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 Chapter 11: Human Relations Aspects of a Housing 

 Inspection

Table of Contents

I. General Considerations

II. Human Relations and Attainment of Housing Goals

I. General Considerations

The term "housing inspection" is generally understood to mean a close-up observation of actual conditions that exist in a dwelling 

and on its premises. It is conducted by a trained, qualified, and competent appointed official to determine whether the observed

conditions meet the minimum requirements specified by the local housing ordinance. In cases where the minimum requirements 

are not met, the inspection procedure offers an opportunity to begin the necessary action to bring the existing conditions up to a 

level that will be acceptable under provisions of the ordinance.

A Purposes of the Housing Inspection

For the occupant of the dwelling unit, the inspection should be an opportunity to compare the conditions in which he lives with 

those considered to be minimal to protect his health and safety. In addition it provides a check on the quality of maintenance 

given to the facilities of his dwelling unit since the last inspection.

For the code enforcement or housing irnprovement agency, the inspection procedure provides a means for:

1 Gathering data that can be combined with other, similar data to develop a comprehensive picture of housing conditions in 

the community as an aid to measure improvement progress.

2 Executing its responsibility for protecting the health and safety of individual citizens as well as the public generally.

The main focus of the housing agency's activities should be primarily related to the improvement of the housing quality of the 

community rather than to the mere enforcement of a housing ordinance.

B The Housing Inspection as a Technique for Improving Housing Quality

The inspection procedure should be considered a technique, which used in concert with other techniques, is intended to improve 

continually the housing quality throughout the community. The inspection procedure, if properly used, is an effective tool in 

achieving code compliance.

1 It provides a reasonably accurate measurement of actual dwelling and premises conditions to indicate improvement or 

slippage in housing quality when compared with previously collected data.

2 It provides a convenient opportunity for consultation to take place between the occupant and the inspector regarding 

conditions that do not meet code requirements.
3 It provides a means of measuring the effectiveness of techniques, such as use of press, radio, TV, and neighborhood 

improvement projects, which may also be employed to help improve community housing quality.

4 It provides information that can be later used if some form of legal action becomes necessary to bring about code 

compliance.

Legal action, as a form of persuasiveness, is often considered to be the least desirable. It can cause adverse publicity for the

agency that can hinder its future work. It is costly. Legal action can cause a false impression to be formed by the public regarding 

the purposes of the agency and the functions of its personnel. It is a last-resort effort that is in a sense an admission of failure at 

being able to teach housing hygiene principles and persuade their acceptance .

C The Community Housing Improvement Program

The success of a community housing improvement program generally depends upon several basic factors.

1 Adoption, by municipal officials, of a housing ordinance with realistic code provisions that will help maintain the quality of 

"good" housing and substantially improve the quality of "poor" housing conditions.

2 The code administration compliance program must be well planned and conducted in a systematic fashion.

3 The program must have sufficient financial support for an adequate number of personnel and other administrative needs.

4 Legal counsel and direct legal aid must be readily available to the program staff when needed.

5 Housing inspectors must be adequately trained and supervised so that they can conduct their work competently.

6 The general acceptance, support, and participation of the public in the housing improvement efforts of the program must 

be secured.

In the end, this last item will largely determine the measure of success or failure of the Program.

The housing agency, as all other governmental units, is a tax-supported public agency that belongs to the people it serves. In the 

final analysis its future existence to continue serving the needs of the people will depend upon the people's wish to maintain it. 

This in turn depends upon their understanding of and satisfaction with the services of the agency and the performance of its 

personnel. Modern thinking is along the line of doing "with" people rather than "for or to" them. When applied to a housing agency 

and the public it serves, the word "with" implies everything that contributes to good human relations.

II. Human Relations and Attainment of Housing Goals

The term "human relations" as used here actually refers to two types of relationships between people: The personal one-to-one or

person-to-person relationship and the relationship that exists between the agency and the general public.

They are interrelated. The public is composed of individuals with attitudes and feelings that when taken jointly make up the public 

sentiment. This sentiment forms the basis for the relationship that develops between the housing agency and the general public.

A The Housing Inspector and Public Relations

The housing inspector is more concerned with the one-to-one or person-to-person relationships than with the relationship 

between the agency and the public. The latter is more a responsibility of the supervisory or executive levels of the agency; the

housing inspector, however, meets individual members of the public personally on a daily basis. What he does and how he does it,

even what he does not do but should do, help to shape the individual's attitudes about the inspector as well as about the agency

he represents. Individual attitudes added together form the basis of the public's opinion of the agency and are important in 
determining whether the public will or will not cooperate with the housing improvement efforts.

