Gilbert, AZ Rental Property Rules: Repairs & Habitability (2026)

Section 42-108 of the Code of Gilbert, part of Article IV, Offenses Involving Public Safety, sets the town's baseline property-condition standard, and nothing in its text carves out rental housing, so a landlord's unit is held to the same floor as any owner-occupied home. Subsection (b) lists seven conditions that make a structure or its equipment 'unsafe or deficient': inadequate means of egress, inadequate light or ventilation, fire hazard, anything otherwise dangerous to human life or public welfare, illegal or improper occupancy, missing or broken exterior windows, doors or fences (or other inadequate maintenance posing a danger of physical injury to a person or animal), and a vacant structure that is not secured against entry.

Under subsection (c), once a structure or piece of equipment meets that definition, the town building official decides whether it must be made safe or taken down and removed, applying the standard in Section 115 of the 2006 International Building Code, the same provision the town uses for its broader dangerous-building abatement process. The ordinance was enacted by Ord. No. 2315, § I, adopted December 9, 2010, which renumbered several neighboring nuisance sections at the same time. Because the rule sits in the nuisance article rather than a landlord-tenant chapter, a tenant with a habitability complaint about a broken exterior door, missing window, or unsecured vacant unit has a local civil-nuisance hook to report to code enforcement in addition to any remedy under the Arizona Residential Landlord and Tenant Act.