http://www.redandblack.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2004/03/23/405fc836dea80
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An Athens-Clarke County program designed to crack down on ordinance violators who officials say disrupt quality of life in residential neighborhoods reported 1,177 cases in January and February.

"If we see it, we cite for it," said John Ward, director of the Community Protection Division (CPD), which was designed to take an aggressive approach to find violators.

Ward's division is the county's latest attempt to deal with complaints from residents upset at ACC ordinance violators, many of whom are students.

The program divides the county into three zones for eight officers to patrol on a daily basis inspecting homes that could be violating ordinances.

Enforcement officers in pairs of two pass through a neighborhood five times per month at the very least, Ward said.

Among the ordinances students normally encounter include front yard parking and trash left outside.

Ward said the county's single family ordinance, which prohibits more than two unrelated people from living together in a single family neighborhood, is harder to cite.

Officials investigate those cases by looking at utility bills and license plates of cars normally parked in the driveway, Ward said.

The CPD also gathers information by knocking going door-to-door and questioning residents, Ward said.

Residents, though, are not required to incriminate themselves by answering the questions because they are protected by the Fifth Amendment.

Officers address a majority of violations through complaints made by neighbors, he said.

To verify if a resident is violating a single family ordinance, he said neighbors often testify against the violators in court.

Now that officers regularly patrol the neighborhoods, Ward said they would be more apt to notice which cars are usually parked.

Twelve cases have been opened in the past two months dealing with single family violations, according to CPD records.

The last case was settled Feb. 13, and the defendant received six months of probation, regular check-ups by CPD and a $400 fine.

"While we're being more pro-active, we are coming upon more criminal activity," he said, explaining the 68 percent increase in cases compared to this time last year stated in a memo to the ACC commission.

In Ward's memo, he said 30 percent of the cases had been closed due to residents immediately complying with the ordinance.

County commissioners developed the CPD last fall, anticipating that the rental registration would not be held up in court.

The court ruled rental registration -- which required landlords to record their tenants' names and the relationships of those they lived with -- was unconstitutional in February.

The deadline for county lawmakers to appeal the ruling passed Friday, signaling the end of the rental registration's hopes for now.

"We think we have a pretty good protection division in place," said Commissioner States McCarter.

"In an appeal there's always a chance that you could lose," he said. "We didn't think it was worth the money or the risk."
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VIOLATIONS
285 front yard parking violations
12 single family violations
308 solid waste violations
31 littering violations
91 garbage accumulation violations
450 miscellaneous ordinances such as junk vehicles, prohibited signs and unlawful dumping
Source: Community Protection Division

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Basically, the professors in Athens, Georgia decided that they didn't like it when students moved into residential neighborhoods and threw parties. Thus, they decided to prevent students from living outside of designated areas by prohibiting more than two unrelated people from living in the same house.

Of course, just having the law on the books doesn't do any good, so they attempted to force everyone to "register" with the government, with jail time for lying. Unfortunately, that was ruled unconstitutional.

Therefore, they hired a select group of spies to write down license plates and look inside mailboxes. You see, if too many people live in one house, they might have different names on the bills. Worse yet, they might slip up and park all their vehicles at the house at the same time.

-Biscuits

Argh. Why don't they just call the cops on residents who create a disturbance?

Ward said the county's single family ordinance, which prohibits more than two unrelated people from living together in a single family neighborhood, is harder to cite

It's stunning how dictatorial the so called land of the free can become.

Rob

Rob, come on.

A group of _permanent_ residents enacted ordinances in order to stem a decline in real property value due to loud parties, poor maintenance and slovenness by students. They are trying to enforce _their own_ ordinances as best they can. Please tell me that you would not be concerned if a large number of residences around you became rental property and subsequently became messier, more poorly kempt and had a negative effect on the value of your most precious posession - your house and land. This is not Big Brother, it's a community trying to protect its own property.

-Zeke

A group of _permanent_ residents enacted ordinances in order to stem a decline in real property value due to loud parties, poor maintenance and slovenness by students. They are trying to enforce _their own_ ordinances as best they can. Please tell me that you would not be concerned if a large number of residences around you became rental property and subsequently became messier, more poorly kempt and had a negative effect on the value of your most precious posession - your house and land. This is not Big Brother, it's a community trying to protect its own property.

