Slumlord surprise: A bill for repairs

"Slumlords who leave tenants in squalor, with no heat or hot water, or sometimes with no electricity, may soon find the needed repairs have been made - at their expense. The city says it's fed up with intransigent landlords and is planning a crackdown that will give building inspectors authority to order repairs, without the building owner's consent or cooperation."
Sally Goldenberg, Staten Island Advance

New York City is way ahead of St. Pete. About half of our neighborhood is owned by absentee landlords, many of them slumlords. Code enforcement needs to have more teeth. Nusiance Abatement also needs to be more effective. We can learn from New York. More from the Advance:

The City Council now says it will crack down on these negligent landlords by empowering city housing inspectors to get more involved in making repairs at the landlord's expense.
With a day of pomp and circumstance surrounding the initiative in City Hall yesterday, the Council introduced the "Safe Housing Act," which requires the city to identify 200 buildings each year with the worst housing code violations, intensify inspections and demand that the landlords pay to fix the problems.