War on Slums : Aging Knight in Baggy Pants Champions Cause of Latino Renters

Four women and one man had squeezed themselves into Dino Hirsch’s office, if you could call it that. Actually, they had wedged themselves into a cubicle.

These Latino tenants, frightened over an eviction notice, quietly waited while the founder, director and--sole worker--for Inquilinos Unidos (United Renters) flipped through his “files,” mounds of paper heaped on top of a metal card table and battered desk. Then Hirsch gave up, sat down and addressed them.

With smudged, horn-rimmed glasses and wearing a casual shirt and baggy trousers, the elfish, gray-haired Hirsch hardly seems to fit the role of knight in shining armor. But to Latino tenants in Los Angeles, who live either in slum buildings or old, rent-controlled structures under increasing threat of demolition, this 73-year-old retired machinist is just about the only one they’ve got.

Hirsch volunteers his time to help Spanish-speaking renters, primarily those living in the center city who face either eviction or poor living conditions, such as lack of heat, leaking roofs, rats and cockroaches. Fellow tenant advocate Larry Gross of the Coalition for Economic Survival calls him “the slumlord’s living nightmare.”

Adopted Role

The diminutive Hirsch adopted his role after he retired in 1979.

“I didn’t feel like staying home, not doing anything,” he said.

He chose to help Latinos because “I felt they were the largest and most oppressed group.” “My role is really to educate people to their rights,” he said. “My constituency generally don’t know their rights.”

As a former union organizer, he first considered working with senior citizens like himself, he said, but decided they were “less ready to take chances.”

He came to admire the tenacity of Latinos, Hirsch said, because “once they’re aroused, they fight back.”

While a handful of tenants’ groups around the city focus on discrimination issues, senior housing or rental problems in specific neighborhoods, Hirsch is perhaps the only one who concentrates on low-income Latino renters, many earning below the minimum wage.

It may seem incongruous that this chain-smoking, Italian immigrant, born of German-Jewish parents and speaking what he calls “a lousy Spanish,” should end up being the champion of such tenants’ rights. But officials of the predominantly Latino United Neighborhoods Organization and aides to Councilwoman Gloria Molina, whose district includes much of Hirsch’s self-appointed “beat,” cannot name anyone else who does it.

Michael Bodaken, an attorney specializing in housing cases at the Legal Aid Foundation, said Hirsch is the “original contact for probably more than half the (tenant) cases” the group files.

“He’s our eyes and ears,” he said.

Last Saturday morning, Hirsch gazed at the latest group that had shown up at his regular “open house” at the cubicle, which he rents for $50 a month from the Central American Refugee Center at 660 S. Bonnie Brae St. To help with Hirsch’s expenses, tenants hand him coins or dollar bills when they come to see him. Besides himself, they are his sole funding source.

These visitors, there for the second time, were from two rent-controlled buildings on Beloit Avenue. The residents had received eviction notices because the buildings’ new owner wanted to demolish all 22 apartments.

A week earlier, when the tenants first came to him, Hirsch noticed that the landlord’s letters had not mentioned anything about paying relocation assistance. Landlords planning to demolish are required by city law to pay adults with dependent children $5,000 per family.

“I have all the time cases like this,” Hirsch commented. “Landlords feel they can get away with it.”

Grisella Patel, a mother of four, had found Hirsch, she said, because, “across the street there used to be another building and the same thing happened.” One of those former tenants told her about the old man who helped them.

“I spoke to your landlord,” Hirsch told her. “He said, ‘I’m perfectly happy to pay the money.’ I said how come you didn’t offer it to the tenants (in the letter), and he says, ‘You can’t blame me for trying. . . .’ ”

“It’s good he’s here,” Patel said, obviously relieved, as the group prepared to return home. “I didn’t know I have rights.”

When they left, Hirsch was not as happy for the tenants as they were for themselves. Relocation money, he said with a sigh, “is like a Band-Aid. You get $5,000, but if you’re going to be paying $150 or $200 more in rent, that money is going to be gone.”

The real problem is “lack of affordable housing for low-income people,” he said. In the last three years, 3,750 rent-controlled apartment units were demolished, according to city officials, and the new buildings being constructed, Hirsch said, don’t “rent at an affordable price for low-income people.”

Hirsch was raised in Italy by parents who had fled Nazi Germany and emigrated to the United States in 1940. He first worked in New York as a machinist and did the same when he later moved to Los Angeles.

He and his wife of 45 years, Claire, were themselves evicted from their apartment in the Wilshire District two years ago when their landlord decided to move into their duplex. They now live in a cooperative apartment in Silver Lake.

He was forced to reduce his tenant work after he suffered a heart attack in 1986, he noted.

“I cut my hours, which are from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. I used to go to 5 p.m. I changed my life style a little. I’m not supposed to smoke, but now I smoke a pack a day. I used to smoke three packs a day.”

Though he gets high marks from Barbara Zeidman, head of the city’s Rent Stabilization Division, for being “practical” and “willing to compromise,” Dan Faller of the Apartment Owners Assn. criticizes him for being one-sided and “obviously working against property rights and freedom of property owners.”

Asked how many tenants or buildings he has helped, Hirsch made a vague gesture at his paper stacks. “I don’t even count how many buildings I have,” he said. “My filing system is very poor.”