It’s tough being a renter in Franklin County and the North Quabbin area.

As a 2018 Recorder series on affordable housing showed, it’s not only hard to find an apartment that is affordable, it’s hard to find an apartment, period, according to local landlords and social service providers. Our housing situation is characterized by steadily rising rents, low and stagnant wages and scant new affordable housing being built.

That makes the rental market ripe for abuse, like the kind recently documented in The Recorder about a Conway Street landlord who was packing 10 people into a single-family dwelling rife with safety and zoning violations. That’s a righteous example of the kind of situation that would be addressed by City Council Vice President Otis Wheeler’s proposed ordinance to protect renters.

The ordinance currently making its way through the Council’s Appointments and Ordinance Committee proposes that whenever a rental within a building that is not owner-occupied becomes vacant, the owner, manager or person in charge must have it inspected by the Board of Health, at the cost of the landlord, before being reoccupied, to determine whether it is in compliance with the State Sanitary Code, at the very minimum.

Our beef with this proposed ordinance to protect renters has to do with the phrase, “at the cost of the landlord.”

To paraphrase Gilbert and Sullivan, a landlord’s lot is not an easy one. They must abide by a plethora of local and state regulations — and most of them do. The State Housing Code 105 CMR 410.000: MINIMUM STANDARDS OF FITNESS FOR HUMAN HABITATION (STATE SANITARY CODE, CHAPTER II) runs 35 pages. It’s that long because the history of habitation is fraught with violations that, over the years, have found redress in the law.

Satisfying all these regulations is both important and costly, not to mention the fees that seem to crop up at every turn. Wheeler said, “I’ll be adding a piece that says a landlord would pay the Board of Health inspection fee. It wouldn’t be huge, but it would have to cover the cost of the inspection.” This would be yet another expense for landlords.

The proposed ordinance, Wheeler said, “is in response to a minority of local landlords who threaten tenants when they complain or call the Board of Health in response to issues.” Wheeler himself admits it is a problem of “a minority of local landlords.”

So, for that minority of landlords whose rental units fail such an inspection, make them pay for the cost of the inspection. But when an inspection fails to reveal violations, the Board of Health should swallow the fee. That seems only fair.

That’s if this proposed ordinance even survives a City Council vote, probably sometime in the early fall. One question councilors will be asking is whether the Board of Health is sufficiently staffed to handle the additional workload of rental unit inspections.

In the meantime, landlords, renters and the public can comment to the Appointments and Ordinance Committee, which meets virtually, for now, on the second Wednesday of every month. Wheeler said he expects the ordinance will be on its agenda for Aug. 12.