Belleville housing inspections

December 13, 2002 9:15 AM

The Overcrowding Police

Belleville inspectors and armed police officers show up without search warrants to check for occupancy code violations, and ticket people who don't let them in -- a practice experts say is unconstitutional.
.....
Invite friends over, babysit your grandchildren or allow relatives to spend the night in Belleville and you risk an armed police officer turning up at your door to search your home and give you a ticket. Enforcement teams consisting of a housing inspector and a police officer do not obtain search warrants before showing up to check for occupancy code violations, a Belleville News-Democrat investigation found.
posted by nofundy (14 comments total)

There's a short story by J G Ballard (of 'Crash' fame) called 'Billennium', all about overcrowding, but how it eventually becomes a part of life.

Each person is allowed only 4 square meters of living space, but when the main character gets a new 'cubicle' he accidentally puts his fist through the wall and finds a large sealed off room, and decides to live in it instead. Several months later, friends have convinced him to let them move in one by one too, and he ends up having as little space as he did before. The End. I'm sure there's a moral in there somewhere.

Us Europeans are already used to living in 6 square meters of space, so 4 meters might not be too far off.

P.S. I just wanted to ask that everyone ignores the next post and skips to the one after that.
posted by wackybrit at 9:32 AM on December 13, 2002

uh, wackybrit - is it my post they're supposed to ignore?
posted by widdershins at 9:37 AM on December 13, 2002

Now if only these crowd cops could follow me around and ticket anyone who gets too close to me....
posted by rushmc at 9:41 AM on December 13, 2002

"puts his fist through the wall and finds a large sealed off room, and decides to live in it instead"

Isn't this part of the first "futurerama" episode. Fry and Bender are living in Bender's little room, when Fry discovers a larger room? Haven't seen it in a while.
posted by mkelley at 9:57 AM on December 13, 2002

Did we really need an "expert" to weigh-in on whether this is constitutional?
posted by ZenMasterThis at 10:08 AM on December 13, 2002

Someone shows up in my home unannounced, he's leaving bloody. I'm surprised nobody's been killed yet.
posted by mr_crash_davis at 10:09 AM on December 13, 2002

mkelly: yeah, Fry lives in Bender's closet, which is massive
posted by Pink Fuzzy Bunny at 11:02 AM on December 13, 2002

mkelly : not to mention fully furnished
posted by Satapher at 11:08 AM on December 13, 2002

How about the Monty Python sketch where the two hippies are living in the guy's body...

"It's not furnished, you facist!"
posted by ZenMasterThis at 12:51 PM on December 13, 2002

I wonder how many of those inspections were instigated by people who were trying to get their in-laws to leave.
posted by tolkhan at 1:39 PM on December 13, 2002

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, apers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated ...

Nah. It doesn't sound unreasonable to me at all.
posted by nathan_teske at 2:37 PM on December 13, 2002

In Vietnam, you have to register with the police to stay overnight at someone's house, even if it's a relative of yours... of course, if it's not a relative, you can't stay there at all.

Several points in that article seem alarmingly similar.
posted by whatnotever at 8:19 PM on December 13, 2002

NoFundy - You're doing pretty well at expressing your (Gore v. Bush) grief. And there are now quite a few conservatives who are alarmed also. Keep it up!
posted by troutfishing at 9:12 PM on December 13, 2002

NoFundy - You're doing pretty well at expressing your (Gore v. Bush) grief. And there are now quite a few conservatives who are alarmed also. Keep it up!

Troutfishing-

You make little sense.
posted by kayjay at 11:48 AM on December 14, 2002