Homeless of L.A.: Fight Widens for Safe Hotels

After nearly two years of fruitless negotiation, attorneys for the homeless plan to file a motion today charging that Los Angeles County illegally spends $2.8 million a year to lodge indigents in unsafe slum conditions in private Skid Row hotels.

Legal briefs prepared by the Century City law firm of Irell & Manella, which stepped in last year to assist overwhelmed poverty lawyers on a pro bono basis, contend that conditions have not improved since a Superior Court judge in the winter of 1984 ordered the county to stop sending the homeless to unheated hotels.

The motion seeks to stop the county from sending the homeless to hotels with gross violations of fire, building and health codes and to force the Board of Supervisors to find an alternative.

Rodents, Insects

The briefs, provided to reporters by the law firm, include statements from 170 past and present homeless people about rodents and insects scampering through the rooms, lack of hot water, frequent robberies and attacks and broken windows.

“I pulled back the sheets and there were tiny baby roaches--a nest of them--crawling all over the sheets,” said Albert Andazola, a tenant at the Howell Hotel, in a statement included in the court briefs. “The floor was crawling with bugs and roaches so I never took my shoes off.”

About 15 of the “single-room occupancy” Skid Row hotels, many dating from the turn of the century, are used by welfare officials to lodge homeless applicants for general relief while their paper work is processed by the county.

At the welfare office homeless indigents receive a reservation and a series of $8-per-night vouchers to rent rooms in the hotels. Once they qualify for general relief--the county’s lowest level of aid--the homeless no longer receive the hotel vouchers, and typically cannot afford to stay in the hotels.

Average Stay 22 Days

An average stay is 22 days, according to Jon Davidson, a partner in Irell & Manella who worked on the case.

The original lawsuit, which was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court in November, 1984, was one of a series brought by attorneys for the homeless that reformed the way the county treated its most destitute citizens. One suit, for example, won the homeless the right to receive emergency aid even if their last shred of identification was lost or stolen.

Negotiations between the county and attorneys for the homeless on the hotel conditions began in the winter of 1984. The county agreed to send health inspectors more often to the aging, often poorly maintained Skid Row hotels, and several hotels were dropped from the county’s voucher program because of unsafe conditions or lack of heating.

But Davidson said that interviews with the homeless tenants and tours of the hotels by experts discovered that the county’s regulations were often violated by the hotels’ management, and perusal of the records found that county inspectors are too lenient when they find violations.

For example, the county’s rules for voucher hotels require that restrooms have locking doors since they are frequently used by both men and women. However, the briefs allege that several hotels do not have the locks and that some have no shower curtains.

Guards the Shower

“When my wife takes a shower, I sit by and police the shower because women have been raped and assaulted in the showers at the Ford,” Wenzell H. Smith said in a statement.

Gary Blasi, an attorney with the Legal Aid Foundation of Southern California, said Irell & Manella agreed to join the case without compensation when it became too drawn out and expensive for him and the other attorneys, representing the Inner City Law Center and the American Civil Liberties Union, who filed the suit.

Davidson said Irell & Manella, a 131-attorney business and litigation firm in Century City, has used about 30 staff lawyers on the case.

The attorneys hope to have a hearing on the issue in mid-August.