I live in Waltham... I can tell you Waltham is not far off from Somerville. With Waltham we have the added complexity of having lots of mixed commercial and res

I live in Waltham... I can tell you Waltham is not far off from Somerville. With Waltham we have the added complexity of having lots of mixed commercial and residential zones (Somerville on the other hand is mainly residential). Waltham is also more diverse than Somerville economically (Somerville has a large amount of college kids that skew the demographics). Waltham has a lot of first generation Americans that are afraid to report violations or just don't know that they can. I have seen single bed apartments with serious safety issues housing families of eight people and more. Almost every house in my neighborhood is in some sort of serious violation. In my small neighborhood (called the Island neighborhood) we have had 3 fires. That is three houses that have had fires substantial enough where they pretty much need to be demoed (luckily not the large family mentioned previously). Nobody has wired smoke alarms but every three family or above requires it. You are not supposed to have grills on any balcony or porch... everyone does... Somerville is massively guilty of this as well. Proper egresses... haha use a window. Such is the style of living in ancient New England houses in high density areas. There is very little incentive to update or even try to correct behavior legally. I'm not sure how towns like Somerville can get their landlords (I am landlord so I am guilty as well) to update their properties. I do know lots of people updated with the federal energy subsidizations. It would be nice if their was some safety subsidizations to maybe start turning this around (along with the rest of our crumbling infrastructure).