Lexington History is an occasional Lexington Times series revisiting the stories that shaped this city. This installment draws on the Lexington Herald-Leader’s 2000 investigative series “Misery for Rent,” reviewed in full through the Lexington Public Library’s NewsBank archive and the bound-page record. The original reporting belongs to the Herald-Leader and the four journalists who produced it; what follows is The Lexington Times’ summary and assessment of what they found, what happened next, and what it still means. We encourage readers with library cards to read the original series — every Fayette County cardholder has free access to the full Herald-Leader archive through lexpublib.org.
The week Lexington found out who was inspecting its worst apartments
The series was called “Misery for Rent.” It ran across six papers — August 27, 28, 29 and 31, and September 1 and 3 — and by the time it finished, the director of the Lexington Division of Code Enforcement had been reassigned to parks work, his interim replacement had been removed in under 72 hours, a supervisor with a million-dollar rental portfolio had resigned, the mayor had hired two independent counsels, and the complaint-only inspection system that made the whole mess possible had been ordered replaced with neighborhood-by-neighborhood sweeps…