Houses Fall as Legal Gap Opens Way to Wreckers

As a demolition crew ripped away at a quaint Spanish-style home on Los Angeles’ Westside Saturday morning to make way for a new 10-unit apartment complex, Terry Steinhart looked on in disbelief.

Just three days before, his Pico-Fairfax Good Neighbors Assn. had persuaded the City Council to adopt a temporary moratorium on construction in the neighborhood. Now, as he watched through a chain-link fence, a developer was scrambling to get his project under way within the 30 days before the ordinance takes effect.

He’s not the only one. A construction crew was busy Saturday sweeping up the remains of another house on the same Hi Point Street, a quiet stretch of mostly middle-class single-family homes in the Mid-City area.

And, with other demolition permits already issued by the city for the same neighborhood, more homes will probably fall before the ban on new construction begins.

“They’re just tearing up our neighborhood,” said Steinhart, an attorney and president of the association. “These are like casualties in a war.”

On Friday, about a dozen members of the Good Neighbors association, which was formed earlier this year to block the boom of apartment buildings in the community, gathered in front of one of the lots to protest the demolition of a small bungalow.

The night before, a vandal had apparently used a hose to dump hundreds of gallons of water in a dirt excavation site where another multi-family project on the same block is already under way.

“It was obviously a guerrilla tactic by the homeowners to try to keep my client from getting enough done to be allowed to keep going when the moratorium starts,” Benjamin M. Reznik, attorney for the property’s developer, Michael Stern, said Friday.

Steinhart denied that his group had anything to do with flooding the site and said that he did not condone the act.

Jerald Indvik, whose property on the 1500 block of Hi Point Street was one of the sites being razed Saturday, said there was nothing improper about beginning work on a project before the ordinance takes effect.

Indvik said he entered into a contract to purchase the property last spring, received demolition permits in August and has developed plans for an apartment building that meets all city zoning rules.

“I’m just acting in accordance with the entitlements issued to me by the city,” he said. “If I weren’t, the city would shut me down.”

At the urging of Councilman Nate Holden, whose 10th Council District encompasses the neighborhood, the city almost did shut down Indvik and other developers in the area.

By a 12-0 vote Sept. 12, the council passed an emergency moratorium that would have immediately banned the issuance of demolition and building permits in the Pico-Fairfax neighborhood and in another small community near Wilshire and Crenshaw boulevards, also in Holden’s district.

But Mayor Tom Bradley vetoed the ban, saying it was illegal and a bad form of urban planning. Since then, Assistant City Atty. Claudia McGee-Henry has told council members that it would be difficult to defend the city if the ban were implemented, but said the measure was not illegal per se.

The council, however, overrode Bradley’s veto by a 10-3 vote Wednesday. By not collecting at least 12 votes, however, the council was not able to put the ban into effect immediately, thus creating the 30-day gap until the city stops issuing permits.

The moratorium will automatically expire when a more detailed growth-control ordinance, which already is in the works, is approved for the area.

Meanwhile, residents such as Steinhart, a homeowner of 21 years, watch uneasily as bulldozers and dump trucks continue to level nearby houses to make way for apartment buildings. Although there are already a few two- and three-story multi-family complexes in the neighborhood, Steinhart contended that any more will detract from the quiet, family oriented character of the community.

“This is a fight between their profits and our quality of life,” he said. “This is not our business. We live here.”