Council Vote May Result in Repairs to 2 Slum Units

When the City Council votes today on whether to take rent money away from owners of two slum properties until they make repairs, the outcome may mean Herminio Ruiz will finally see the broken pipes, rotted window frames and gaping holes in his apartment fixed.

Ruiz, a 28-year-old short-order cook, lives at 521 S. Union Drive in one of the two buildings that could become the first ever placed in the city’s “rent escrow account program.”

Under the program, passed by the council in November, rents from extremely dilapidated buildings whose owners have refused to make repairs can be diverted to special bank accounts maintained by the city. Once owners bring their buildings up to health and safety standards, the city will give the landlord the rent money, less administrative fees.

Near Downtown

The South Union Drive building is in the Westlake district just west of downtown, as is the other property the council will consider at 1041 South Westlake Ave. Both are three-story buildings more than 60 years old, once attractive but now marred by graffiti. Most of the tenants are Latino.

Council members Zev Yaroslavsky and Gloria Molina, authors of the rent escrow ordinance, which is patterned after similar laws in New York and Detroit, staged a press conference Monday morning outside the 36-unit South Union building.

Touring part of it, they saw broken windows, exposed wires and broken plumbing. Some tenants displayed several mice they had caught the night before, and others showed cockroaches.

“It is an embarrassment to the city of Los Angeles that you may have an abundance of mice but no running water,” Yaroslavsky said. “It’s a disgrace.”

Cutting Off the Cash

The program, he added, “will intercept the rent check before it gets to the landlord, taking away his cash stream.”

But the building’s owner, Peter Berrocal of Mano Industries Inc. said such an action was unlikely to solve his problems, which he said stemmed from “finances, not negligence.”

“It is counterproductive,” the landlord said, “because they (the city) are not going to do the work. . . . It will actually discourage me from doing anything. They punish the child the wrong way.”

Berrocal said he has owned the building about 10 months, and had made repairs to the roof, heating system, and plumbing. “The building is old, decayed,” he said, adding, “It takes time.” He had also been plagued by “increasing gang activity,” he said. “The tenants bring the gang members inside.”

Tenant Ruiz said, however, that he, his wife and two children have to live with torn window screens, holes in the walls and no hot water most of the time. Ironically, the rent on his one-bedroom apartment was recently raised from $280 to $350.

“The worst part is if we’re late one day with the rent we have to pay extra,” Ruiz said Monday. “But (when) we ask him for repairs we wait for months, and nothing.”

At the Westlake Avenue slum Monday, two building inspectors checking repairs made by owner Luis Guerrero said a lot of work had been done in the building in the last few months. Guerrero declined to be interviewed.

For a building to qualify for the rent escrow program, it has to be declared “untenantable” by either the city’s Building and Safety Department or the county Department of Health Services. Since the ordinance passed, four buildings were referred to the city’s Community Development Department, which administers the program. Two owners took action to make repairs, and their buildings were removed from the list.

The City Council will decide today whether to put the two remaining into the escrow program.