S. Detroit Street--a War Against Redevelopment

It was about three months ago, Marsha Mann remembers, that a tall young man came to her apartment on South Detroit Street demanding:”Who owns this building?I want to buy it.”

A block away, rumors were circulating in the building where 70-year-old Howard Alperin lives that the six-unit apartment house and the one next door had been sold. Soon, repairs stopped being made.

Down the street, Marla Berk heard rumors, too. Brokers began stopping by the building where she lives. Workmen showed up to do “soil testing.” And the gardener stopped coming.

Not long after, eviction notices came to tenants of three buildings--Berk’s included--on this quiet street, just north of Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile area.

Word followed that at least eight buildings along three blocks of the street had been sold to one Los Angeles developer, Homestead Group Associates, and that the company had obtained city demolition permits for seven of them.

South Detroit Street, the residents discovered, had become “hot” property.

A street of mostly two-story Spanish Colonial or chateau-style apartment buildings dating from the 1920s, populated mostly by elderly retirees and young professionals, it has become another older city neighborhood, like downtown’s Bunker Hill, West Adams or West Hollywood, subject to development pressure--in this case, pressure encouraged by city planners.

Homestead plans to demolish the three buildings where eviction notices have been distributed--with a combined 24 units--and replace them with 60 luxury apartments.

Of the remaining four buildings with demolition permits, Homestead’s attorney, former City Councilman Arthur K. Snyder, says the company has no current plans to tear them down, and no eviction notices have been issued.

“They have not gone down the road on the others,” he said. However, the permits, issued by the city in October, are good for six months.

The mood among the tenants along South Detroit Street is one of fear, confusion and anger at the turn of events. About 150 of them have banded together to try to preserve their neighborhood.

“We don’t know where we stand,” said Alperin, who has lived in his apartment for 33 years. A tall, dapper old man who sports a cane, a waxed mustache and a bowler hat, Alperin lives in one of the purchased buildings for which a demolition permit has been issued.

Most of his neighbors also are elderly, and Alperin wonders where they will go if they have to leave their rent-controlled apartments. “Where can we go and find rentals we are paying today?,” he asked. The average monthly rent on the street, according to one city official, is $350.

The problem facing the residents of South Detroit Street and half a dozen other blocks just west of La Brea Avenue is largely a result of city planning and zoning decisions, made as long as 10 years ago.

Then, the Miracle Mile section of Wilshire Boulevard was designated by a City Council-adopted Wilshire district plan as a “regional center,” to encourage large-scale commercial development there.

‘High Medium’ Density

This neighborhood abuts that area and was zoned in the same community plan for “high medium” residential density, allowing 40 to 60 units per acre. Most of the existing buildings have only six to eight units apiece.

“The existing zoning and city plan is promoting this area” for redevelopment, said City Planning Department community planner Lynell Washington. The zoning was reaffirmed last year in new plans drafted in preparation for Metro Rail, he said.

The passage of Proposition U in November, which restricts major commercial development, is also important, Washington noted, because “regional centers” like Wilshire’s Miracle Mile, were exempted from the initiative.

“The opportunity is there,” he said, for future large-scale apartment construction to complement the expected large-scale commercial development.

The recent changes along Miracle Mile, including the expansion of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and new office buildings, already attracted one developer, Goldrich & Kest Industries, to construct a 212-unit apartment complex at 6th Street and Curson Avenue, not far from South Detroit.

‘Looking to Come Back’

“There has not been any new growth in that area from a residential standpoint in well over 25 years,” said Mark Bornstein, Goldrich & Kest vice president. “People are looking to come back into this area (to live) but there is very little available, which is the prime reason we found the area attractive.”

Though city officials have not yet noticed other developer presence on neighboring blocks, Homestead is unlikely to be alone for long, Washington said. “I don’t think this is the last. This is only the beginning.”

