Independence quietly cut part of its rental safety program. Then kids died in unsafe homes

Seven years ago, Independence’s Rental Ready program was put in place, with the goal of ensuring the safety of rental homes for tenants in the city.

But this July, as anger swirled over poor living conditions at one troubled Independence high-rise apartment and questions were raised about the program, the city’s main enforcement effort to track down and register landlords with Rental Ready was quietly defunded, just as city officials boasted of their progress tracking down non-compliant rentals.

The move has left an already weak program without dedicated resources to verify landlords and rentals are on the city’s radar.

Since the cut, at least two children have died in Independence rental properties in incidents that may have been preventable with proper oversight. One of those rentals was not registered with Rental Ready, and had never been inspected. The other passed city inspections despite blatant health and safety violations.

Both properties demonstrate the city’s failure to ensure all Independence rentals are compliant with the health and safety standards central to the purpose of the Rental Ready program, either due to a lack of proper oversight, enforcement or inspection standards. As a result, in part, a 3-year-old boy died in July after falling from the broken window of his eighth floor apartment. Then, in August, a 12-year-old boy died after his unregistered rental home went up in flames.

In fact, thousands of rental properties were not on the city’s radar — and thus were not registered with Rental Ready — until a local realtor brought the issue to light and was hired as a private contractor in August 2023. In her 11 months working with the city of Independence, Becky Hake said she found 5,000 unregistered properties.

In July, Hake found out her contract wasn’t going to be renewed, due to the city’s budget constraints.

Instead, Independence officials say they now have a team of three from the business licensing department working to locate non-compliant properties when they can, on top of their other job responsibilities. They no longer have anyone doing the work full-time; nor do they have anyone overseeing the Rental Ready program.

City officials say they’re still making progress with the program, but haven’t provided firm numbers of how many non-compliant rental properties they’ve registered with Rental Ready since the switch, or how they plan to prevent further tragedies.

Two young boys, two preventable accidents

On the night of Aug. 17, Independence firefighters were called around 3 a.m. to 1317 E Salisbury Road, where they found a man standing outside, spraying the house with a hose.

According to the fire department’s investigation, firefighters who made entry into the home struggled to move through what they described as hoarding conditions in in the smoke-filled home, causing near zero visibility. The child was found during a second search, partially under a bed.

He was later declared dead at an area hospital.

The fire was found to have started in the kitchen, but the exact cause was never determined, according to the report. Smoke detectors were located in the house, but were not functional that night. The reason for the failure was not found, the report stated.

A functioning smoke detector is one of the nine baseline requirements graded by the city in its inspection, according to the Rental Ready program’s ordinance.

But the house was never inspected by the city.

It’s one of many rental properties in Independence believed to not even be listed on the program’s page of participating properties. If it was listed and inspected properly, there is a chance the faulty smoke detector would’ve been flagged, according to Hake.

That boy wasn’t the only one to die within city limits within weeks of the city council’s action, which jeopardized the already weak Rental Ready program.

In July, a 3-year-old Tidus Bass fell eight stories out of an unsecured apartment window at Independence Towers. He was found lying on the grass outside the building, unconscious but breathing, and was rushed to a hospital where he later died.

Part of the possible cause — a broken window that was supposedly reported to management several times, according to previous Star reporting. The boy’s father, Moses Bass, and his girlfriend, Destiny Lee Randle, face felony child endangerment in the case, but allege they’d been asking the building management to fix the broken window for a year.

Independence Towers, located at 728 North Jennings Road, passed its latest 2023 city Rental Ready inspection, despite multiple well-documented safety hazards, including exposed wiring, holes in ceilings, water damage, pest infestations and heating and cooling issues.

“It’s really a program in name only at this point,” said Gina Chiala, attorney with the Heartland Center for Jobs and Freedom. “One of the central functions of city government is to protect the health and welfare of the city residents… and if the city is not regulating those, then it means the city is really not functioning.”

Hunting for risky rentals

Hake first noticed in 2022 that her clients in Independence were losing out on homes due to out-of-town investors offering cash deals to purchase properties, which they’d turn around to rent. In her search, she unearthed thousands of rental properties within Independence city limits that weren’t registered with the Rental Ready program, and thus weren’t undergoing city inspections.

