Houses of Horror : ‘Slum Busters’ Cracking Down on Dangerous, Dilapidated Apartments

Every time Ernest Padilla thinks he has seen the worst slum in Los Angeles, he discovers a new low.

“I keep saying, ‘This is the worst place I’ve been to,’ ” sighed the tall, slender 59-year-old city building inspector. “And I have to keep saying it again.”

Padilla had just walked into the three-story Southern Hotel at 412 East 5th St. on Skid Row. He knew when he walked in that the two floors above him contained 50 dingy, roach-infested little rooms that rent for $200 or more per month.

Padilla knew that the adults and children who live in those rooms shared dim corridors and filthy communal bathrooms. In some of the bathrooms the toilets had been removed and the sewer lines were left open or covered only with loose plywood. Bathtubs were clogged with filth. There were numerous and dangerous fire code violations throughout the dilapidated building. Inspectors had already noted all of that.

But, in the bowels of the building, behind a storefront church and directly beneath the rented rooms, Padilla had just discovered a brand new chamber of horrors:

In the underbelly of the building was a ruinous cavern with great holes gaping in the ceiling. A sewer line that protruded into the room from above missed an intended connecting pipe by nearly a foot. The whole place was dripping wet and filled with the stench of sewage and old, rotting mattresses. Waste water from upstairs, apparently from a toilet, gushed through an open ditch.

“This,” said Padilla, who, despite being spattered with sewage, maintained his customary equanimity, “is the worst place I’ve been to.”

Padilla is a member of the “Slum Busters,” or, more formally, the Los Angeles Interagency Slum Housing Task Force, which for the last six years has been cracking down on the owners of the most dilapidated apartment buildings in the city with stiff fines and jail terms.

The task force is made up of representatives of the County Health Department, the City Building and Safety and Fire Departments as well as lawyers from the city attorney’s office. It was formed in 1980 by then-City Atty. Burt Pines in an attempt to coordinate the housing code enforcement efforts of individual agencies.

The Southern Hotel is one of about 100 buildings currently on the case load of the task force. It is one of the “slums de la slums” of Los Angeles, as task force leader Stephanie Sautner of the city attorney’s office describes the case load.

Concentrating on slum property in the downtown area, Skid Row, Hollywood and to a lesser extent South-Central Los Angeles, the task force, since its inception, has extracted $900,000 from landlords in fines and reimbursement for task force expenses.

The task force has also sent nearly 20 of the most recalcitrant owners to jail for periods ranging from 30 days to as much as four years--the term currently being served by notorious slumlord Nathaniel Wells.

Deputy City Atty. William Cullen says that the task force handles about 300 cases a year and, while there are no exact figures available, he estimates that hundreds of apartment buildings have been brought up to code during the last six years.

Moreover, private attorneys and public interest law firms are waiting in the wings to follow up on task force cases by filing suits against landlords on behalf of tenants.

A jury in one such case awarded tenants $1.83 million in April.

Even so, Deputy City Atty. Sautner and her colleagues seem to have few illusions about what they are accomplishing.

“There is a terrible shortage of low-income housing in Los Angeles,” Sautner said. “The prognosis is not good. . . . What we are trying to do is make what housing there is as habitable as possible. . . . I think what we’re doing is improving the quality, but not the quantity.”

And some slumlords, she said, continue to escape prosecution because tenants are afraid to complain.

“There are many people out there who are undocumented,” said Sautner, “who feel they have no right to complain about the poor conditions they live under.”

Sautner would like to see the task force expanded to include what one attorney termed “Slum Rangers” to go out looking for substandard housing rather than waiting for complaints to come in.

The 38-year-old Sautner, who formerly worked as a police officer in some of New York City’s toughest neighborhoods, didn’t expect to find slums behind the pastel walls of Los Angeles.

“When I first came here,” she recalled, “I thought, ‘These are slums? They have palm trees, how can they be slums?’ But the conditions inside these buildings are as bad as I’ve seen in New York.”

The buildings on the task force case load, Sautner says, usually are in violation of the codes of all three inspection agencies involved. Even though the structures are in terrible condition, the goal is not demolition, but rehabilitation.

“The task force decided very early on,” said Sautner, “that the goal was . . . not putting people out in the street. . . . Our goal is to get the slum buildings in Los Angeles into compliance (with codes) to be better, safer places to live.”

First Step

The first step in the task force compliance process after receiving a complaint, says Sautner, is notification to a landlord that a building is in violation of the various agencies’ standards and that corrections must be made within 30 days.

If an owner makes a serious attempt to correct the problems, she says, the task force will extend the deadline. “We don’t want to file on somebody who is working very hard,” she said, “because what we want is compliance.”

But the landlord who ignores such a notification may find that the task force is not only willing to prosecute--but that it has never lost a case.

And if a landlord begins serious repair work only after charges are filed, the task force will not drop the case, but instead will seek a fine and a period of probation that stipulates correction of all code violations.

“It’s amazing what happens when charges are filed,” said Deputy City Atty. Aline Bakewell, another member of the task force.

She was talking about recent improvements to an apartment building at 823 S. Bonnie Brae owned by Neil Blueler, formerly of San Francisco, who says he has recently been buying and rehabilitating property in Los Angeles.

23 Charges Listed

Bakewell says that Blueler faces 23 misdemeanor charges stemming from alleged delays in correcting such code violations as vermin infestation, bad plumbing, deteriorated walls and fire hazards in the three-story building inhabited mainly by Latino families.

