Up In Flames

What this episode covers

What comes to mind when you think of a college town? Old brick buildings covered in ivy. Some narrow, tree-lined streets, with little bookstores and coffee shops. And that’s because the biggest public universities are generally in small towns. Towns that share few common demographic and geographic features: A lot of them are more than 150 years old. Many in areas that are rural. Often, the towns around them are very dependent on the university economy. And often, even with the financial prop of being a university town, they are still economically depressed. This situation accentuates a kind of class-system when it comes to campus housing -- students (or parents) who can afford the big, shiny new multi-story off campus apartments, and those who turn to the cheaper option: old converted homes that have been divided up into as many living spaces as possible so they can be rented to students. Some of these houses are owned by upstanding landlords, but some are not. And many are in towns where there is no vigilant code enforcement. So for this episode, we thought we’d put ourselves in the shoes of a student or parent who has just a few hours -- not a few weeks -- to search for code inspection reports. We searched the websites for local municipalities in more than a dozen major college towns, first trying to find out if the safety records are easily available online, then if not, with a phone call follow up to the code inspection office to see how we could get the information. The results varied greatly.

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