Huntington Beach Flophouse Video Challenged : Downtown Folks Smell a Rat

At first, Bud Millen watched with surprise. When his curiosity was finally piqued, he shuffled up to a photographer tilting a camera toward the second floor of a building on Main Street in downtown Huntington Beach.

“Excuse me, but what is the attraction up there?” Millen asked politely Tuesday afternoon.

Told that the City Council the previous night had been shown an 8-minute videotape of flophouses, graffiti and cockroach-infested housing along the three-block area of the city’s downtown area, Millen still looked perplexed.

“I live up there, and it’s certainly not rat-infested,” he replied.

Immediately after the seven-member council had screened the videotape made by the Downtown Task Force Program, it voted unanimously to begin enforcing city health and safety regulations immediately.

Millen, 37, pays $80 a week for No. 7 of 10 single rooms above the Bread Crumb Sandwich Shop. The 10 occupants of the dormitory-like residence had shared two toilets and a shower. In the three months he has lived in the building in the 200 block of Main Street, Millen said varmints had not been a problem.

The place could have been better kept, he conceded, but the rooms were not as unsafe as the city’s videotape presentation of downtown buildings indicated.

“It could have been better, but there’s a pride down here now. There are a few problems, but one of them is the city,” Millen said.

He and other residents of downtown Huntington Beach speculated that the city is probably trying to degrade downtown as much possible to get its way--to condemn the buildings and open the area to major redevelopment.

“Any negative publicity they can get about the downtown is to their favor,” Millen said about city officials.

Merchant Michael Ali agreed. Ali owns Cagney’s by the Sea, a popular bar on Pacific Coast Highway, just around the corner from Main Street. He and his cousin, Mike Abdelmuti, also own a large building on the corner of PCH and Main Street. Neither of their buildings was among those targeted in the videotape, city officials said.

Ali said some downtown merchants have been hampered in efforts to improve their property because the city has never given them a clear indication of what redevelopment plans it has.

“Some of those things in the video exist. There must be some improvement, especially in the next block,” he said. “But some of it exists because the redevelopment of downtown has taken too long.”

‘No Reason to Blame the City’

But City Administrator Paul Cook said: “That’s not really true. The inland blocks have been rehabilitated for several years by some owners. Some others have not done anything, and they’ve had years to do so. There is no reason to blame the city.”

Cook, who said there are about four or five second-level apartments in dire need of repair, said his staff would present the City Council a recommendation on Feb. 15 on how to get owners to bring their property up to code.

“We don’t know how much time we will give them, whether it will be three months or six months. We have to work all that out,” the city administrator said.

But Larry Lawrence, owner and operator of the Bread Crumb Sandwich Shop on the first floor of the building where Millen lives, said owner Tom Wurlz of Long Beach is not one of the errant owners.

“My landlord is really putting some money into it,” Lawrence said. “The upstairs was unsafe, but it was just run-down and old. He’s fixing that.”

Millen and other residents were told last week to vacate the place by Wurlz, who plans to give the 10 small rooms a quick remodeling. On Tuesday, Herman Paredes and a crew of three dry wallers were already tearing down and installing new walls. Once that is done, Paredes said, another crew will install new beams and make the building strong enough to withstand earthquakes.

Lawrence said there have been no problems with roaches. He added that most of the downtown area is steadily being improved.

“There’s a lot to offer here. I see more people coming downtown now because it is safe,” he said. “But it’s not going to happen overnight.”

Ali and his cousin took over their Main Street building in 1984. Originally a historic hotel built in 1904, the building was bolstered to withstand earthquakes, and other improvements were made to meet city safety codes, he said.

Three decaying apartments on the second floor have never been rented out, Ali said, because the brothers hope to raze the entire structure and rebuild. But their plans have been stalled while they wait for the city to decide what the redevelopment plan is for the area.

Some absentee owners have not maintained or improved their aging downtown buildings because, Ali said, they are “greedy” and “only care about the money.”

A Graffiti Problem

City officials, he said, “should do something about them.”

Ali also agreed that there is a graffiti problem in the area. But he cautioned: “You will always have graffiti, no matter what the building is like. You just clean it up when it happens.”

Across the street from Lawrence’s sandwich shop in the 200 block of Main Street is another building in which residents live in seven one-room apartments on the second floor. The walls there are newly painted, and the communal bathroom is clean. The only apparent hazard is that the staircase lacks a banister.

One occupant, when told of the videotape showing run-down conditions in the area, expressed surprise.

“This place is clean, as you can see,” said the middle-aged man, who declined to give his name. “The only problem here is that people run up and down the hall all night making loud noise.”