The Legislature finds and declares all of the following:

(a)  The Department of Housing and Community Development reports that one in every eight dwelling units in the state is substandard and that unless health and safety problems are corrected, habitability conditions generally deteriorate until the units become life threatening and uninhabitable and must be removed from the housing stock through closure or demolition.

(b)  California is experiencing a housing shortage of significant proportions, particularly in the affordable housing sector. The state and many local governments are funding affordable housing from a variety of sources at substantial costs. It is ill advised to neglect timely code enforcement responsibilities and, as a result, to lose housing that could have been retained.

(c)  The lack of code enforcement on a single dwelling unit can lead to the deterioration of an entire neighborhood as the substandard or abandoned unit becomes a magnet for crime, vandalism, fires, and other activities that rapidly infect the surrounding homes and neighborhood.

(d)  Many local governments endeavor to fulfill their statutory responsibility for code enforcement. However, local governments with a higher percentage of lower income households with families, living in older, overcrowded housing stock, exacerbated by the neglect of absentee slumlords, bear a disproportionate code enforcement cost and responsibility compared with more affluent communities.

(e)  Existing law provides building standards to assure decent, safe, and sanitary housing for all Californians.

(f)  Resources for code enforcement at the local level are frequently allocated to construction-related code enforcement activities, which generate fees to pay for regulatory services, including building and permit inspections, rather than housing maintenance activities that prevent or abate substandard conditions.

(g)  The enforcement of housing maintenance codes for existing housing is frequently performed only on a complaint-by-complaint basis and frequently there is insufficient funding for the abatement of existing violations through timely and effective administrative or judicial proceedings.

(Added by Stats. 2000, Ch. 664, Sec. 1. Effective January 1, 2001.)