But the tenants on South Detroit have mobilized to save their street. About 700 signed a petition calling for a moratorium on demolitions. About 150 residents formed the Detroit Street Coalition, operating out of an apartment at 401 S. Detroit St.

Many of them met this week with John Ferraro, city councilman for the area, to ask his help in obtaining a moratorium.

Ferraro said he has discussed the situation with planning officials and the city attorney, and would only say he is “considering all the various options.”

Calls for Balance

There needs to be a balance, he added, between “the concerns of the residents to preserve the character of the neighborhood, and the rights of the property owners.”

“We need an 18-month moratorium” said Marsha Mann, a dark-haired, intense performance artist who became a coalition leader after learning that her building had been sold to Homestead. A delay, she added, would “give us a chance to apply for rezoning, and historic status for this neighborhood.”

Residents are hanging their hopes for preservation of the neighborhood on the architectural styling of the buildings, with their flower-filled courtyards, arched doorways, tiled roofs and French windows.

Tenants in two of the buildings scheduled for demolition applied to the city’s Cultural Heritage Commission to have their buildings declared “historical monuments,” a designation that would save them from the wrecker’s ball.

The application was considered at a Cultural Heritage Commission meeting this week, where resident Frank Ostrowiecki nervously read a statement, written out on a legal pad, asking for a reprieve from “the destruction of this marvelous old apartment.”

‘Box With Some Trim’

Snyder, speaking for Homestead, retorted: “It’s a box with some trim hung on the outside. The trim happens to be Spanish Colonial.”

The commission voted in favor of Snyder and Homestead.

The buildings individually may not be architecturally significant, Los Angeles Conservancy Executive Director Ruthann Lehrer said, but taken as a whole, the Detroit Street apartments are important, and complement a proposed historic district along four blocks of Wilshire Boulevard, from Detroit Street to Burnside Avenue.

“I feel they’re worth saving,” she said, “not only because of one individual house but because there is a sense of cohesion and unity in that neighborhood. It’s quality housing of a certain period and type, an example of duplex housing built in Los Angeles in the 1920s.”

The neighborhood could also be considered for a “historic preservation overlay zone,” Lehrer added, which is a special city zoning status that protects existing housing.

‘We Must Provide Housing’

“I don’t think that’s realistic,” Snyder countered. “If there truly are to be centers (regional commercial centers such as Wilshire’s Miracle Mile), it is inescapable we must provide housing. Do we want people who work in high-density commercial buildings on Wilshire Boulevard to live in the Santa Clarita Valley and commute in?

“It’s easy to look at the microcosm and it seems awful callous,” he added, “but just the way you can’t make omelets without breaking eggs, you can’t build a new city without tearing down part of the old.”

Homestead has done this before. Early this year, the development company evicted about 400 people, half of them longtime elderly residents, from a large complex in Westchester, in order to demolish and rebuild luxury apartments.

The difficulties faced by those tenants, according to city officials, strongly influenced the City Council last February to speed up planned amendments to the city’s rent-control law, to broaden the circumstances under which landlords would be required to pay relocation costs when they evict.

Relocation Costs

Previously, landlords had to pay relocation costs only when they converted units to condominiums or demolished them for commercial development. The new amendments required owners, among other things, to pay costs for tenants evicted for demolition for new residential development, not just commercial. The relocation costs range from $1,000 for most tenants to $2,500 for tenants who are senior citizens, disabled or families with children.

Homestead, Snyder said, has assigned two employees to assist the evicted tenants on Detroit, in addition to paying packing and moving costs for those who are elderly. Almost all have signed agreements to leave by Jan. 15, he said, and in return are getting free December rent along with relocation assistance.

Homestead’s management company, he added, will be operating the other buildings.

The tenants, however, are still fearful.

“I don’t believe they’re going to stop,” said Alperin.

“They can come into a thriving, successful neighborhood and obliterate it,” Ostrowiecki said. “They’re speculating on the future, at our expense.”