L.A. to Order Evacuation of Sinking Condominiums

As many as 80 residents living in the crumbling Huntington Terrace portion of the massive Monterey Hills redevelopment project will be told to vacate their homes early next week because the sinking condominiums are no longer safe, Los Angeles building and safety officials said Thursday.

Officials said the buildings could be made habitable again with extensive repair work planned by the city Community Redevelopment Agency, which will also pay for the relocation of the residents. CRA officials predict the work could take six months to a year to complete.

The first such action to be taken at the beleaguered housing complex, the evacuation order is the most drastic development yet in a controversy that erupted in the early 1980s, when scores of the condominiums and town houses built on a landfill north of downtown literally began sinking into the ground.

Building and safety officials said they are likely to post the notice to vacate on Monday at the 36-unit building at 4000 Via Marisol, which is the most badly damaged of the more than two dozen complexes dotting the hills and canyons east of the Pasadena Freeway. Residents will then have 48 hours to find and move into new housing.

“If the settlement (of the land) continues, it’s possible the building could collapse,” said Bob Ayers, chief of the city’s building bureau.

Ayers said the private developers of the CRA-sponsored project were supposed to shore up the sagging structure but “we’ve sat around waiting and waiting and waiting and we’ve become concerned.”

He said an inspection of the complex conducted after the Oct. 1 earthquake convinced officials that they could no longer wait.

Redevelopment agency officials, meanwhile, said they are taking steps to pick up where the developer left off.

CRA Administrator John Tuite confirmed Thursday that agency officials are prepared to repair the building and, while the repairs are being made, the agency will pay the costs of relocating and housing the displaced families. Making the units livable again is expected to cost as much as $2.5 million, he said.

“We’ll worry about the money later,” Tuite said. “We feel a real responsibility for these people, and we hope to get moving on this. . . . We hope they will only be out of their homes six months to a year.”

Although officials have known for some time that the cracking and settlement problem in the Huntington building was nearing a critical stage, Tuite said, “we were all anticipating the developer was moving on that front.”

Tuite said the Carley Capital Group sought and received building permits to do the re-shoring work beneath the building but then announced it would no longer undertake the job.

Carley officials could not be reached for comment. But Tuite said he believed that the repair work was dropped when the company was unable to obtain liability insurance.

Although the most severely damaged structure in the development, the Huntington Terrace building is just one of many that has slipped and cracked apart because of the moving earth.

Unable to sell or even rent their homes in many cases, members of at least four of the 17 homeowner associations and scores of individual owners in the hillside development have sued the city and the CRA to recover their losses. Some have sued the builder and subcontractors, and others are staging mortgage strikes.

The CRA, among others, has filed multimillion-dollar lawsuits in return.