Landlord Jailed, Fined, Must Do 1,000 Hours Community Service
A downtown landlord was sentenced Tuesday to 30 days in jail for code violations at one of his apartment buildings and was also ordered to perform 750 hours of community service at a mission that aids homeless people.
William Burkhalter Jr., 54, who was convicted Feb. 24 of 22 building code violations at his building at 1723 W. 9th St., was also ordered to pay a total of $18,700 in fines and penalties and was placed on three years’ probation. In addition, Los Angeles Municipal Judge Suzanne Person ordered Burkhalter to spend 250 hours working with burn patients at County-USC Medical Center.
For the record:
12:00 a.m. March 6, 1987 For the Record
Los Angeles Times Friday March 6, 1987 Home Edition Part 1 Page 2 Column 1 Metro Desk 1 inches; 28 words Type of Material: Correction
In a story in Wednesday’s Times about a landlord fined for Building Code violations, an attorney for the Legal Aid Foundation was incorrectly identified as Rod Leonard. The attorney’s name is Rod Field.
Deputy City Atty. Abraham Khan explained that Person ordered the landlord to perform the bulk of his community service at the U.S. Mission at 1154 N. Western Ave. because he has been accused of evicting hundreds of tenants from his apartment buildings. “Because his policy is mass evictions the judge wanted him to get a feeling for what homelessness is like,” Khan said.
Khan, who prosecuted Burkhalter, cited fire code violations at the building as the reason the defendant will have to work with burn patients.
Rod Leonard, a staff attorney with the Legal Aid Foundation, said that over the last two years, Burkhalter, who owns more than a dozen apartment buildings, primarily in the Pico-Union area, has found various ways to evict tenants or persuade them to move in order to bring in new tenants and raise rents. According to Leonard, Burkhalter then refinances the buildings on the basis of the higher rents for the purpose of buying more property.
But the attorney said that despite wide-scale evictions, “not many” of the tenants, most of whom are illegal aliens, wind up homeless. “We’re dealing with employed people,” he said. “They’re minimally employed, in sweatshops or manufacturing. But they’re all very hard-working people so they seem to survive.”
Among the violations found at the 63-unit apartment building on West 9th Street were rat and cockroach infestation, unsanitary sink and lavatory fixtures, missing screens, lack of heat and accumulation of trash and debris. At his trial, Khan said, Burkhalter told the jury that he had evicted all but 10 families from that building.
Burkhalter’s attorney, Frank Whitehead Jr., could not be reached for comment.
