Durham, NC Building Safety: Building Inspections (2026)

Article VIII of Chapter 10 sets out how Durham decides which buildings get put into ongoing periodic inspections rather than one-off, complaint-driven checks. Sec. 10-361 records the city council's finding that most housing-code complaints come from buildings that are not owner-occupied, and authorizes the administrator or housing inspector to run periodic inspection programs that solely target residential rental property on that basis. Sec. 10-362 then sets the reasonable-cause triggers: a rental building is placed in the periodic-inspection program if its owner or landlord has three or more verified violations of the housing code or unsafe building law within a 12-month period, if the building has been the subject of a complaint or inspection request alleging substandard conditions, if the administrator has actual knowledge of an unsafe condition, or if code violations are visible from outside the property.

Any of those triggers puts the entire building into the program, not just the unit where the problem was found. Separately, Sec. S. 160A-424(b), again focused on residential rental property rather than owner-occupied housing citywide. These mechanisms sit alongside, but are distinct from, the substantive property-condition standards in the Housing Code (Sec. 10-234) and from the electrical-specific inspection sequence in Article III.