Shoring up the ‘Bricks’

Last April, Los Angeles voters narrowly defeated a $100-million bond issue to underwrite low-interest loans to shore up old brick apartment buildings, the city’s largest single source of housing for poor families. In the wake of the Bay Area earthquake, Los Angeles City Councilman Richard Alatorre wants to try again. We agree.

The City Council should approve Alatorre’s proposal to put another $100-million bond issue on the June ballot, with $90 million allocated to making old apartment buildings less vulnerable to quakes and $10 million to building more shelters for homeless people.

The low-interest loans would provide an incentive for landlords who are willing to comply with the city’s 1981 Earthquake Hazard Reduction Ordinance. For those who refuse to make their buildings safer, Councilwoman Gloria Molina, would expand a new city ordinance originally designed to persuade landlords to make ordinary repairs. The Rent Escrow Assistance Program allows the city to collect rent directly from tenants and use it to make repairs itself.

Molina, the chairman of the council’s new Housing and Community Redevelopment Committee, is also being tough on the city’s Building and Safety Department. She wants to know--with much greater precision--how many brick buildings are in need of reinforcement, and where they are located. That is a reasonable request.

The old brick apartments are located primarily within a 3-mile radius of downtown, in the Mid-Wilshire District and Hollywood. The current estimates, made last week before the City Council’s Community Redevelopment and Housing Committee, put the citywide inventory at 1,657. Molina thinks there are far more than that, largely because the inventory shows few such buildings in her district, just west of downtown, even though her staff counted hundreds of them after the 1987 earthquake. She has insisted on a recount.

These apartments typically rent for $350 a month or less and provide shelter for 50,000 low-income families. The loss of rent receipts would provide a stick to push landlords. The council has no more alternative to trying again on the bond issue than those families do to living in the buildings at risk.