Unsafe shelter
The city needs to step up in its oversight of rooming houses.
“The place is on fire!” Screams echoed through the maze of makeshift bedrooms spread around what once was a banquet hall in southeast Houston. Flames leapt through the building’s attic, filling already darkened spaces with black smoke. Inside the rooming house known as Briscoe’s Place, dozens of people scrambled to flee from windowless rooms.
Two of the residents didn’t make it out that night last March. Firefighters found their corpses just inside the front door, which apparently was locked, blocking their escape from a labyrinth of sleeping spaces that city officials say violated building codes.
That deadly fire on Griggs Road tragically highlighted the little noticed hazards posed by rooming houses. These low-income dwellings are a refuge of last resort for an untold number of needy people, many of them elderly or disabled, whose meager incomes from sources like Social Security payments don’t provide them with enough money to live in nursing homes or rent regular apartments.
As the Chronicle’s St. John Barned-Smith recently reported (“Dangerous dwellings,” Page A1, May 7), rooming houses operating in Houston face little government scrutiny. An ordinance passed in 2013 requires group homes to register, submit to annual fire inspections and meet a series of other preconditions before taking in tenants. But the Chronicle discovered inspections have been spotty, and a mishmash of records scattered around various city departments complicates oversight.
Still, Houston’s ahead of the curve on tackling this problem. A federal study published three years ago concluded unlicensed care homes are widespread, and many of the residents living in these places are extremely vulnerable. While many if not most of these homes are run by earnest and genuinely compassionate people, all too often the operators simply don’t have the training to properly care for their elderly, disabled or mentally ill clients. But this business is also rife with fraud and abuse; countless unscrupulous scammers provide poor housing as a pretext for essentially stealing their tenants’ Social Security money and government assistance payments.
Mayor Sylvester Turner said last week he had ordered a review of how the city regulates homes like these. It’s abundantly clear the ordinance passed four years ago hasn’t adequately addressed this issue. Our mayor and city council need to not only consolidate efforts to oversee rooming houses into one city department, they also need to figure out how our city government fell short in its last attempt to regulate these low-income homes. And they need to do it quickly, before more people die in dangerous buildings like Briscoe’s Place.