Almost four years ago, a 39-year-old woman died after a fire occurred in a 13-bedroom duplex north of Northeast 55th Street on 16th Avenue Northeast. The residence had been zoned for single-family housing. The woman suffered burns over 60 percent of her body.

After the fire, the fire department did not find code violations in the house that might have led to the fatal fire, but frustrated residents said that they shouldn’t have to wait until after a fire to see whether or not the landlord had adequately maintained the property.

One retired professor said he wanted the fire to act as a catalyst to propel the city to address longstanding safety concerns in rental houses in the “North of 45th” community.

Four years later, neighbors contend that any progress toward safer housing hasn’t happened.

“You have to fight every single issue here,” said Ruedi Risler, University Park Community Club member. “You have to go to DPD (Department of Planning and Development) and fight.”

Now a coalition involving both the university and the ASUW want to push the city toward mandatory inspections for rental housing in Seattle, a move that supporters claim would improve living conditions for students residing in rental housing. If enacted, the legislation would affect thousands of student renters.

“We’re not making new rules; we’re just enforcing existing law,” said Eric Shellan, ASUW assistant director for the Office of Government Relations. “We’re not trying to put new paint on the walls. We’re not trying to clean out gutters. I’m talking about grave issues — security, safety, mold.”

While the coalition has not agreed on what sort of path they’d like to take toward introducing legislation, Shellan said he wants to submit legislation to the city council this winter in hopes that the new mayor and two new council members would support such a law.

As the law stands now, tenants — in this case mostly students — have to request an inspection to report illegal bedrooms, missing smoke alarms, and other violations. If students don’t lodge a complaint, nothing happens.

Students particularly “vulnerable”

That inaction is something Shellan hopes to solve.

“By making it mandatory, it takes the onus off the tenant for reporting,” said Matt Fox, a member of the University District Community Council.

Neighbors, university employees and city officials can’t order inspectors into a house due to concern for tenants’ privacy.

“We know that there is a problem, but the major issue is we actually don’t know how many of these rental houses are really a disaster and how many are okay,” Risler said. “There’s no way to know it because you can’t inspect them.”

Shellan and others advocating for required inspections said “vulnerable” students don’t report substandard housing themselves because they’re at a disadvantage when it comes to raising complaints with the city.

“They don’t know what’s appropriate, what’s proper, what’s code,” said Van Chu from Student Legal Services, a student service that often deals with rental-housing issues. “There’s a lot of expert advice involved that an 18-year-old freshman won’t know.”

At the same time, some property owners use managers to handle tenant issues, and both managers and tenants tend to come and go quickly, said Carole Grayson, director of Student Legal Services.

Risler, the University Park resident, also mentioned absentee landlords who don’t directly maintain their property.

The situation results in a general climate of inaction; concerned parties like the university and longtime U-District residents basically complain they cannot order inspections, students seem to have reasons not to request inspections, and landlords themselves don’t voluntarily open their doors to inspectors.

The result: Nobody does anything.

Landlords say problem overblown

Landlords, however, do not claim to have abdicated responsibility for their rental homes. Rather, some contend that the problem really isn’t much of a problem at all.

“There’s such a small percentage of homes that are actually in substandard or derelict condition that we just don’t believe every home needs to be inspected,” said Julie Johnson, president of the Rental Housing Association of Puget Sound.

Instead, Johnson argues that the university should not turn to the city government to address rental-housing issues when administrators have not examined other options. She suggests better education for student renters and a partnership between the university and landlords; if the university confirms a landlord’s property meets code requirement, that landlord would be listed as preferred student housing.

On its off-campus housing Web site, the university already refuses to list properties owned by landlords who have violated legal code in the past. Additionally, the university mails brochures to students living in off-campus rental housing, advising them to learn their tenant rights and the ways with which they can report housing-code violations.

The university has actually lobbied the council for the past few years to address the issue through inspections, said Aaron Hoard from the university’s Office of Regional Relations.

“We’ve had some concerns about rental housing around campus for awhile,” he said. “Really, those concerns are based on sorts of stories that we here from students about housing up there. We hear from students that they don’t have locks on their doors, smoke detectors on their units, faulty wiring, that sort of thing.”

Lacking data, anecdotes propel legislation’s proponents

The stories might just be isolated anecdotes, gross outliers that do not reflect the majority of rental housing near campus, but Hoard said he can’t assess the problem without hard numbers.

“If you don’t get inspections and can’t get inspections, you can’t see what condition they’re in,” he said.

So residents like Risler can only estimate how safe these rental units really are. In a neighborhood once prized as prime real estate for faculty housing — one can search records to find professors with familiar names like Parrington, Padelford, Condon and Savery residing in the U-District — Risler suspects houses like the duplex that burnt down four years ago are still operating in violation of code throughout the neighborhood.

“The landlord rips it apart and puts a wall in the middle of the living room to get more rent out of it,” he said.

But he cannot verify his claims. Like Hoard, there are just stories. Until tenants report these issues — the strategy the Rental Housing Association promotes — or until people like Shellan and Hoard successfully lobby for mandatory inspections, Risler can only speculate.

Reach reporter Andrew Doughman at news@dailyuw.com.