The Department of Consumer & Regulatory Affairs is officially launching a new blog next week associated with its Collegiate Off-Campus Housing Initiative, called ThisShouldBeIllegal.com. The basic idea of the web-based program, according to DCRA spokesperson Michael Rupert, is “to try and get college kids to make sure they are being rented to legally.” Under D.C. law, your landlord is required to have a business license, and the process of obtaining one prompts an automatic safety inspection to check for things like working smoke detectors and fire exits.

There might be a few tweaks to the site between now and the official launch, but all of the basic functionality is already up and running. It’s a nice little web site that incorporates other social networking-based outreach efforts like a Facebook group and a Twitter feed.

Early posts to the blog encourage renters to visit this Business License Verification tool, which allows you to enter a landlord’s name or your address to find out if your landlord has complied with the law. If you don’t see your landlord’s name in the database, it’s likely they don’t have a license, at which point you can contact DCRA through the blog, their Twitter feed, via email or phone to trigger an investigation.

So what happens if you sick a DCRA investigator on your landlord? Could you end up unwittingly setting in motion a series of events that could lead you to being forced to move out of an apartment you’re perfectly happy with? ThisShouldBeIllegal.com says that your landlord won’t know it was you who contacted them, and that “most of the time, a simple visit from city inspectors can be just the nudge landlords need to respond to problems quickly and without any hassle.” Rupert also told us that typically an investigator would say that the agency is doing a random check on rental properties and ask the landlord to “voluntarily come into compliance,” or in other words, pay the money to get a basic business license and have a housing inspection.

“The only way you would get kicked out is if your place was a fire trap or really nasty,” he said.