L.A. Renters: Condemned to Extinction?

My apartment building stands ready for razing, a testament to Progress and the New Order of Luxury Housing Construction. As a consequence, I have become part of that growing breed in Los Angeles, the refugee. I am not referring to poor immigrants. I am talking about middle-class, long-time residents whose apartment rentals have been snatched from them because rising property values are making their buildings fodder for developers.

I’m a Los Angeles native who grew up in a lovely three-bedroom home built by my grandfather in Huntington Park in 1929 at the cost of $4,000.

But times change. As a single woman I have waited long and hard for Mr. Right to come along and supplement my income enough to afford another single-family dwelling. Until then, my meager pay as a writer leaves apartment living my only option. For a stable resident living under rent control, it was a comfortable option. Not any more.

I lived in a $375-a-month West Los Angeles fourplex for eight years; my grandmother was there for 10 years before that, and her sister lived there, too. Such attachments to a rental mean nothing. The building was recently sold for a price the owners “couldn’t refuse.”

I have joined the “real world,” paying exorbitant rents for barely habitable habitats. The $2,000 relocation allowance from my former landlord barely covered the move plus first and last month’s rent. It did not cover the time it took me to pack, or the weekends wasted looking for new housing, or the days spent at the new apartment waiting for utilities service, which can’t be promised at any time other than “somewhere between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m.” Two thousand dollars did not cover the loss in the quality of my life.

Nearly 75% of the streets on the Westside where I looked were littered with construction sites for new rental housing in the $1,000-and-up range. When I see those sites, I can only think of those being displaced.

I wonder about Helen. A spry lady in her 80s, she had lived in my building 17 years, sometimes spending whole days in her kitchen making her favorite cheesecake recipe. She has been relegated to a retirement home. No more kitchen. No more cheesecake.

And what about the rest of the neighborhood? As I was throwing away some of my past that would not squeeze into my new apartment, I saw a well-dressed old man foraging about the trash. We started talking, and I found out that he lived close by and was looking for boxes. At 90, he, too, was being thrown out of his home. He didn’t know where he would go. I wonder how other senior citizens fare, who have lived in their apartments for years and exist on a fixed income.

And, given 30 days to vacate, what did I end up with? For $650 a month, my new domicile is two-thirds the size of my old one, with faulty pipes and faltering electricity. The landlady tries hard to keep up the decaying 35-year-old building, but since most of the tenants have been here for 15 years and are paying less rent than I used to, she is not about to renovate the rent-controlled building. Of course, the tenants, mostly senior citizens, all fear that she would pass on such costs to them, so they take their rusty baths in silence.

Who shall sleep in comfort; who shall wander more? In Los Angeles, our fate is written in the developer’s checkbook.

This isn’t the Los Angeles I grew up with. Lots of people lived in apartments 25 years ago--my father built and managed apartments--but somehow there was more trust: Landlords painted and tenants paid the rent on time and developers didn’t have a death grip on peoples’ lives.

I’m starting to believe the stereotypes about Los Angeles. If you rent, don’t dare put down roots, because your home is only your crash pad.

I’ve started my new life with less income, less room and less hope. But I suppose it’s all for the best that I moved when I did; they were just starting construction on a mini-mall behind my old building.