Pittsfield Township, Mich., has an ordinance that demands rental home inspections. One or more twp employees enter the home and inspect the building and the tenants personal property. This ordinance only applies to renters, homeowners are not affected. Penalties for refusal are severe.
Is this local ordinance a violation of the Fourth Amendment?
The very site OP points to indicates:
All rental dwelling units must complete a biennial Property Maintenance Rental Housing Inspection. Each unit must be inspected and approved in order to receive a Certificate of Compliance.
It also points to the name of the township's ordinance, the current version of which is here. It includes this paragraph:
§ 6-27 Inspection procedures.
A. When an inspection is requested, the Building Services Director shall send the owner or agent a notice of the date for the inspection and the fee that must be paid before the inspection.
B. If an owner fails to request an inspection before the expiration of a certificate of compliance, the Building Services Official shall send the owner or agent a notice of the date for an inspection and the fee that must be paid before the inspection.
C. An inspection may be rescheduled for just cause. Once a date for inspection is scheduled, the owner or agent shall:
(1) Notify each tenant of the date when the inspection is scheduled to occur. This notice shall be delivered posted at least 48 hours prior to the time of the scheduled inspection.
(2) Notify each tenant or occupant that the owner or agent is required to accompany the inspector during the performance of all inspections, and in the event that the tenant or occupant is not present, the owner/agent must provide access to the inspector by unlocking the dwelling unit's door, verifying that no occupant is present and securing the unit after the inspection is completed.
As such, there is a strict procedure, this is not a violation of the search-and-seizuire process and the tenant has at least 48 hours to try to reschedule due to notice periods. Failure of the owner to follow up his duties under 6-27 C 1 does not make this a search of seizure violating the 4th amendment.
Actively preventing the inspection btw. renders the house condemned on the day the previous inspection certificate runs out.
And last but not least: Read your contract. You most likely agreed to that as a condition to even be able to rent the place in the first place - as the landlord can't continue renting it out to you if he can't have it inspected.
This is almost certainly constitutional.
The 4th Amendment does not prohibit routine administrative inspects for health and safety purposes at reasonable hours with advanced notice, although it an owner objects, this must be formalized with an "administrative warrant" granted as a matter of course pursuant to an overall municipal inspection plan, without the need to show probable cause.
For example, this 2012 law review article explains that:
[T]he government conducts thousands of administrative searches every day. None of these searches requires either probable cause or a search warrant. Instead, courts evaluating administrative searches need only balance the government's interest in conducting the search against the degree of intrusion on the affected individual's privacy to determine whether the search is reasonable. This reasonableness balancing is very deferential to the government, and the resulting searches are almost always deemed reasonable. As a result, the administrative search exception functions as an enormously broad license for the government to conduct searches free from constitutional limitation.
Some of the leading U.S. Supreme Court cases on point are explored here:
"[T]he Supreme Court until recently employed a reasonableness test for such searches without requiring either a warrant or probable cause in the absence of a warrant. See, e.g., Abel v. United States, 362 U.S. 217 (1960); Frank v. Maryland, 359 U.S. 360 (1959); Oklahoma Press Pub. Co. v. Walling, 327 U.S. 186 (1946). . . .
"But, in 1967, the Court in two cases held that administrative inspections to detect building code violations must be undertaken pursuant to warrant if the occupant objects. 'We may agree that a routine inspection of the physical condition of private property is a less hostile intrusion than the typical policeman’s search for the fruits and instrumentalities of crime.'" Camara v. Municipal Court, 387 U.S. 523, 530 (1967) (home). See also See v. City of Seattle, 387 U.S. 541 (1967) (commercial warehouse). . . .
"In Donovan v. Dewey, [452 U.S. 594 (1981)] however, the Court . . . appeared to permit extensive governmental inspection of commercial property without a warrant."
Also, while most property owners would consent to inspection, when they do not, even if an administrative warrant in order to inspect sites where consent was refused, this administrative warrant can be issued on more lenient grounds than a criminal search warrant:
Administrative warrants issued on the basis of less than probable cause but only on a showing that a specific business had been chosen for inspection on the basis of a general administrative plan would suffice. Even without a necessity for probable cause, the requirement would assure the interposition of a neutral officer to establish that the inspection was reasonable and was properly authorized. 436 U.S. at 321, 323. The dissenters objected that the warrant clause was being constitutionally diluted. Id. at 325. Administrative warrants were approved also in Camara v. Municipal Court, 387 U.S. 523, 538 (1967). Previously, one of the reasons given for finding administrative and noncriminal inspections not covered by the Fourth Amendment was the fact that the warrant clause would be as rigorously applied to them as to criminal searches and seizures. Frank v. Maryland, 359 U.S. 360, 373 (1959).
Basically, even if the owner does not consent, an administrative warrant to do a building inspection is available to building inspectors making routine inspections as a matter of course.
In the usual case, where the owner either scheduled the inspection personally, or does not object upon receiving notice, the consent requirement is met, and the tenant's lease almost certainly authorizes the owner to demand that the tenant consent.
At most, if the ordinance was found to be unconstitutional, it could be swiftly and easily amended by the township's governing body to clarify that if the owner does not consent that the local government inspector may obtain a warrant for the scheduled date as a matter of course in a township administrative court created for that purpose or some other local court, rendering any challenge to the ordinance moot without meaningfully vindicating any protections against having a rental property searched by building inspectors.
Also, if the tenant is required by the terms of the tenant's lease to consent if the landlord consents, then the tenant would not have standing to raise this issue in court.
Something that really upsets folks when they learn about it is that the building they own is not something that they are entitled to use commercially without complying with certain conditions. This is something I deal with all the time in my field, but most folks are aware of this concept but usually just from the perspective of how it benefits them.
One example is that an industrial processing plant is likely subject to multiple environmental regulations restricting what kind of wastewater they can discharge into a stream or how much they have to clean smoke before they release it into the atmosphere; naturally, compliance with these requirements is enforced by inspectors who come in either a scheduled or unscheduled manner.
Another example that's more similar to your situation, if you purchase a parcel of land and want to build an apartment building on it, you will be subject to regular inspections as a condition of the certificate of occupancy. Often, this is to check that you as the landlord are maintaining things for the benefit of the tenants and the general public. For example:
Such inspections are for the benefit of the tenants and the general public because you as a landlord do not have the right to not provide those safety features and the Township has an interest in ensuring they confirm compliance.
These inspections stem from laws relating to the fire code, tenants' rights, and the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Another way to look at this is seeing it as a variety of benefits. While you may not like the mandatory nature of these inspections, consider that there are potential benefits to them as well.
If a fire occurs, but just last week the fire marshal confirmed that all of the alarms and egresses were working properly, then you can be relieved to know that you've done all you can to give your tenants the best chance of escaping safely. Another more major benefit to you is you get access to an expert to conduct the inspections for you instead of having to track one down yourself. Finally, if there is a lawsuit, the fire marshal's report that all things were working correctly can provide you much better leverage if you are sued (because someone's life was lost or their belongings destroyed) or you need to sue your insurer (who might suggest that the fire was as bad as it was because you failed to meet your obligation to maintain working alarms).
Unless you are regularly failing these inspections and having to make a lot of improvements that you didn't budget for, these are generally a good thing for you. And if you didn't budget for these improvements, I guess it's giving you a good lesson on how to better plan for your next business venture.