This seems to be a huge cultural difference between the US and UK. Over here, while we might be "concerned", there is no legal power that can be invoked against neighbours in this sort of situation unless the neighbours are causing genuine risk (whether structural or health-related) to adjoining properties. Loud parties can be dealt with on a case-by-case basis by council noise enforcement, but poor maintenance is a matter solely between the neighbour and his mortgage company, and slovenliness is not viewed as cause for an Anti-Social Behaviour Order. If you move into a neighbourhood which then goes downhill, that's just bad luck; US-style "homeowners' associations" send a chill down my spine and I expect those of most people here. They've never really shaken off their image of Levittown-era institutionalised racial steering, and intolerance of students just seems like the same old same old. Sure, having a mixture of races on a street drove down the prices that white supremacists were willing to pay for houses there. Was excluding blacks a good answer to that problem? No.

Peter

In reply to:

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group of _permanent_ residents enacted ordinances in order to stem a decline in real property value due to loud parties, poor maintenance and slovenness by students. They are trying to enforce _their own_ ordinances as best they can. Please tell me that you would not be concerned if a large number of residences around you became rental property and subsequently became messier, more poorly kempt and had a negative effect on the value of your most precious posession - your house and land. This is not Big Brother, it's a community trying to protect its own property.

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What is it is an exercise in futility and putting the value of property before the value of people. In any case it will be just as useless as things like rent control in New York City or any other regulation that tries to control property values. In most cases houses become rental houses because they were low value to began with therefore they can be rented to low-income tenets like college students. As a house-renter I am tired of being snarled at by neighbors simply for living where I do (I never cause problems or have wild parties BTW). It's not my problem their property values might be lower- most home owners that complain about rental houses have run-down houses themselves and should not be complaining about others from what I've experienced.

Just to let you know, I find "homeowner's associations" offensive, too. Here's a snippet from a Dave Barry interview:

Reason: Why did you leave Coral Gables, the Miami suburb that's the libertarian paradise?

Barry: God, you talk about a libertarian nightmare ! We got a ticket for painting our own living room white. And they came to the door, a guy in a uniform.

Reason: This is inside the house?

Barry: The interior living room. It turned out you had to have a permit if the job cost more than $50. I don't know what you can possibly do for less than $50 to have somebody come in your house. I had to pay the painter to go down to the city hall. This is after I called up city hall and ended up actually screaming. The painter spent a day getting a permit to do a job that took about half a day to actually do.

Then I wrote a column about that and discovered that there were people in Coral Gables who would wait until 2 o'clock in the morning to replace a sink because to do it during the daytime you'd see the trucks outside. Two trucks. That's a carpenter and a plumber. So that's two different permits. People were not fixing their houses because they didn't know how to get the permits. It was crazy.

Reason: If you have a cat out of the house, it's supposed to be on a leash there.

Barry: Yeah, and you're not allowed to park a truck in your driveway. You're not allowed to work on your house on Sunday. The people who enforce these laws are nuts. After I wrote a column on this, I got I don't know how many letters from Coral Gables homeowners, story after story after story, wonderfully horrible stories. And the venom they felt for their own government! You cannot paint the exterior of your house. You have to take the paint chip down to show the paintchip Nazis. It goes on all the time and it's hilarious. People are afraid to own their own homes. People are afraid their own government will catch them fixing their houses.

Dave Barry, by the way, writes a nationally syndicated pseudo-absurdist humor newspaper column.

Ever see the x-files episode about the homeowners who had a monster go around a kill people who weren't following the rules? Too funny!

It's stunning how dictatorial the so called land of the free can become.

I live in the US. When I first read the story, I thought, "man, what country is this story from?." I was surprised I saw the reference to the 5th amendment.

I'm glad my neighborhood isn't like this! The only really annoying ordinance that I know about (so far...) is no parking on the street between 2AM and 5AM (annoying because I often have friends over during that time period and my driveway is about a 30% grade--people hate parking on it)

Officials investigate those cases by looking at utility bills ...

Therefore, they hired a select group of spies to write down license plates and look inside mailboxes.