The effects of the housing inspector's contacts with the public can have even deeper implications. Since the only contact many 

members of the public may have with the municipal government is through the housing inspector, he may, to them, represent the 

municipal administration. This is especially true for the inner-city poverty area resident to whom the housing inspector may well 

be the municipal government. The housing inspector has more personal contact with members of the public than any other 

municipal employee, even the mayor. To a large degree, the success of his relationships may well determine the success or failure 

of many municipal programs other than the housing improvement program.

B Anatomy of the Person-To-Person Communication Interaction

Since the person-to-person relationships of the housing inspector have such far-reaching effects, it is important for him to have 

some idea of what takes place when two persons confront each other in an attempt to communicate.

When two persons meet and attempt to communicate with each other, their reactions to what is said by the other are dependent 

upon many factors. The behavior of an individual (John) in the presence of another person (Frank) is, at the same time, both a 

response and a stimulus to the actions of Frank. Because John knows that Frank will react to the manner in which John conducts 

himself, he (John) is likely to temper his behavior. John may, knowingly or unknowingly to himself, behave in such a way as to 

bring about certain responses from Frank. John's subsequent behavior thence depends upon whether or not he brings about the 

desired responses from Frank.

Of course this is an oversimplified explanation of a very complex matter explained in terms of stimulus and response, action and

reaction. Under ordinary circumstances, the behavior of persons in interaction flows quite smoothly. This occurs if each party to 

the interaction has learned to anticipate the response that an action on his part will elicit, as well as to anticipate the responses he 

will make toward the actions of the other party. Such interactions flow smoothly, however, only when both parties share the same 

definitions of their-own and each other's acts, as well as an understanding of their relation with each other.

On the assumption that the housing inspector understands his job to be that of teacher and in addition to that of code 

enforcement officer, it is to his advantage to have a workable knowledge of the person-to-person communications technique. 

Armed with this advantage, his job of making people interested in the things they may not want to be interested in becomes 

easier.

C How To Interest People In Things They Don't Want To Know

Every normal human being is interested in many things. Certainly he is interested in himself, his family, and conditions that affect 

his daily life. To establish an effective communications link the housing inspector must find a way to relate what he wants to say 

with what the other person is already interested in. If he can do this, the inspector can reach him and teach him what he needs to 

know to improve his housing conditions. This is a two-step process the inspector must:

-get the attention or interest of the subject;

- then do the teaching.

Everyone the inspector tries to reach will have some interest, some need, some desire, to which he can relate himself and his 

message. At the start. it must be something in which the subject is interested, not something in which the inspector is interested. 

He must find this need or desire and use it to anchor an emotional or intellectual bridge between himself and his subject. Then he 

can send his messages across this bridge to his subject.

1 How To Get The Interest Of The Subject

Obviously, until the inspector has figured out what need or desire he can serve in the subject - and until he states convincingly to 

the subject - he cannot begin to interest the subject in anything. In fact, the person may not even know that he should have a 

particular need or desire. This may be especially true with dwellers of inner-city poverty areas who have lived in poor housing 
conditions so long that their sensibilities to react to these conditions have been dulled. In this instance the best starting place 

might be to reawaken these sensibilities.

To recognize the needs and desires of the subject, one must know as much about the subject as the subject knows himselfperhaps even more. To do this effectively, the inspector must first recognize and accept certain basic facts:

a That there is no such thing as "one" or "the" public. All communities - and neighborhoods - have population subgroups 

based on religion, economic or social status, race, education, nationality, age, sex, and occupation.

b Childhood rearing patterns vary in each of these subgroups so that the experiences, attitudes, and behavior of individuals 

belonging to each of these subgroups will be different. These differences may be evident in their attitude and behavior 

toward the municipal government, its representatives, and even members of other subgroups. Municipal officials themselves 

constitute a subgroup that is further broken down by smaller sub groupings formed on the basis of rank, status, or the type 

of duties performed.

c Inner-city dwellers in particular may confuse the housing inspector if he is unfamiliar with their problems.

Many of these residents have migrated from remote rural areas that kept them isolated from the mainstream of 

technological change that has occurred so rapidly in this country. They may have received little or no education or job 

training. Many came to the city with the sincere hope of improving their condition and becoming a member of the American 

society. Being unfamiliar with city ways, however, they soon found themselves in difficulty with the law, without a job, and 

in living conditions that were worse than those they had left in the rural hinterlands.

