Sherman Oaks Procession : Marchers Protest Tenant Evictions for Apartment Upgrades

About 60 people, including tenants to be evicted from two apartment complexes in North Hollywood and Venice, marched in a mock funeral procession Wednesday in Sherman Oaks.

The protesters carried a wooden coffin and placards reading “Don’t Make Grandmas Homeless” in front of the Ventura Boulevard office of Keith Sinclair, the buildings’ owner.

The marchers were protesting a provision in Los Angeles’ rent-control law that allows tenants to be evicted if a landlord spends $10,000 a unit on improvements. A moratorium on the provision expires June 30, and the City Council is expected to decide on Friday whether to keep or delete it.

The protesters’ chants did not fall on deaf ears. Los Angeles City Councilman Mike Woo, in whose district the North Hollywood complex is located, will recommend to the council Friday that the rehabilitation provision be deleted, Bill Chandler, Woo’s press deputy, said Wednesday. Woo is chairman of the council’s governmental operations committee, which extended the moratorium and held public hearings on whether to amend the provision.

“The demonstration . . . shows that major rehabilitation is controversial,” Chandler said. “We’re trying to basically make sure there can’t be any loopholes at all, and one way to do that is to eliminate major rehabilitation as a reason for eviction.”

Several of the 19 tenants who received notices to leave the 120-unit Diplomat Park apartments on Riverside Drive in North Hollywood participated in the protest, as did some of the 10 tenants notified that they must leave the 795-unit Lincoln Place complex in Venice.

Members of the Coalition for Economic Survival, a tenant-activist organization, also participated in the march.

Sinclair disputed claims by the protesters that the bulk of those to be evicted are low-income or elderly.

“To the best of our knowledge, on both buildings there were no low-income people evicted, and to the best of our knowledge there were no seniors at Lincoln” who received eviction notices, Sinclair said. About six of those who received notices at the North Hollywood complex are senior citizens, he said.

Sinclair said evicted tenants will be given the first opportunity to rent their units once they are renovated, but at higher rates. He would not specify how much rents would be raised, except to say they would be increased to “market value.”

The city’s rent-control ordinance, passed in 1979, limits rent increases to a set amount, now at 4% annually. The rehabilitation clause was intended to allow owners of substandard and unsafe apartment buildings to make necessary repairs.

“He’s throwing me out so he can put somebody in there for $875 under the guise that the building needs rehabilitation,” said Robert Klein, a 65-year-old World War II veteran. “I hate to think that I went through the jungles of New Guinea so somebody can just throw me out on the streets. It’s my home.”

Klein, a retired restaurant critic who is disabled by kidney disease, pays $510 a month for the spacious, two-bedroom North Hollywood apartment where he has lived for 27 years.

Klein and most of the tenants at the demonstration said their apartments do not need improvements.

Sinclair, however, maintained that the units may look presentable but are badly in need of new wiring and plumbing.

“The outside may look lovely, but the infrastructure still needs some work,” Sinclair said. “The whole goal of major rehab is to extend the life of the existing housing stock.”

Mildred Judge, 68, a 15-year resident of Diplomat Park, said she received an eviction notice and does not know where she will go.

‘No Affordable Housing’

“I would probably have to leave the state because there’s no affordable housing here,” said Judge, who pays $523 a month for her two-bedroom apartment.

“The only reason he wanted to do this was to evict people paying the lowest rent,” said Leslie Lang, president of the Tenants Assn. of Diplomat Park.

Lang, 50, and fellow residents Klein and Elaine Lewis, 65, proudly showed off their apartments to a visitor. Each had installed new carpeting, light fixtures and curtains, as well as other personal touches.

All the units look out on a garden with a well-maintained Olympic-size swimming pool, clusters of palm trees and beds of colorful flowers.

“We’re not living in a slum,” Lang said. “Most of us have perfectly beautiful apartments.”