Owners Slow in Fixing Buildings for Quake Safety

Owners of nearly half of Los Angeles’ brick apartment buildings and residential hotels have failed to begin upgrading their buildings, as required by the city’s earthquake safety ordinance, according to city officials.

About 1,555 unreinforced residential structures, containing 44,372 apartment units, must have their floors, walls and ceilings anchored and strengthened, or be vacated, under terms of the 7-year-old Earthquake Hazard Reduction Ordinance.

However, records at the Department of Building and Safety’s earthquake safety division show that owners have taken out permits to begin seismic work on only 822 residential buildings. While landlords have roughly three years to complete the work, Allen Asakura, chief of the division, said there are interim deadlines for owners who intend to upgrade, rather than demolish, the structures.

Owners of all residential buildings received earthquake-compliance orders by early 1987, and Asakura said, “all the buildings should have by now started construction.”

Not Sure What It Means

The building department does not know what the owners’ tardiness means. It may signal that many buildings will be demolished, compounding an already serious housing shortage for poor people who tend to live in the unreinforced buildings. On the other hand, as several landlords suggested, it may mean that many owners have yet to start because they are having problems financing the work or finding reliable contractors.

Officials in the department’s building bureau could not say how many owners who are officially behind schedule have asked for or obtained extensions, or how many had been given citations for being delinquent.

Asakura acknowledged that his division is behind in monitoring compliance with the law, and attributed it in part to a shortage of inspectors. The 13 who are working each have case loads of about 200 commercial and residential properties, he said.

However, Tim Taylor, the chief of the bureau, said more than 1,000 property owners had taken the initial step of submitting a plan, and expressed confidence that most eventually would obtain permits.

Regular inspection duties leave little time for what the department calls “research,” or checking whether owners have met the earthquake-improvement deadlines. “It’s a difficult ordinance to enforce,” Asakura said. “Each building has a zillion compliance dates. There are so many dates, we’re just bogged down.”

Two months ago, the division started putting inspectors on overtime to try to catch up, and officials said they expect to fill seven vacancies within a few months. Taylor also noted that, “the October (1987) earthquake put a severe drain on the staff there,” because inspectors dealt not only with 600 damaged city buildings but assisted other communities, such as Whittier, for several months.

In addition, the city program has been accelerated, placing more pressure on inspectors. Originally, the ordinance phased in compliance over a 15-year period, but the City Council ordered the program speeded up after the 1985 Mexico City earthquake.

The next six months will be a “crucial” time, Asakura said, as officials decide what to do about the rash of delinquencies.

Officials can issue orders to vacate such buildings, but do not like to do so, Asakura said. If the city orders a building vacated, landlords do not have to give tenants relocation assistance under current law, and landlords, he noted, “tend to use us.”

Other city officials are worried about the potential loss of low-income housing if the owners decide not to upgrade their buildings.

“I’m concerned (about) how many are going to demolish and put people on the street,” said Councilman Ernani Bernardi, chairman of the council’s Building and Safety Committee. Even though the final deadline for completing work on the buildings is two years away, he wondered if the owners’ slowness to start work was a reflection of “skyrocketing” land values that may outstrip the value of the buildings.

“Does this mean when the two years is up they’ll decide they’ll be better off demolishing the buildings and putting (the land) to a higher use?” Bernardi asked.

Some officials are also disturbed about a trend toward gentrification of these buildings, particularly in the mid-Wilshire area, when owners do upgrade and then jack up rents.

In a Dilemma

“We’re between a rock and a hard place,” said Gary Squier, the mayor’s housing coordinator. “We’ve got to protect people’s lives through reinforcing buildings, and at the same time we hope to preserve the affordability of housing.”

“It is the housing of last resort,” Barbara Zeidman, director of the rent stabilization division of the Community Development Department, said, noting that rents average $350 a month and are crucial to the city’s poor. “It is irreplaceable.”

Her department has commissioned a study of the effect of the seismic ordinance on the city’s stock of low-income housing. The results will be presented to the council in a few weeks, Zeidman said, along with recommendations on how to preserve this housing. These may include procedures to make demolition more difficult and requirements for landlords to pay tenants relocation assistance if the owners drag their feet until the city orders their buildings vacated.

Early indications are that most property owners are not tearing down the buildings, Asakura said. Of the 790 unreinforced buildings demolished since the ordinance was passed, he noted, only 145 demolitions have been of residential structures.

Records Incomplete

However, of the 7,210 commercial and residential buildings still standing, he did not know how many owners of the remaining 1,555 residential structures have applied for demolition. Department records of demolition permits do not differentiate between commercial and residential structures.

One who has applied for such a permit is Hyung Chu, owner of 340 S. New Hampshire Ave. The expense of seismic work on the 70-year-old, eight-unit building and a seven-unit building next door did not make economic sense, she said. Estimates of the cost, according to others, range from $3,000 to $5,000 per apartment.

“This is a really old building,” Chu said. “It’s better to tear down and get a new one.’

Although she had applied for a demolition permit, she said she was “not sure” whether she can obtain financing to rebuild, and so might not carry it out. But Chu was equally unsure whether she could obtain financing to do the seismic upgrading.

While the owner expressed her concerns, tenants were also anxious. Sam Kim, an economics student at UCLA, said he would not mind if the building were torn down because “it’s really old fashioned.” He figured he would “move to Santa Monica. They have rent control. It may be cheaper there.”

Loves Her Building

But Rose Ober loves the graceful two-story building, and over 21 years she has fashioned an elaborate garden outside her front door. She pays $279 a month rent.

‘All I have is Social Security,” she said, wondering what would happen if she had to leave. “I couldn’t afford to pay $500 or $600 a month,” she added. Those are common rents for small apartments in the area.

Displacement of such low-paying tenants is a major concern because, according to Squier, the gap between the supply of new apartments and the demand is 11,000 units a year in Los Angeles. Also, new apartments are not geared toward the poor. A recent city study showed that the average rent for newly constructed apartments is $903.

And when the buildings are fixed, rents inevitably climb. The city allows owners to pass on the cost of seismic upgrading, related improvements and interest expenses over a 5-year period. “People are having to pony up $100, $125 and $150 a month,” Zeidman said. “The people who are going to get killed with this are long-term tenants, elderly, living alone on a fixed income, and paying under $400 a month.”

However, once a tenant leaves a rent-controlled apartment, a landlord has no further restrictions on rental fees, leaving the path open to “gentrify” the buildings, if they are in an area where that is possible.

Early Indications

Zeidman said early indications are that it is happening in the Hollywood, Wilshire and Central City areas with the largest numbers of these buildings. In Central City, poorest of the three areas, work had started on 43 buildings, compared to 74 in Hollywood and 175 in Wilshire.

However, some of the building owners said the rental increases are not likely to be as high as city officials fear. For example, Kenneth Shaffer, who owns a building at 621 S. Union Ave., where work was recently finished, said he had applied for an increase of $47 because “I’ll go with what the traffic will bear.”

Darryl Wong, owner of a four-story unreinforced building at 802 N. Vermont Ave., has applied for $107-a-month increases for each of his building’s 60 apartments, now that the seismic work has been done. According to city records, monthly rents there range from $260 to $525.

Pedro Gonzalez is a factory worker who now pays $260 for one of the apartments, shared with his wife and baby. “It’s a lot of money,” he said of the increase, and did not know if he could pay it.

But Wong said that if the city grants the hikes, he would probably only apply it to the lower rentals.