Fire victims wait for action on unregulated housing
Alonza Crawley will never forget the day his brother, Gregory, died.
Gregory had been living at Briscoe’s Place, a rooming house in south Houston, when the building caught fire.
Most of the building’s residents got out, but not Gregory Crawley, 60, or his girlfriend, Sandra Bruner, 55. They perished in the flames.
City officials said the unregulated boarding house was operating without proper permits and did not comply with city building codes. After a Houston Chronicle investigation uncovered gaps in the city’s regulatory system that allowed such facilities to flourish, Mayor Sylvester Turner pledged to revamp the way the city oversees the few options available for people on the verge of homelessness.
“We need to take a look at them, and we are,” Turner said in May.
Months later, Alonza Crawley is still waiting for action.
“I had a brother that burnt up in there and couldn’t get out,” he said. “What are we going to do about that?”
A multidepartment city task force is drafting policies for previously unregulated lodging facilities like Briscoe’s Place to face annual inspections and permits, plus additional fire safety provisions. The committee is also proposing changes to current regulations for boarding homes and other living facilities in an effort to streamline oversight citywide.
The task force hopes to present the proposed changes to the City Council’s public safety committee in January.
“We’ve been moving as
fast as we can, but there are a lot of moving pieces, and we want to get this right,” said Lara Cottingham, deputy assistant director at the city’s administration of regulatory affairs.
‘A complex problem’
After being tasked with overhauling the regulations, city officials realized they’d need to make more comprehensive changes to address other types of congregate living facilities, such as boarding homes, rooming houses and alternative housing facilities, Cottingham said.
“While they’re all very similar, there are distinct nuances,” Cottingham said. “If it were easy to do we would have done it, but this is a complex problem, and it requires a lot of thought and a lot of cross-departmental collaboration, and that takes time.”
The force had originally planned to present its findings by the end of the summer, but Hurricane Harvey delayed that, she said. The city has held several meetings with residents and operators already and hopes to schedule more in the coming weeks.
Among the most significant changes: requiring all types of “lodging facility” — a catchall term that includes boarding houses, bunkhouses and other facilities — to receive annual permits and “life safety” inspections.
The city is also planning to require “boarding homes” — a separate type of facility where three or more unrelated people live and receive some kind of medical care — to obtain annual permits. Currently, such facilities were only required to register with the city.
Fire Chief Samuel Peña said he supports the proposed changes.
“The focus on safety, building upkeep and code enforcement is critical to life safety in these facilities,” he said. “Too many deaths in these types of buildings have a central theme: inadequate, locked, blocked, missing exits.”
Such failures contribute to more nonresidential fire deaths than any other factor, he said.
“It is through code enforcement that fire and building codes move from just another regulation into life safety,” he said. “In an effort to prevent needless deaths in these facilities, we need trained personnel in the field performing inspections and generally improving the fire safety in our communities.”
Councilwoman Brenda Stardig, who chairs the city council’s Public Safety and Homeland Security committee, said the proposed changes are “very important” to protect underprivileged residents who might otherwise be taken advantage of.
“We need to get a handle on and understand what’s out there so we can make decisions that don’t negatively impact the community, and so we can offer services to those in need,” she said.
‘In the shadows of society’
Advocates for low-income, disabled and other Houstonians with few places to go said that without stricter regulation, the city is certain to have future tragedies.
“They were low-income people, they were in the shadows of society, so why not put them in substandard housing?” said Dennis Borel, executive director of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities. “That’s the wrong attitude.”
He warned against making permits prohibitively expensive, however.
“You don’t want to shut down what is often a shelter of last resort for people with very low incomes, but you want to make (sure) there’s no life safety threat there,” Borel said.
Lonnie Provo, a former convict who runs a weekly broadcast called Oasis Ministry Radio, said former inmates frequently end up in facilities that are more dangerous or unsanitary than the cells they left.
“You can become so discouraged you want to give up,” said Provo, who supports the city’s overhaul efforts. “You have to make an environment such that you’re able to build up character.”
‘Nobody was watching’
Months after the fire at Briscoe’s Place, plywood covers the front of the damaged building. In a brief phone conversation, Moses Briscoe, the owner, said he was unsure if he would try to rebuild.
“That’s on the back burner,” he said, before hanging up.
The residents are long gone, of course. City officials say a third victim died shortly after the blaze.
Cherika Argus, one of the residents, moved to north Houston after the fire. She lives there still, with Roscoe, her pitbull terrier, and Shaqurria Norris, 21, her son’s girlfriend.
Briscoe’s Place had given her a cheap place to live. Like her old dwelling, her new unit has its challenges.
In her apartment, the ceiling is buckled in one room, damaged during Harvey.
Proposed rules
A city task force is drafting proposed changes to the regulations covering lodging facilities, boarding homes and alternative housing facilities that had faced little oversight. Here are proposed changes scheduled to be presented to the City Council’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Committee in late January.
Lodging facilities, including unregulated boarding houses and similar facilities
(Does not include apartments, short-term rentals or hotels)
• Annual permit with process for revocation/denial/appeal;
• First-year building code inspection, which may require the location to obtain a Certificate of Occupancy;
• Annual life safety inspection prior to permit renewal; • Framed beds; • Posted and practiced fire evacuation plan; • Accessible fire extinguishers; • Operable smoke alarms and carbon monoxide detectors;
• Readily available first-aid supplies.
She’d like to move, she said. Dogs bark in the apartment below, and the air outside reeks with the stench of dog feces.
“There’s shootings and threats at night,” said Argus, 38. “I don’t feel safe.”
She still thinks about the fire, when she banged on her neighbors’ doors to help them get out. She thinks about Gregory Crawley and Sandra Bruner. She thinks about the locked front door that kept them from escaping, and the lack of windows that almost killed her.
She hopes the city makes good on its pledge to ensure that landlords don’t cut corners or endanger residents.
“Nobody was watching,” she said. “And there are a lot of buildings run like this.”