experiences with student rental housing have made him aware of how large the issue is.
“I can remember a couple of my buddies’ houses in college,” he said. “I don’t think there was anyplace in that house that was going to be clean.
“I think a lot of time people say that housing issues are one of the major issues in the community.”
Singh also said the guest inspector program was a good education tool for city officials.
“We hear from all sides of the community,” he said. “This gives us an opportunity to see what happens. It is a good lesson for us when making policy decisions.”
During an annual inspection Friday, Mosher found only small problems in a Northlawn Avenue duplex, like missing smoke detector batteries and flood lightbulbs that had been placed in a closet lighting fixture.
However, Mosher, who will sometimes inspect as many as 60 properties a week, said such a clean rental property was unusual. More than half of the properties in East Lansing require a follow-up inspection for violations.
“The students will leave the windows open, and then you get the varmints,” he said. “This is a nice, clean house. I get a few of them, but most of them, I have to move things aside just to test (the electrical current).”
Steve Flood, the property owner and landlord, said he lived in one side of the duplex before moving to South Haven, Mich., in 1995.
Mosher said it is likely that Flood’s duplex is so clean because the home is usually rented to young professionals instead of students.
“It’s licensed for three, but we’ve never had more than two,” Flood said. “It’s just the neighborhood. We try to keep it quieter.”
For more information about the Housing Guest Inspector Program, call the East Lansing Code Enforcement and Neighborhood Conservation Office at 319-6857.
Jamie Gumbrecht can be reached at gumbrec1@msu.edu.
