‘Cheerless and Ugly’ : Life Inside L.A.’s Slums: A Window on Despair

Maria Figueroa has bought cans of Black Flag to fight cockroaches, and set traps to catch mice. She has nailed boards across one screenless window--so the children won’t fall out. She has put a large piece of plywood over another window--to prevent stray bullets from fights in the street from shattering the glass above her bed.

The 22-year-old Salvadoran immigrant--one of perhaps 450,000 people who the city estimates live in slum conditions in Los Angeles--so far has refused to surrender to the challenges of living in a little square box of a room at the Cameo Hotel.

Most of her time is spent confined to this 12-by-12-foot space, which she shares with her two little girls and her two brothers, who recently fled El Salvador. She, Claudia, 1 1/2, and Yaritsa, 3, share the double bed while the brothers sleep on the floor.

“We find ourselves under these circumstances,” she says without a trace of self-pity, “but we can’t afford to get a better place.”

When officials speak of slums in Los Angeles, they talk about supply and demand, tax laws, city task forces and the demographics of immigration. But the tenants tell a more basic, and tragic, story about the ugliness of these buildings, with their broken fixtures and leaky pipes, rats and maggots, endless noise, crime and fear.

Once, the Cameo, just west of downtown at 504 South Bonnie Brae St., was a decent place. Made of solid brick and decorative trim, it was built in 1925 for tourists, who at the time considered nearby MacArthur Park a prime Los Angeles attraction.

Now, the carved relief “cameo” sculptures on the facade are gone or covered with graffiti. A fire escape climbs the front, ruining whatever grace was lent by the original design. A steel gate slices the lobby in two, making the place look more like a prison than the entrance to an apartment house.

Over the years, as the surrounding Westlake neighborhood deteriorated, transients, prostitutes and drug addicts moved into the Cameo. By the early 1980s, Cubans from the Mariel boat lift were there. They were so rough, one former owner claimed, he had “to pay them off” just to get inside.

Today, most of the 700 or more tenants living in the 174-unit building are, like Figueroa, from El Salvador. The majority are families with children, paying $250 to $275 a month. No deposit is required and utilities are included.

This is about the cheapest possible rent in Los Angeles, but even so, people don’t stay long. They move as soon as they can do better. Figueroa, there two years, is considered a longtime resident.

The building has been a subject of several city prosecutions in the last decade, for unchecked vermin, defective plumbing, gaping holes in walls and ceilings or unsafe conditions in the event of fire.

It is also among 11 properties named in City Atty. James K. Hahn’s suit against 142 property owners and their lending institutions, charging that they milked the buildings for profit and failed to maintain them.

The suit calls the Cameo a “transitional slum” because the current owner, Mordehai Ben-Horin of Encino, has been fixing it up. Even so, he is a defendant along with his lender, Bengal Discount Corp. of Inglewood. He is accused by the city attorney of being a “straw man” for other hidden owners, an allegation he denies. Bengal is one of a cluster of affiliated lending companies that have financed slum properties throughout Los Angeles for several years. Bengal recently settled a portion of the case.

Indeed, Figueroa and other tenants say the building is a much better place than it was a few months ago. The rats and maggots that fed on human excrement and garbage in the halls and stairwells are gone. So are the winos and addicts who crept in at night to sleep in the passageways.

There are other buildings that appear much worse. The front of 521 S. Union Drive a few blocks away, for example, is full of graffiti. Garbage spills out of dumpsters by the front steps.

Herminio Ruiz, a 28-year-old cook who pays $280 for a “single” that includes three small rooms, shows holes where plaster has crumbled away and mice have come in, worn screens, warped windows and ceiling stains from leaks.

This building is not included in the city attorney’s suit, but the Department of Building and Safety has proposed that it be one of the first three properties in the city placed in a new “rent escrow account program.” This would enable the city to place tenant rentals in special bank accounts; owners cannot retrieve the money until they make repairs.

Another building, at 4020 S. San Pedro Ave., southeast of the Coliseum, is part of the suit and has “the look” common to Los Angeles slums: long, dark, narrow hallways, institutional brown paint and walls and ceilings full of bulging lumps, left from years of patching holes. The common bathrooms at the end of the halls smell, and their walls are mildewed.

Here, in Luz Ruiz’s one-room unit, she shows holes in the walls, a door that cannot close properly or be locked and a window that won’t close. But the toughest part about living in this building, she says, is the waiting in line every night, either to use the common toilets or bathtubs at the end of the hall or the one four-burner gas stove downstairs.

“There are definite effects on the psyche and physical well-being on people that are forced to live like this,” said Dr. Shirley Fannin, associate deputy for disease control for the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services. Serious and even life-threatening health conditions can result from rat infestations, lack of adequate water supplies and extreme hot or cold temperatures, particularly for infants.

‘Cheerless and Ugly’

But slums are also “a depression-inducing environment,” Fannin noted. “Much of the hopelessness you see among poor people has a lot to do with their environmental situation, which is so cheerless and ugly.”

The effect can be “very long-lasting to a child or to an adult’s self-esteem,” she added. When children play in dark hallways because it is too dangerous to play in the street, she asked, “What kind of distorted image of life comes out of an early childhood experience based on fear of other people, or fear of the streets or of being outside?”

Several buildings named in the city’s suit have been recently cleaned up, and like the Cameo, have fresh coats of paint in the halls and new lighting. But physical improvements alone don’t turn a building around if the people and the neighborhood remain the same. So the Cameo is still a slum.

Just as Figueroa still battles cockroaches and persistent ceiling leaks at the Cameo, the small 22-year-old with a heart-shaped face and short, curly dark hair must also deal with the street where she lives.

