Pontiac Treats Renters as Second-Class Citizens

Pontiac — It’s shocking that a city with more renters than homeowners can effectively treat the tenants who live here as second-class citizens.

In practice, Pontiac residents who lease their homes from someone else don’t have the Fourth Amendment right to refuse rental inspections. For the landlord who informed residents about their rights, it’s become a yearslong nightmare.

On the books, Pontiac’s rental inspection code says the city needs an administrative warrant when a tenant denies access to their home.

But in practice, the city threatens landlords with fines and fees if they don’t get renters to open up their homes whenever they schedule inspections.

Dan Miracle is a former homicide detective and a good friend. He knows the Fourth Amendment because he’s used to navigating what he can and can’t do in the heat of the moment. His family owns a historic apartment building on Miami Road.

He’s got roots here. His family has lived in the building, and his father was Pontiac’s former chief of police. More than most landlords, Dan cares about the quality of life his tenants enjoy.

That’s why his tenants may be the only ones in the whole city who know they have a right to refuse administrative searches from the city. Dan knows and cares enough to tell them the truth: They do not have to consent to warrantless inspections under the Fourth Amendment.

Because they told their tenants about their rights, and their tenants have refused city inspections, the Miracles have been fined over $4,000.

The conflict goes back years. When Pontiac’s inspectors came to the building in March of 2023, Dan showed them apartments where tenants consented to inspection, but he explained he would not open the doors to the other units without a warrant.

Clarence Cohen, a Pontiac code enforcement manager, bemoaned the legal rigamarole of denying them entry and wished Dan would roll over like everyone else and just let them in. Dan explained to Cohen that tenants have a Fourth Amendment right to privacy.

“They don’t own this, so their privacy is really limited,” Cohen said.

Then Dan asked Cohen if the owner of a single-family home had more Fourth Amendment rights than a tenant who rents from a landlord in a building.

“Of course,” Cohen said.

Cohen also said that tenants who didn’t submit to inspection should be evicted, which has been a pattern with the city’s approach to tenants who exercise their rights.

In 2025, Dan told an employee in the Pontiac code enforcement office that one of his residents at a single-family dwelling did not consent to an inspection.

The employee said the tenant would need to be evicted so the city could inspect the unit. Apparently Pontiac would rather renters be homeless than exercise their rights.

Over three and half years after the initial inspection in 2023, enforcers from the city are pulling up on Miami Road to serve an administrative warrant for the first time. They’ve only recently gone through the trouble of going before a judge to get authority to complete their searches with a sheriff.

Dan lets them into the building that he maintains and manages. It’s hard to call him a landlord with all the negative connotations that come with that word. He calls his tenants by name when he knocks on the door to remind them inspections are today.

The sheriff’s deputy stands in the hallway. He says he’s never been asked to serve one of these administrative warrants for an inspection before.

When the doors are open, the upbeat inspectors breeze past tenants into their apartments to look around. They turn on all the smoke alarms and look around quickly. When they’re done, they write a checkmark next to the apartment number.

The inspection of one unit takes probably a minute and a half. It’s hard to believe even a trained eye could find hidden issues in that amount of time.

Renters I spoke with in the building on Miami Road explained they didn’t give their consent to the city because they don’t have any issues with their apartments.

One longtime renter says that he works nights and that the city inspections woke him up. He says the intrusion was unnecessary and that if he ever has a problem, he just tells Dan and it gets fixed.

Another resident tells me after the inspection that she was afraid of the police officer and that she didn’t want the inspectors in her home. She’s lived in the building for years, and her mother lived here before she did.

Her only comfort was that the inspection was so short, but she wonders what inspectors could possibly have gleaned from such a small amount of time and effort inside her home.

Pontiac, like many other cities, has shifted from reactive to proactive rental inspections. There’s an ideological assumption underneath the change: All landlords are slumlords until proven otherwise. There’s no motivation for keeping a spotless building with no complaints.

There’s been some pushback to unconstitutional city codes: Landlords in Flint and Jackson have successfully challenged aspects of the rental inspection codes in those cities by arguing they violate the Fourth Amendment.

Currently, Pontiac’s code enforcement machinery presses down hard on the landlords and tenants who don’t know they have a right to ask for a court order before letting the city walk in.

Even with a court order in hand—which makes inspections in compliance with the laws on the books—there’s a deeper problem that shows the government overreach.

It’s not fair that one guy gets to sleep in on a Thursday because he has a mortgage and the other has to wake up and let the eyes of the government scan him and all he owns simply because he pays rent.

Those are the facts, Jack.