Philly usually inspects rental homes only if someone complains. The city may soon start doing proactive checks.

Philadelphia is looking into proactively inspecting rental homes for safety and health instead of relying on tenants’ complaints to trigger inspections, according to a city official who testified at a City Council hearing Tuesday.

The Department of Licenses and Inspections has started working with the Pew Charitable Trusts to conduct research “to establish some best practices that can be implemented here,” said Bridget Collins-Greenwald, commissioner of the quality-of-life division at L&I.

“We’ll work with the mayor’s office and managing director’s office and our partners at [the Philadelphia Housing Development Corp.] to actually get some good recommendations together,” she said. “And hopefully some are just a process fix and then some will probably be a little bit larger, I imagine.”

A 2021 Pew report found that L&I inspected only about 7% of Philadelphia’s rental units in a year, which the department attributed to limited resources. The city estimates that it has 250,000 rental units, Collins-Greenwald said. Tenant advocates, Council members, and city officials have talked for years about the need for more inspections of the city’s rental homes, so they don’t endanger residents.

As city budget negotiations continue between Mayor Cherelle L. Parker and Council members, advocates and city lawmakers are calling for funds for proactive inspections in a city with old housing stock and a lack of affordable rental options for residents.

OnePA Renters United Philadelphia, a coalition of renters unions and advocates, and Philly Thrive, an advocacy group for racial, economic, and environmental justice, are asking the city to allocate $10 million for L&I to start a pilot program to proactively inspect rental homes.

“The city gives [property] owners a license to rent. And I need the city to make that license mean something to protect renters,” said Theresa Howell, a renter and member of OnePA Renters United Philadelphia. “The reactive inspection system that L&I currently has is inadequate.”

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To help guide L&I as it considers policy and operational changes, Pew plans to provide examples from other cities and research findings to consider, Chris Arlene, who leads Pew’s policy work in Philadelphia, said in an interview. Pew anticipates its research will begin in the coming weeks and will last roughly four months.

The rental inspection program in the nation’s capital used to be complaint-driven like Philadelphia’s, but Washington now has a proactive inspection program.

“Proactive housing inspections have been a key part of the district’s tool kit to help maintain our stock of multifamily housing and make sure tenants are receiving the conditions required by law,” Keith David Parsons, an administrator in a code enforcement office in Washington’s Department of Buildings, said at Tuesday’s Council hearing. He said that “as an early adopter of this relatively novel approach,” the city is happy to share resources.

The city inspects rental properties with one or two units when their owners receive a business license to rent.

More than half the residential units in Washington — about 180,000 — are licensed multifamily apartment buildings with three or more units, Parsons said. Owners of these properties have to participate in inspections as a condition of their rental licenses.

The city schedules inspections using a “risk-based algorithm” that takes into account information such as the age of a building, how much time has passed since it was last fully renovated, when it was last inspected, and results from previous inspections, Parsons said.

With nine inspectors completing more than 16,000 inspections per year, it would take more than 10 years to inspect every rental unit, he said. When the proactive inspection program started in 2009, inspections were randomized. But rental property owners wanted more control over when their buildings were inspected. So Washington started using the algorithm in 2018, Parsons said.

The city notifies rental property owners 60 days before a scheduled inspection and requests permission from tenants to enter their homes.

Philadelphia relies on small rental property owners to provide affordable housing for residents. But affording repairs can be a challenge for these landlords.

Those with 15 or fewer rental units in no more than five buildings can apply for loans to make repairs through the Philadelphia Housing Development Corp.’s Rental Improvement Fund.

The community development organization’s fund gives loans of up to $25,000 per property. Eligible landlords who agree not to substantially raise rents can get the loans forgiven after 10 years. The program is funded by Council’s $400 million Neighborhood Preservation Initiative and has its own inspectors.

Since the program launched in the summer of 2023, the fund has allocated $8.2 million for repairs, said Rachel Mulbry, director of policy and strategic initiatives at PHDC.

Some of the most common repairs include fixes to roofs, electrical systems, plumbing, and heating and cooling systems, Mulbry said at Tuesday’s Council hearing.

“The Rental Improvement Fund is the city’s most recent and largest attempt to support Philadelphia small landlords to make needed repairs and improvements,” she said.

Mulbry said PHDC could scale up the program to help more landlords make repairs if the program had more resources. She said the program soon plans to offer a loan to “finance more expensive repair work at unoccupied rental properties and encourage more energy efficiency improvements.”