Local News in Brief : Elderly Tenants Win Fight

Four years after elderly residents of the decaying Cadillac Hotel on the Venice beachfront were told to move out, an agreement was signed allowing the seven remaining tenants to keep their low-rent apartments for life. The legal settlement Monday also provides for cash payments of up to $3,250 each for the current and former tenants.

Michael Feuer, director of Bet Tzedek, a legal services agency that filed suit on behalf of the tenants, said the settlement “will provide our clients with whatever they could have wanted.”

The Cadillac, whose previous owner kept the rents well below market rates, was home to 33 tenants when new landlord, Werner Scharff, said in 1983 that the building would have to be vacated to allow for renovation. Scharff said Monday that the same agreement could have been reached in 1983, “but they thought I wanted to put something over on them, which I didn’t want to do.”

“I wanted to fix it up, which I’m doing now,” he said.