The feud over a small apartment complex, Boone Court, in East Durham seems to crystallize the dilemma of enforcing city housing codes while trying to do everything possible to retain increasingly scarce affordable housing.

Boone Court is in many ways a textbook case of run-down housing. Neighborhood activists are concerned that the dilapidated, un-maintained housing is a breeding ground for criminal activity.

For months, the city has been trying to force the owners to bring the units up to standard. Failing that, the city wants the units torn down.

Demolition seemed to be hours, maybe moments, away last week after the owners had consistently failed to meet city deadlines for repairing the property. But despite repeated missed deadlines, despite an apparent agreement as part of bankruptcy proceedings to waive any further appeals, the property owners persuaded District Court Judge Orlando Hudson last week to issue a restraining order against the demolition forces the city had lined up.

On the one hand, it seems a stark case of someone being above the law — a point argued by neighborhood activists including the Rev. Melvin Whitley. “Once again, they show how powerful they are,” lamented Whitley after bulldozers were called off Thursday.

Here’s the rub: As lawyers for the owners, the family of longtime and controversial owner James “Fireball” White, have argued, it’s better to restore the property than to demolish it. City inspectors, concurring in that, have worked to give the Whites time to repair the complex.

As Constance Stancil, the city’s neighborhood improvement services director, put it to The Herald-Sun’s Ray Gronberg last week, if “they were sincere in bringing this property back, it would be better than having a vacant or deteriorating building, or a vacant lot where people would congregate.”

But at some point, forbearance and flexibility have to give way. If the city’s housing-standards enforcement is too flexible, it ceases to have any teeth, any effectiveness. Neighborhood concerns about blight are serious and should be treated that way.

Time is running out — it may already have run out — for the owners to forestall the wrecking ball at Boone Court. They are the victims of past failures to live up to agreements — the city may be, and should be, out of patience.