Week in Review : CITIES : Lagging Landlords May End Up in Court Over Dilapidated Units

City housing inspector Susan Tully reached under an apartment kitchen sink in Huntington Beach and pulled out a bucket. It turned out to be home for scores of live and dead cockroaches.

“How long has it been since you sprayed for bugs?” she asked the landlord’s agent, who was standing nearby.

“Hey,” he quipped, gesturing to the Vietnamese family who lived there, “those are their pets. Don’t let them out.”

But landlords soon may have to make serious explanations in court.

Tully was inspecting the apartment houses on Commodore Circle, an island of dilapidation in a neighborhood of modern condominiums, to determine how landlords had responded to city orders that they fix up their buildings. Her reaction: “I was really disgusted.”

It has been five months since the city ordered 10 separate landlords to correct more than 700 housing code violations, including overcrowding, in the cul-de-sac’s 80 apartments.

Some have made moves to comply. “I didn’t know it was this bad. This is not my major business,” explained one landlord, a Pacific Palisades lawyer.

But others have done little or nothing, Tully said, and after her inspection, it appeared that five of the landlords would be charged by the city attorney’s office with criminal violations. Each violation, a misdemeanor, carries with it the possibility of a $500 fine and six months in jail.

“The landowners have been given every opportunity (to comply),” said City Atty. Gail Hutton. She said she could file the necessary court documents in about two weeks.