A Neighborhood Campaign:
City Officials Announce Plans to Scour North End, South End for Quality-Of-Life Violations

October 26, 2004
By OSHRAT CARMIEL , Courant Staff Writer

A team of city code inspectors will be coming into two Hartford neighborhoods over the next four months, scrutinizing every house for quality-of-life violations, Mayor Eddie A. Perez announced Monday.

As part of a pilot "quality of life'' initiative, the city's limited staff of building inspectors, rodent inspectors and health inspectors will concentrate their efforts on a neighborhood in the South End and another in the North End.

"Every structure will be inspected,'' Perez said Monday.

The goal: to see what happens when the city's disparate inspection forces work together.

The city also plans to teach residents in the target areas to spot code violations and encourage them to solve them on their own, in a neighborly way, without necessarily reporting them to the authorities.

In the North End, inspectors will be focusing on an area from Albany Avenue to Vine Street and from Greenfield to Edgewood streets.

In the South End, they will focus on streets between Clifford Street and Campfield Avenue and between Mountford and Broad streets.

According to the mayor, the inspectors will be issuing citations for unsafe porches, rodent problems, illegal parking and unsecured, unoccupied buildings, among other things. They also are hoping to get inside buildings, looking for working smoke detectors and trying to root out housing code violations.

As a corollary to the mayor's announcement the city council voted Monday to create a quality-of-life task force that will study ways to improve the city's quality of life ordinances and their enforcement.

The task force will issue a report by the end of February 2005.

Neighborhood meetings announcing the spate of inspections will be held in early November.

The North End zone will have a meeting Nov. 3 at 6:30 p.m. at 57 Vine St.