That’s when she said she was hired as a contractor with the city to find properties full-time.

“Let’s just say there was a lot more unlicensed than there was licensed,” Hake told The Star.

But less than a year after starting the work, Hake found out her contract wasn’t going to be renewed. In July, her position was cut from the budget, minutes after the department noted the increased enforcement initiative as a major accomplishment, saving the department $60,000.

To Hake, the work of getting rentals registered with Rental Ready was essential to ensuring the Independence rental market could be trusted to provide safe properties for renters.

“There’s just a whole lot of them out there that have never been inspected. You don’t know the safety issues. You don’t know if they’re full of problems or any of that,” Hake said.

In a previous Independence city budget meeting on May 29, Council member Jared Fears questioned the move to eliminate the enforcement position, asking the department how they would continue the proactive hunt for unregistered properties, given that Hake still had so many left to process.

The city’s proposed answer? To amend the business license code so that before utilities could go be turned on, owners would need to be registered for the program. Another potential solution cited was having other departments reporting buildings they stumble on during the job.

Both proposals present obvious issues — including the fact that it excludes any rental property that already has its utilities turned on, and asks city workers not familiar with locating rentals to be watchdogs, operating outside their normal responsibilities.

According to Community Development Director Tom Scannell, the issue of unregistered rentals escalated when an influx of investors bought up properties in Independence and rented them out between 2020 and 2022, creating alot of turnover. The city didn’t have the ability then to keep track of all the transactions, which he said is where Hake came in.

During her employment, Hake said she found 5,000 rental properties not registered with the program. Scannell said that some were duplicate entries already being investigated by other government officials, but could not provide a number or estimate on how many.

In an interview with The Star, Scannell said the position was taken away due to a tight budget.

Now, he noted, the business licensing department is fully staffed. The three people there will pitch in when they can, he said, to locate other unlicensed properties, combing through sites like Facebook and Craigslist for landlords. Scannell also said they are using the help of artificial intelligence and asking other departments to tip them off.

The added responsibility is not the full-time job of these staffers, however, he said. They also take phone calls, assist in other business licensing, making sure codes are enforced and speak to public information officers.

City data shows that for this year up to September, which includes time Hake was working under contract with the city, Independence issued 362 new landlord licenses, compared to 281 this time last year. Landlords who refuse to register can receive tickets or may have to appear in court.

What’s not known is how many licenses have been issued since the city scaled back efforts to locate unlicensed rentals.

Ineffective inspections, lack of oversight

The lack of enforcement for Rental Ready is just one of many issues with the program, including a lax inspection process for registered properties and a lack of program oversight by the city.

At a city council meeting on Sept. 16, Brent Schondelmeyer, a local resident and former Star reporter in the 1980s, said he examined 3,300 city inspection scores from May 2022 to May 2023. Of those, he said 99.2% received a perfect score. He recently did the same search with current data, and said that the scores were very similar.

Schondelmeyer recently retired from the Local Investment Commission, a nonprofit organization, and was involved in the adoption of the Healthy Homes Ordinance in Kansas City and around for the early formation of KC Tenants.

“My concern is the Rental Ready program is not working as some had hoped and intended,” he told city council members. Schondelmeyer noted there hasn’t been a thorough review of the program by the city since its adoption. He believes there needs to be a thoughtful review, not a quick fix.

Rebecca Gannon, spokesperson for the city, said that when Rental Ready started in 2017 there was a person dedicated to the program who no longer works there. The city’s goal is to have another dedicated employee oversee the program, she said. She did not provide a timeline of when that might happen.

In the meantime, the program, Gannon said, is in the midst of being evaluated.

“We’re taking a thoughtful approach to it, and researching what other cities across the United States are doing, and seeing what works best for the population of Independence,” Gannon said. “We plan to present it to the city council before the end of the year, and it will be up to the City Council to make the changes we suggest.”

This story was originally published October 10, 2024 at 6:00 AM.