A Piece in the Puzzle of Providing Adequate Housing: Court Effectiveness in Code Enforcement

This article provides an overview of the general characteristics of the City of Syracuse, and the efforts of the City to improve housing and its code enforcement system. This overview is designed to relate the Syracuse model to other urban areas that face similar housing problems and share many of the City's demographic attributes. This article proceeds to set out the research methodology and findings of an empirical study of Syracuse's court system. Finally, this article addresses the problems in measuring court effectiveness in code enforcement.

This article emphasizes the limits on a court in effecting social changes and suggests that court effectiveness should be judged by assessing case processing, case outcome and the role of the court in a larger governmental plan.