## Facts

- Platteville, Wisconsin, a college town, concluded that its rental housing stock was deteriorating due to inadequate compliance with health and safety requirements and that complaint-driven enforcement was ineffective.
- In 1997, the City adopted a property maintenance code based on the 1996 BOCA National Property Maintenance Code and created a rental-property licensing and periodic inspection program.
- The program required inspections at set intervals (generally one or three years depending on conditions), with authority to seek an administrative search warrant if a landlord or tenant refused entry.
- A separate, preexisting ordinance limited the number of unrelated persons who could live in a single-family dwelling to four.
- Although warrants were sought for health-and-safety inspections, the City’s inspector also used inspections to investigate suspected occupancy-limit violations, including searching closets and bureaus to find evidence of multiple occupancy.
- Landlords, tenants, and a local apartment association sued to enjoin enforcement, alleging Fourth Amendment violations.

## Issues

1. Whether a neutral, periodic rental inspection program enforced through administrative search warrants satisfies Fourth Amendment reasonableness and probable-cause requirements for health-and-safety code enforcement.
2. Whether an administrative warrant justified by health-and-safety inspections may be used to search for unrelated occupancy-limit violations.
3. Whether intrusive inspection methods aimed at uncovering occupancy evidence (e.g., searching personal storage areas) are reasonable under the Fourth Amendment in the administrative-inspection setting.

## Decision

- The Seventh Circuit upheld the City’s periodic inspection and licensing program as a valid administrative-search regime when tied to health-and-safety enforcement and implemented under neutral criteria.
- The court held that the City could not use health-and-safety inspection warrants as authority for intrusive, evidence-gathering searches directed solely at occupancy-limit enforcement.
- The court approved limiting relief to prevent searches exceeding the warrant’s justified scope while allowing the City to continue inspections consistent with the program’s health-and-safety purpose.

## Legal Principles

- Administrative inspection warrants may satisfy Fourth Amendment probable cause when issued under a reasonable, neutrally applied periodic inspection program rather than individualized suspicion of specific violations.
- The scope of an administrative search must match the regulatory purpose that justifies the warrant; use of the inspection to pursue distinct enforcement goals can render the search unreasonable.
- Tenants retain significant privacy interests in their homes and personal effects; administrative inspections for physical health-and-safety conditions do not justify rummaging through personal spaces to gather evidence unrelated to that purpose.

## Conclusion

The court sustained Platteville’s rental inspection system as a constitutionally permissible administrative search program for health and safety code enforcement, but restricted inspections to the warrant’s justified scope and barred intrusive searches undertaken primarily to detect occupancy-limit violations.


Platteville Area Apartment Ass’n v. City of Platteville, 179 F.3d 574 (7th Cir. 1999)