Often many do not recognize an illness, much less know where to get treatment, even though a health clinic may be just 

down the street. Some have never been trained to perform simple technical functions such as how to use a washing 

machine. To survive, many fathers have had temporarily to leave their families in search of work in other cities. Some never 

return, leaving the women to raise the family. Boys and young men grow up with deep rooted feelings of insecurity, never 

having had the model of their father to guide their development into manhood. Often any municipal employee represents 

the real or imagined oppression of the government and is a likely target on which to vent pent-up anxieties.

d The housing inspector must realize that he also belongs to one or more population subgroups with attitudes and behavior 

patterns that are different from those found in other groups. As a housing inspector, he must neutralize the attitudes or 

behavior patterns that may evoke an undesired response from the subject. He must further make it clear to the person with 

whom he is trying to establish a communications link that, although there are differences between them, he is unbiased and 

nonjudgmental in their relationship, and that he expects the same from the subject. These are generally expected 

characteristics of persons belonging to the subgrouping of municipal officials.

e By using whatever background knowledge he can learn about the people with whom he must work, the inspector, with 

some tactful probing, should be able to determine their needs and desires and build a communications bridge to them by 

establishing a genuine interest in them.

2 How To Get Your Message Across

Once the communications bridge has been built, the housing inspector can begin sending messages across.

The message he has to tell must be important to the subject, related to some basic need or desire of his, and related in his terms, 

not the inspector's.

Then he can hope to move the subject in the direction he wants him to go, that is, toward improving his housing conditions.

Every communication has three elements, each of which determines the value of the other two. There is the content of the 

message, what it is the inspector wants to say. There is the form of the message, how the content is expressed and transmitted, 

and this includes both the medium and words used. And there is the subject of the communications, the person to whom it is 
directed.

Obviously until all three of these content, form, and subject are carefully and successfully related to each other, the 

communication is not likely to have the desired result. The content must be properly and precisely related to the subject. How the 

message is stated must be properly and precisely related to the content and the subject of the communication. If these three are

not effectively related, the intended message will fall short of communicating.

Finally, the communicator, that is, the inspector, must not be message oriented. Although his message may be important to the 

subject, it may also be new and different, and the importance of the message may have no impact on the subject. The inspector 

must be always conscious of whom he is trying to reach, of how that person thinks and feels; as he directs his efforts, he shapes 

his message and form of delivery, as best he can, to fit the subject. To do this, he must start with his subject in mind; that is 

where persuasive person-to-person communication starts.

D Interagency Relations

The housing inspector should realize that the housing improvement program is only one of many programs of municipal 

administration. During a normal work day, the housing inspector is likely to meet other municipal employees in the same 

neighborhoods working with the same people.

With the multiplicity of community and personal improvement programs in effect today, especially in inner-city poverty areas, the 

traffic of public employees can become bewildering, if not irritating, to the neighborhood residents. Naturally, all employees feel 

their work is important, and in their striving to achieve their goals, compete with other employees for the time, interest, and 

support of community residents. If competition for the attention of neighborhood residents becomes too intense, the result might

well be the polarization of individuals around one or a few program activities- those that interest or benefit them most. Or worse, 

the result might be sheer apathy and loss of support or interest in any program's efforts.

Several things can be done to avert this very undesirable situation and make the efforts of all public employees mutually 

beneficial. They include the following:

1 The housing inspector should try to determine which employees have duties related to his or perform similar activities. These

will usually be health, building, electrical, fire, and various public works employees. He should then try to learn as much as 

possible about the other employee's work that relates to his own. Then, if he discovers conditions that should be brought to the

attention of other departments, he will know enough to determine whether the condition really does constitute a hazard or a 

violation of another ordinance. Unnecessary inspections can become costly to the municipal administration, time consuming, and 

bothersome for the other employees as well as for the resident .

A possible result of this type of needless activity can easily result in alienation of both the other city employees and the resident. 

Eventually the housing inspector will find himself without the participation and support of others in his program efforts.

2 The housing inspector should try to develop lines of liaison or channels of communications with employees of other units. Then, 

through these channels he should attempt either formally or informally to coordinate the planning and execution of his activities. 

For example, an occupant of a dwelling would rather have the housing and other necessary inspections done at the same time or 

on the same day rather than arrange separate appointments on different days.

3 Exchange information and views about the neighborhood and its residents. Keep it general and related only to topics that will

directly help improve communications with the residents or otherwise help achieve the desired objectives. All persons regardless

of their station in life have the right of freedom from invasion of privacy. The details of a person's life or living circumstances that 

the inspector may learn during his work should not be idly discussed.

Perhaps the most important fact the inspector should keep in mind, regarding good interagency relations, is that, although his 

interest is primarily focused on one program area, he is part of a larger team working together to improve the conditions of the

total community.
Table of Contents | Acknowledgements | Foreword | Chapter1 | Chapter 2

Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7

Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11

 

 

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