CITY TO INCREASE RENTAL PROPERTY REGULATIONS

The Cape Girardeau City Council voted Tuesday night to license rooming and boarding houses in the wake of three fires at in the past four or five months.

Fire Chief Robert Ridgeway said the license requirement clears the way for the city to inspect rooming and boarding houses to ensure they aren't fire traps. The annual license will cost $1.

Two of the three recent fires occurred at 105 S. Spanish and the other occurred at 719 N. West End Blvd. Ridgeway said the fires might easily have been fatal.

Two people weren't breathing when they were rescued from the burning buildings, one at 105 S. Spanish and the other at the West End Boulevard address. In both cases, they were resuscitated.

"There are a lot of 105 S. Spanish streets out there," the fire chief said prior to Tuesday's council meeting.

When firefighters responded to the Nov. 30 blaze at 719 N. West End Blvd., they discovered there were about a dozen people living there.

"You had a situation up there with blind alleys and no smoke detectors," Ridgeway said. "That is scary to me."

The city has had a licensing law on the books since at least 1967, but city officials said the ordinance hadn't been enforced, and landlords haven't applied for licenses.

The old law primarily referred to buildings rented to college students. The new measure makes it clear that the licenses are required of all rooming houses that have five or more tenants.

"We are not concerned about the little old lady who wants to rent out a room," Ridgeway said.The chief said the inspections will focus strictly on safety issues. The fire chief said all boarding and rooming houses will be inspected initially, but then maybe only once every two to three years.

Finding such places, however, could prove difficult. The fire chief said he doesn't know exactly how many rooming houses there are in the city. He estimated the number is in the dozens.

Inspecting such structures can help assure they are safe for tenants. It also provides firefighters with information about the layout of buildings that would come in handy if there is a fire, Ridgeway added.

Most of Cape's rooming and boarding houses are in older structures, he said.

Unlike apartments, boarding houses generally don't have kitchens in the rooms and often have communal bathrooms.

The owner of the former hospital on Spanish Street where there were two fires, Nelda Ireland of Jackson, said she favors inspections.

"I think that is probably needed, because I have been in some of these places that really don't look that safe," she said prior to the meeting Tuesday.

Although she favors inspections, Ireland said the increased city regulation likely will drive up rent and make it more difficult for the poor to find housing.

"There are going to be more and more homeless with the way we are headed," she said.

Ireland said she has worked with the city to improve safety in her building on Spanish Street since the fires.

She said both fires were caused by tenants. In one instance, a lighted cigarette started a fire. The other blaze was caused by a renter who stuck his jeans in the oven to dry.

Since the fires, the smoke detection system was upgraded and fire extinguishers were installed in the hall.