Anyone else wondering how they can justify looking at somebody's mail? I've always been taught this is considered a very serious offense.

"putting the value of property before the value of people"

Huh? There were 12 violations having to do with the non-related parties statute out of 1132 total violations, the other 1120 had to do with property or behavior (littering). How hard is it to put out your garbage on the right day, not litter and not park on your (rented) lawn?

Don't get me wrong, I totally agree about housing associations being a PITA, I once had to get a permit to put in a two-step stair from a deck to a lawn in a condo I once occupied - it took three months to be approved. I also can see the racism possibility, but I can't evaluate that from the article's contents, there's just not enough information.

I'm not arguing that their regulations will be effective in the long term, only that it's their right to do so as the majority of voters, so long as they stay within constitutional & legal boundaries.

-Zeke

This ordinance-enforcement organization's primary purpose is to enforce the single-family ordinance. Frankly, I believe they are upset that they haven't caught more people so far.

By the way, this is NOT a neighborhood association, this is the city government. 101,489 people live in Athens, GA and they all fall under these ordinances.

-Biscuits

I lived in one of these neighborhoods for about three years. Very upscale, very nice. But the rules were crazy. It was not as bad as what Bitt wrote but it was pretty bad. One of my neighbors got into trouble for painting his house a color that was not "approved". It was a very nice shade of blue. Not bright and glaring but a nice toned down hue. It really looked good. I finally couldn't stand it any more so I moved. I now live in the country on 5 acres.

But they're targeting all students, not just those that are causing the mess. Why not just press charges against the people that violate the already-existing ordinances that are there expressly to prevent this sort of thing instead of harassing people who just want to have a roommate?

"But they're targeting all students,"

Where do you read that? While that is certainly implied in the article (and by Biscuitjam's commentary), there's no evidence presented to support it (edit: or either way for that matter). There's information stating that the students were why the ordinances were passed, but not that they're being unfairly targeted. There's no information about the number of citations issued to students vs. non-students.

The ordinance covers three unrelated people living together, not two, so a roommate is fine, just not three unrleated people.

I don't see anything here which is alarming at all, just enforcement of statutes that passed the local government.

-Zeke

I don't see anything here which is alarming at all, just enforcement of statutes that passed the local government.

Selective enforcement is where it becomes unacceptable. And no, there's no clear evidence to suggest that's happening in Athens, but based on my own college experience, and Biscuit's commentary, I think the probability of "student profiling" in Athens is high. During my time at Penn State, I observed that a student dwelling and a town dwelling could violate the same ordinance, but the student dwelling (sometimes my own) was the one that would get a citation. There was one loony townie who had a yard that was such an eyesore it regularly made the papers, yet it basically took an act of congress to have anything done about it. Yet if we went an hour or two past the 12 hours we were given to clear snow off our walkway, a citation was promptly delivered. While I realize students are quite good at playing the role of villains in a college town, I think these blatant acts of profiling are quite unnecessary. Each violation should be judged on its own, and cops should avoid their insatiable urge to stick it to the students, who, coincidentally, are often the lifeblood of a college town's economy.

I couldn't agree more, I've been on the receiving end of selective enforcement (in my case parking citations from the college I attended) and find it to be pure evil. My point is that there's no evidence presented of selective enforcement and if there were the article would be much stronger. Since the article was written for a student publication, it sure seems likely that if there were any evidence of selective enforcement that it would have been presented.

-Zeke

"Since the article was written for a student publication, it sure seems likely that if there were any evidence of selective enforcement that it would have been presented. "

I guess you don't know the Red and Black... Most students here casually call it a "commie rag," because it is so biased. Very rarely are the actual opinions of the majority of the student body represented. Instead, the newspaper fawns all over University president Adams (you've probably heard of him) and the city council. Perhaps they are afraid they would lose access if they ever posted anything negative?

-Biscuits

Okay. They're targeting people who don't live with families. Whatever. The problem is that there shouldn't be a law that makes having two or more roommates illegal. That's asinine. All I'm saying is to enforce the laws that exist decrying the anti-social behavior, not create laws that exist to prevent poor people from finding housing. You can't tell me that there aren't laws against littering and disturbing the peace. I can see how those laws might need to be hardened -- stiffer fines, jail time, maybe even forced eviction, if that's possible -- but telling people that they can have only one roommate means that those people that need to split housing costs more ways get screwed.