“To have done so much work in such a short time,” says Blueler of his recent repairs to the building he bought last winter, “and then have them threaten me criminally, I don’t have the best feeling about it.”

But Sautner said of such cases: “We take a tough stand. The case won’t go away. We won’t dismiss. It’s like returning something that you stole. It doesn’t mean that you didn’t steal it to begin with.”

And the task force, in an apparently self-congratulatory mood, has designed Slum Buster T-shirts for its members.

“I’ll call them Slum Busters,” complained Dan Faller, president of the Apartment House Owners Assn. in Los Angeles, “when they start citing the tenants that create the slums.

“The only solution,” he continued, “is to cite not only the owner but also the tenants. . . . Then the owner and the renter can get together and clean the place up.”

Task force members agree that tenants sometimes cause problems such as vandalism and that they sometimes contribute to unhealthy conditions by strewing garbage about. But it is lack of maintenance, not poor tenants, that creates slums, Sautner insists.

“I have never seen one of these buildings, a true slum, caused by tenants,” she said. “It’s years of lack of maintenance and repair.”

Even with the task force victories--the rehabilitated buildings, the fines, the jail sentences--the process of attacking slums is slow and often frustrating.

A badly neglected apartment building at 1613 West 7th St., for example, was gutted by fire last month after the task force had ordered the owners to make extensive repairs. Eighty people were left homeless as a result of the blaze, which is being investigated as arson by the Fire Department.

Josefina Orellana, one of the tenants who lost her home in the fire, told a reporter just hours before the blaze that she had retained an attorney to fight a recent eviction notice to leave the $240-a-month room where she had lived for six years.

Orellana said water from an upstairs toilet leaked into her room. She had piled rugs three-deep to soak it up. Other tenants complained of stopped-up plumbing, lack of hot water and an infestation of mice and roaches.

One woman who didn’t want to be named had been keeping score with marks on a calendar of the mice she had recently killed: Eight in two days.

In another room, a woman said the roof leaked so badly that she needed an umbrella inside when it rained.

The building is owned in part by Allen E. Alevy, a well-known Long Beach figure who formerly operated a carnival, once had a financial interest in a notorious massage parlor in Signal Hill and was involved in a casino concession operation in Las Vegas with a partner who was murdered. Alevy said he purchased his share of the building last winter and that he was attempting to relocate the tenants and renovate the structure but had not complied with many of the task force orders before the fire because he didn’t want to take a “Band-Aid” approach.

About a week after that blaze, another task force-targeted building at 1501 W. Adams caught fire, killing one man and injuring nine other people, two of them critically. The fire, which did an estimated $15,000 damage, was termed arson by the Fire Department, but police investigators say the cause of the blaze is unknown.

A week before that fire, the owner of the building, Mark Schulman, had pleaded guilty in Municipal Court to six violations of health, building and fire codes, and was placed on two years probation and agreed to bring the building up to standard by Aug. 7, according to Deputy City Atty. Bakewell. Schulman could not be reached for comment.

“The pictures that we have,” said Bakewell, “indicate that the building as a whole was in very deplorable condition (before the fire). The investigators told me that when they opened the cupboards to take photographs, the roaches literally jumped into their camera lenses.”

Back to Skid Row

And then there is the Southern Hotel on Skid Row.

Dhansukhbhai D. Patel purchased the building in 1981. In July, 1985, the slum task force inspected the property and compiled several pages of health, building and safety and fire violations.

Patel failed to correct the violations and was charged with 23 misdemeanors by the task force. In a plea bargain last February, he admitted to eight code violations, was fined $6,800 and placed on three years probation with the condition that he comply with all future orders of task force inspectors.

In April, members of the task force reinspected the building and listed a dozen pages of violations similar to those found last year. Deputy City Atty. Cullen says he is now going to seek a 30-day jail term for Patel for violating probation.

Patel’s attorney, Thomas Beck, protests that his client intends to repair the hotel and has obtained a building permit to do the work.

But even Beck acknowledged the dilapidated condition of the building: “The pictures (taken last winter by the task force) looked pretty awful. I wouldn’t even store boxes over there.”

“In a year there’s been hardly any attempt to correct the major problems,” said building inspector Padilla during a recent tour of the building. “Instead of going forward, he’s going backward.”

Revealing Tour

Padilla, in his quiet, sometimes sardonic manner, pointed out violations as he walked through the building.

A missing toilet in a community bathroom: “His idea to take care of it is a piece of plywood. Great.”

A hallway fire exit nailed shut: “Bad, bad violation.”

His tone remained matter-of-fact, unemotional. He had learned a long time ago to cope with problems such as having his clothes ruined by vermin and sewage contamination during inspections. And he had learned to cope with his feelings about children living in places like this.

“My emotions in the beginning were quite devastating,” he said. “I’d go home and I’d think about it and I’d say, ‘These kids don’t have a break.’ And . . . I’d get very emotional about it.

“But I’m not paid to be a minister. . . . My job is being an inspector. . . . So I’ve got to go back to being like the nurse or the doctor in the emergency ward and treat the wounds. I’ve got to treat them with building violations and divorce myself from it to keep my sanity.”

Does he feel like a Slum Buster?

“Our fellow inspectors call us that,” Padilla laughed. “They think we’re the do-gooders and that with a magic wand we can change everything. But we can’t. There’s a lot of procedures. . . . And the buildings that we go into will never be the Bonaventure.

“You can only hope for . . . getting some reasonable compliance to the standard living conditions and live with that,” he said. “We’re not do-gooders, we’re just there to do a job. And the job is to write up violations.”