BAY AREA QUAKE : 100,000 People Live in Unsafe Buildings in L.A., City Officials Say

The owners of aging, unreinforced brick buildings that house more than 100,000 people in Los Angeles have made little or no effort to shore up the structures despite a 1981 ordinance that requires the repairs, city officials said Wednesday.

The buildings are largely in low-income areas of the city and are considered by engineers to be highly vulnerable to the side-to-side shaking caused by a major earthquake, such as the 6.9-magnitude Bay Area temblor on Tuesday evening. Engineers predict that many of the brick-and-mortar buildings will simply crumble under the stress.

But their owners have ignored the city ordinance even though federal grant money is available for low-interest loans to finance the repairs, Ralph R. Esparza, director of the Community Development Department’s housing division, told the City Council.

“The basic problem is that the programs have been voluntary in nature,” Esparza said.

“I’m actually steaming over it,” said Councilman Hal Bernson, chairman of the council’s Planning Committee.

“If they can’t get financing, that’s one thing,” Bernson said. “But to deliberately allow the endangerment of these lives simply because they don’t want to respond. . . .”

Mayor Tom Bradley acknowledged at a Wednesday press conference that the city may be moving too slowly in forcing the owners of the aging buildings to upgrade them.

Bradley said the Bay Area earthquake “does cause us to take another look at the speed” with which the city is requiring owners of aging buildings to comply with the 1981 ordinance.

Also at the press conference was Warren V. O’Brien, general manager of the Department of Building and Safety, who said that owners of unsafe apartment buildings in Los Angeles have not been demolishing or rebuilding them as quickly as they should. He, too, predicted that the Tuesday earthquake will prompt owners to act more quickly.

“This earthquake is an eye-opener,” O’Brien said.

O’Brien said the owners of 647 residential buildings containing 18,665 units have completed repairs on their own since the 1981 law was passed. Another 152 residential structures with 5,294 units have been demolished.

Estimates of the number of residential buildings that remain to be fixed range from 814, according to O’Brien, to 1,600, according to Esparza. At least 100,000 renters live in those buildings, O’Brien said.

Nevertheless, City Council members vowed Wednesday to get tough with the owners and said they will cease the practice of granting extensions of time for the repairs to be made.

“If the money’s available and they are not willing to do the work, then we as a city are going to have to step in and take control away from them,” Bernson said.

Bernson said the city may be able to take over the buildings using the authority of the so-called “slumlord” ordinance, which allows the city to make repairs to buildings if landlords fail to do so. In return, the city collects the rent.

The problem with the 1981 law, Bernson said, is that the only penalty it provides for failure to upgrade buildings is condemnation and demolition.

“The council was reluctant to allow these buildings to be torn down,” Bernson said. “Nowhere in the city is there that level of rents, as far as low-cost housing is concerned.”

Bernson said that if he had been aware that the owners were not taking advantage of federal grants obtained by the city for repair, “I would have been after them with a very large stick.” He added that he intends to sponsor a new ballot proposition calling for the issuance of bonds to finance the repairs. If necessary, he said, he will sponsor a new ordinance giving the city more authority to get the buildings repaired.

At present, $16 million to $18 million of federal grant money for seismic repairs has gone unclaimed, according to Esparza.

Los Angeles County, which has authority over unincorporated areas, implemented an earthquake ordinance in February, 1988, and notified owners of 74 old masonry buildings that they must buttress or demolish the structures by 1991, or prove they are structurally sound.

About 80% of the buildings are shops, stores, restaurants, offices and apartment houses located in the Firestone area south of Huntington Park or along busy commercial strips in East Los Angeles. Three are small churches.

The buildings, all erected before 1934, are considered the most dangerous in the county’s unincorporated areas because their brick and block walls are not melded to floors or roofs with steel and tend to collapse during severe earthquakes, county engineers said.

Owners of another 210 unreinforced masonry structures--also concentrated in the Firestone and East Los Angeles areas--will be required to make their buildings safer against earthquakes at least by 1994, they said.