I'm not saying anything about enforcement of the new law. Personally, I think that the federal government would have issues with local law enforcement looking in mailboxes without warrants. I'm just saying that the new law shouldn't exist. It may help reduce the problem, but it catches people who aren't going to be a problem, too. What if it was found that Hispanics were much more likely to cause a disturbance? Should they ban Hispanic folks from the neighborhood, too?

"The problem is that there shouldn't be a law that makes having two or more roommates illegal. That's asinine."

-That's a matter for the local voters and government to decide unless it's found unconstitutional or opposes a state or federal law.

"Personally, I think that the federal government would have issues with local law enforcement looking in mailboxes without warrants."

-Agreed.

"It may help reduce the problem, but it catches people who aren't going to be a problem, too."

-And if enough of these people are voters, perhaps they can convince enough voters to change or repeal the ordinance.

"Should they ban Hispanic folks from the neighborhood, too?"

-No, that would violate state (perhaps - this is Georgia ) or federal (certainly) law.

-Zeke

You seem to have this notion that all laws are correct. It used to be the law that whites and coloreds couldn't use the same public toilets. Sure, this isn't even remotely the same level of idiocy, but it's in the same category.

You seem to have a notion that I agree with this law! I don't (well, the cohabitation part anyway, the rest seems reasonable). I didn't & wouldn't vote for it. I do think communities do have rights to set standards for civil behavior - that's what local governance is for.

However, if the laws aren't enforced equally - that's offensive and is worse than having no law. We have a system in this country for striking down laws if they violate higher laws and constitutions.

And you're right, this is _miles_ from racial segregation via local ordinance, but I will cede that it has a similar odor - depending on execution, of course.

-Zeke

And you're right, this is _miles_ from racial segregation via local ordinance, but I will cede that it has a similar odor - depending on execution, of course.

Execution would probably put this directly in the same realm as racial segregation . . .

> Ever see the x-files episode about the homeowners who
> had a monster go around a kill people who weren't
> following the rules? Too funny!

That was the only episode I enjoyed!

-brendan

That was the only episode I enjoyed!

Then you didn't see the episode with Charles Nelson Reilly and the Men In Black.

"Her hair was red, but a little too red, if you know what I mean..."

Then you didn't see the episode with Charles Nelson Reilly and the Men In Black.

Or what about the one with the Satanic PTA?

... most precious posession - your house and land.

Not my most precious possessions. Not even close, actually. I'd re-prioritize.

BTW, from this topic's subject, I presumed it would be a story about Greek authorities' counterterrorism efforts around the Olympics....

US-style "homeowners' associations" send a chill down my spine and I expect those of most people here.

I've been dealing with them for years in multiple states in these USA, and yet they CONTINUE to give me ye ol' spine-chilling.

poor maintenance is a matter solely between the neighbour and his mortgage company

It occurs to me now that there are exceptions to this in the UK: particularly historically or architecturally significant buildings become "listed", which means you need approval for any work done to them -- inside or out -- which might damage their historic or architectural value. Living in a listed building is, apparently, a real pain -- but relatively few private houses are listed. Less strict but more widespread is the idea of a "conservation area", where works must be approved (by the local council) if they affect the appearance of properties as seen from the street. I don't know how that slipped my mind, as I live in such an area! Obviously someone feels that an area containing row after row of two-up-two-down Victorian terraces (the commonest of the common, in every sense, in the 1800s -- as depicted in Coronation Street or the North of England bit of The Meaning Of Life) is quaint enough to deserve "conservation".

Local councils get the power to do this with their powers over town-planning decisions; I still don't reckon they have any power over lack of maintenance, only inappropriate maintenance -- let alone any power to enforce "sociological zoning" of the sort the Georgian Athenians seem to enjoy.

Peter

Living in a listed building is, apparently, a real pain

Not as bad as in Amsterdam. I can't change my toilet door - it's supposedly historical

I don't consider loved ones possessions.

-Zeke