Slum Tenants’ Legal Effort Results in $610,000 Victory

Most were illegal aliens, not well educated and poor. They lived in a slum building--the Frostonya Apartment Hotel on Vermont Avenue--with holes in the walls, broken plumbing and rats, mice and roaches everywhere.

While that situation may be all too common in old, deteriorating buildings in Los Angeles, there was nothing common about 47 of the families in this one.

They pulled off a rent strike. They ran the building themselves. They sued the landlord.

And they won.

In a settlement announced early this month, the families, most of them from El Salvador, including 185 adults and children, received $610,000--about $13,000 per family--from four insurance companies representing the owner, the Noori Mehta Trust.

Surya Gupta, trustor for Noori Mehta, has in the past faced civil and criminal charges brought by the city for substandard conditions in several apartment buildings, including the Frostonya. An assistant city attorney once described Gupta, an Indian-born businessman, as “ the worst slumlord in Los Angeles.”

This was the first case brought by his tenants and is one of a growing number of suits against landlords for personal injuries suffered from living in slum conditions.

“This is a new area of law,” said Barrett S. Litt, attorney for the Frostonya tenants at 338-348 N. Vermont Ave. “Lawsuits like this didn’t exist.”

The first such local suit was filed in 1981, Legal Aid Foundation attorney Barbara Blanco said. Of at least seven filed since then, two have been settled in favor of the tenants, including the Frostonya’s, three have been won by tenants at trial and two are pending.

The largest judgment came nearly a year ago, when a jury awarded $1.83 million to more than 100 tenants of a building on South Berendo Street owned by former San Diego City Councilman Michael Schaefer.

Such cases stemmed from frustration on the part of Legal Aid lawyers, Blanco said. “We were good at going in and getting injunctions that forced landlords to do repairs, but what we couldn’t do, because we were Legal Aid lawyers and were prohibited from taking fee-generating cases, was really assess the damages for those people who live in slums.”

These lawsuits, handled by private personal injury attorneys, “link up the injunctive cases with the personal injury aspect,” said Blanco. They are intended, she added, “to make it more expensive to violate the law than to follow the law. When chronic slum operators are hit in the pocketbook, they’ll begin to realize . . . it makes more sense to keep a building up to code.”

Michelle Mulvey, an attorney for Noori Mehta Trust who also represented one of the insurance companies involved, called the settlement “a business decision.” Had the case gone to trial, with 185 plaintiffs and 1,495 individual causes of action, litigation costs, she said, “would have exceeded the sum of $600,000.”

For former Frostonya tenants who met recently at Lucia Ramos’ new apartment not far from the old building, what was at stake was more than a legal principle.

“I never thought it would be such a long, big affair,” Ramos said. “It went on and on.” Maria Franco, a 35-year-old Salvadoran, had lived in the six-story building nearly seven years with her two children and her parents in a fourth-floor single. “We had no elevator. Three years we had no elevator,” she recalled.

“There were many rats, roaches, mice, many holes in the walls,” the 35-year-old Ramos, a garment worker also from El Salvador, said. “The faucets were leaking. Very often there was no hot water. There were no screens on the windows. The manager removed all the mailboxes.”

When she first moved in to the large white building at the Vermont entrance to the Hollywood Freeway, “it was not so deteriorated,” she said, but as things got worse, the rent for her one-bedroom apartment, shared with her four small children, climbed from $165 a month in 1979 to $300 a month by 1983.

By June, 1983, the tenants had had enough, Ramos said. “We got together and decided to go talk to someone.” The building had 80 units, and 47 families eventually joined the fight.

“Someone” turned out to be Dino Hirsch, a 72-year-old retired machinist and former union activist who has devoted the last six years to fighting for tenants’ rights, particularly Spanish-speaking tenants. A native of Italy who is fluent in Spanish, Hirsch runs a group called Inquilinos Unidos (United Renters).

Hirsch met them, in the first of what would prove to be hundreds of meetings, in the lobby of the 60-year-old building. “I explained that they didn’t have to be scared,” he recalled, explaining that tenants, particularly illegal aliens unfamiliar with American law, are often fearful that the system could turn against them, and they could be either evicted or deported.

So, they started a rent strike. After three months, Hirsch negotiated a settlement with the managing company of the building, for a 30% reduction in rent due to code violations.

In mid-1984, however, the tenants received eviction notices, and when they refused to leave, they found the utilities were shut off and garbage collection halted.

“The garbage grew to a mountain in the parking lot,” Ramos said.

That was when they decided to run the building themselves. Hirsch persuaded City Councilman John Ferraro to get the Department of Water and Power to agree to let the tenants pay the utility bills themselves. They then arranged to pay for trash removal as well.

The city attorney filed a civil case against the landlord for code violations. Hirsch contacted attorney Litt, who filed the tenants’ suit.

Maria Franco, who works six days a week as a cleaning woman, became the principal leader. It became her job to go with Hirsch once a month to pay the bills, and to collect about $90 a month from each family for utilities, garbage collection and other costs. Later, the fee rose to $100 after two arson fires broke out and she paid some young tenants to work as security guards.

“That was the first time I ever did anything like this,” she said, in a self-deprecating manner. The hardest part, she added, was “collecting from some of the people that were reluctant to pay.”

At the end of each work day, Ramos and Reyes Villanueva would join a “work detail” of about 10 tenants for two to three hours. “We washed the walls, we washed the floors,” Villanueva said.

In September, 1985, the city’s suit was settled. The owner agreed to pay $100,000 in relocation costs to the tenants, along with $100,000 in civil penalties and nearly $16,000 in city investigative costs. The tenants got $1,000 to $2,500 per household, and left.

Now their case is settled, too, and the tenants are trying to decide what to do with their windfall.

Franco said a lot depends on how the family’s immigration status is resolved. If they cannot get legal papers, she said, “I plan to buy a house in Salvador.” The family’s $10,000 settlement is enough for a sizable house in El Salvador, she noted, but if they all can stay, she will use the money as a down payment for a house here.

Villanueva was unsure what to do with the $9,000 her family received, but her son, Milton, hopes it would help pay college expenses two years hence. He is interested in science and chemistry, he said.

The money is “not all that important,” the 16-year-old said. “I guess many people think we Latino people will take it. The owners thought they could make us feel afraid of immigration. But we didn’t pay attention. We wanted things to be fair.”

The story isn’t over, however. The one-bedroom apartment where Lucia Ramos now lives has peeling paint on the ceiling and water marks that were signs of leakage.

Villanueva, 38, said conditions were bad in her new apartment, too.

“The fight continues,” Franco said with a sigh. “I had some problems in my new building, but I told the landlord I am familiar with all the laws. That’s not true, but that’s what I said.”

She grinned at the others, and added: “He’s afraid of me.”

Today the Frostonya stands empty. Its front gates are shut, the carved ornamentation around the front door chipped and several windows broken. The building’s future, according to spokeswoman Mulvey, is “uncertain.”