Two of the three buildings on Bonnie Brae that are closest to the Cameo are vacant. The street has a “narcotics problem,” according to police, and nearly every night men furtively gather in small groups, or stagger along the sidewalk by themselves. If a stranger pauses near the billiards joint on the corner, someone approaches moving his arm up and down as if shaking dice--a signal there is rock cocaine for sale.

“They don’t let you sleep,” Figueroa said. “In the morning I wake up, I’m very tired. They yell and they throw bottles. They break bottles fighting.”

Noise is ceaseless inside, too. There is loud music in other rooms, the sound of people walking on the floor above and the shrill cries of children playing in the halls because there is nowhere else for them to go.

According to Los Angeles Police Officer Phil Michaelson, the senior patrol officer in the area, the Cameo no longer has much of a drug problem, but it is a place where tenants argue a lot with each other. When police are dispatched to the building, he said, “most are dispute-type calls.”

Figueroa doesn’t spend much time outside, except to go to the store for food in daylight hours. She spends most of her time watching the children or cleaning her unit, which like most slum apartments, seems oppressively overcrowded.

‘Keep Bad Spirits Away’

Actually, there is very little here: an old refrigerator, a particle-board dresser and two metal chairs. A wall shelf holds a small black-and-white TV, a clock radio, stuffed animals and plastic flowers.

A small Central American herb called a ruda sits on the window sill. She mixes its pungent leaves in a drink “when the children are afraid,” she explained, “and I use it to keep bad spirits away.”

A corner of the room has become her “kitchen,” which she has tried to spruce up by sticking blue contact paper unevenly to the wall. Here she has a hot plate, two pots, a frying pan, a strainer and two forks in a glass.

Her $250 rent takes half her monthly welfare money. She has worked, she said, as a maid, for $60 a week, and in a garment factory for $90. She stopped four years ago when she met the father of her children. He is no longer there.

“This is what happens to all the women,” she said, in a matter-of-fact tone. “They just leave the women with the children and you have to fend for yourself. That’s what happened.”

On the first of every month she takes the rent money in cash to the lobby. She gives it to Adolfo Estrada, a 34-year-old who sits in an office with bars facing the lobby, like a cage.

Tenants tend to say he is “malo, “ the Spanish word for bad, and “mean.” Some seem genuinely afraid of him. They talk of fights they have had with him, or the angry way he reacts when they say something needs repairing.

“Sometimes he won’t give us the mail,” Maria Melgas said. “I ask for the mail and he says there’s no mail if you don’t pay the rent.”

“He seems to always pick on the women,” added another tenant, Aidee Alcantara.

Estrada, for his part, doesn’t try to hide his contempt for tenants at the Cameo. “I was in one building before in Echo Park,” he said vehemently one day. “The people were nice. This area is different. Different people. It’s more difficult.” The worst part, he said, is that they are “not clean.”

Melgas and Alcantara are friends of Figueroa, visiting back and forth every day. When these two attend English classes to meet their amnesty requirements, Figueroa takes care of Melgas’ baby and Alcantara’s 4-year-old. Because she came illegally in 1983, fleeing the war after guerrillas wiped out her family’s crops, Figueroa does not qualify for amnesty.

One day, as often happens when they get together, they talk about the building.

“The ceiling is down again,” said Melgas, a 30-year-old with five children. “Pieces of it are falling.”

Jailed for Wife-Beating

Alcantara commented that one of her neighbors was jailed for beating up his wife. “But he’s getting out today.”

They snort derisively at the boric acid the owner has had placed along the floorboards to fight cockroaches. They do not believe it works, but Melgas said she doesn’t buy spray and fight the bugs as Figueroa does. “What can you do? We just let them run. They’re everywhere. They crawl all over me.”

She wonders if this is why “one of my little boys, he’s got rashes all over and he’s losing his hair.”

The women call Ben-Horin “Senor Ben” and say they see him around often. He tends to wear jeans, an old shirt and work shoes when he’s there. His gleaming white Mercedes convertible is parked outside.

Ben-Horin, 59, bought the building in December, 1987. It was one of 12 Los Angeles properties previously owned by Vijaynand Sharma, who had defaulted on his loans.

Sharma was convicted in 1987 of the largest number of slum violations in city history. He is now a fugitive and has not served any of his 20-month jail sentence.

Ben-Horin said most of the properties, including the Cameo, were in bad shape when he got them. The former manufacturer, by his estimate, has spent more than $300,000 on the Cameo alone, putting in new boilers and a fire sprinkler system, relighting the halls and repainting. He needs to spend another $150,000 to finish repairs, he said.

Faces Trial

Apart from the city attorney’s civil suit, he still faces trial this summer on criminal charges for code violations that were also filed by the city attorney. Stephanie Sautner, head of the city’s slum housing task force, said the agency took the action because “work was proceeding too slowly.”

“Too slow by whose standard of measure?” Ben-Horin responded, saying he believes that he is being unfairly targeted because he took over buildings owned by Sharma, whose case was highly publicized. Given the poor condition of the Cameo when he bought it, he believes that he is going as fast as he can.

“There is God and there is the city,” he said, exasperated.

City officials often fail to take into account the damage tenants can cause, he said, explaining that slum conditions come from both “tenant habits and the accumulated failure on the part of the owner to keep up with repairs.”

Once repairs are done, he continued, “what it will be in a year’s time depends on what kind of tenant is there.”

In one building he finished repairing last year, several panels of the new solar heating system on the roof were smashed and several of the newly installed carpets badly stained.

But the Cameo tenants say a lot depends on how well the repairs are done. Some of the work in their old building seems purely cosmetic.

“It leaks here,” Figueroa said, taking a metal rod to poke at her bathroom ceiling, which routinely breaks down from leaks. It had been recently repaired, again.

“They come, they put a board up there,” she said. “It collapses and they come and put another board.”