Home Knockdowns Roust More Than Drug Dealers
When Mayor Tom Bradley announced an aggressive new program last January to bulldoze abandoned homes and drive out the crack cocaine dealers and users who often inhabit them, he probably did not have Florence Kirksey or Henry Smith in mind.
Yet the city’s Operation Knockdown has caught these two unrelated individuals in its web, driving Smith out of his childhood home and into homelessness two days after Christmas, and forcing the disabled Kirksey to exhaust her life savings to save her property from the wrecking ball.
Billed as a way to rid drug-weary Los Angeles neighborhoods of about 70 homes in its first year--double the number the city ordered torn down in 1988--Operation Knockdown has indeed helped some areas. Residents from South-Central Los Angeles to San Pedro say they cheered when bulldozers flattened the seemingly impervious drug dens that had terrified them.
But Operation Knockdown has grown far beyond a war on drugs or derelict shanties.
Not 70, but 215 homes and other structures have been demolished under city orders. An unknown number of them, including Henry Smith’s, were salvageable homes in low-income areas where the city’s housing crisis is at its worst.
The demolitions make Los Angeles one of the few metropolises in the United States that is tearing down usable dwellings in the midst of a housing shortage.
City officials said the number of homes torn down is three times their original estimate because more buildings than expected were found and placed in violation, and the subsequent tear-downs proceeded more quickly than anticipated.
By contrast, in the most widely publicized demolition program in the nation, Oakland ordered only five homes torn down in its drug-riddled urban core last year. There, housing shortages have spurred a well-received campaign to restore 150 such homes.
In Boston, “Our rule is, whatever you do, don’t tear it down, even in the worst, poorest neighborhood,” said an official. Boston makes renovation loans to owners.
San Francisco, with its worsening housing crisis, does not order housing torn down. “Two-hundred homes gone in L.A.? Oh, my gosh!” said Barbara Smith, director of the mayor’s office of housing. “Wouldn’t it be better to get rid of the drug dealers and keep the housing?”
Bradley, an avid backer of Operation Knockdown, appeared in person to watch the demolition of two crack dens. His aide, Bill Chandler, said the program “is ridding innocent neighborhoods of something nobody deserves to live with.”
Safety officials also defend the program, saying that many of the destroyed homes were ramshackle magnets for illegal activities.
Some had been reinforced with bars and heavy doors by crack dealers, and one was the site of a recent rape, said Art Johnson, assistant chief of the Department of Building and Safety. “It is nearly impossible to permanently secure some of these homes,” he said. “Like magnets, when one building is removed, (dealers) move to the next.”
But officials acknowledge that most of the destroyed homes were not known crack houses. The exact number is not available, because city officials say they are not keeping a tally. Rather, the homes were deemed public nuisances because they were open to passers-by or squatters and were unkempt or sometimes hazardous, prompting complaints, officials said.
By contrast, in Miami, the drug-weary center of a major cocaine smuggling route into the United States, only homes with proven drug troubles are destroyed under the city’s anti-crack program.
Pablo Canton, Miami’s assistant director of building and zoning, said that of more than 300 homes ordered torn down last year, “95% were crack houses, and the rest were wrecks, not rebuildable.” Video cameras were used to document drug use in buildings bulldozed there.
But in Los Angeles, open and abandoned houses are being flattened because many owners cannot afford repairs, others are interested only in the appreciating land value, and still others cannot be located, city officials said.
Otis Slaughter, a senior building inspector, estimated that 10% to 30% of the houses were “completely trashed” crack dens, were deemed hazardous, or had been severely fire-damaged. For many of the other houses, he said, “the cost of demolition would go a long way toward fixing them.”
Demolition costs an owner roughly $2,500 to $4,500. Homeowners have a choice of hiring their own bulldozer or waiting for the city machines. If a homeowner waits for the city, he is charged a 40% administrative fee and a lien is placed on the property to assure payment.
To save money, more than 150 owners bulldozed their homes themselves, Johnson said. More than 50 other homes--the vast majority in poor areas of South-Central--were bulldozed by the city when owners failed to act.
Under city codes, owners have no right to a court hearing. The city conducts a title search to notify owners and lenders, but need not actually find them. Except in cases of extreme hazard where immediate demolition can be ordered, a notice is posted on the building, giving 10 days to secure it from outsiders and 30 days to repair it.
It usually takes longer to arrange a demolition, but the lag time has not proved enough for many homeowners, officials said.
One owner has threatened to sue the city because her fire-damaged home in Reseda was destroyed without her knowledge. She had not updated her property tax records, and the city notification was sent to her last known address, a city attorney said. An attorney for the homeowner declined to comment.
Another owner, Florence Kirksey, is struggling to find a loan to complete city-ordered repairs, but may still face demolition after completing $20,000 in framing and roofing work on her rental duplex.
Kirksey, a landlord who is disabled and relies on a modest rental income, said, “I would sue the city tomorrow if I had a dime left.”
Slaughter, the building inspector, said it is unfortunate when such homes are lost, “but it was decided that things have just gotten so bad with drugs, we have to move faster. We used to give people all the time in the world to fix these places because of the (city’s) housing problems.”
The new policy led to the destruction in South-Central of the boyhood home of Henry Smith, an unemployed man who, until Dec. 27, lived in the filthy, unheated, but repairable house on East 47th Place. The house was owned by his absentee family. Smith had taken in five homeless men, including a paraplegic who slept in a car in the driveway.
Police said that the men attracted trouble. The neighbors, who asked not to be named, said the men were down on their luck and had banded together to survive.
In December, a city official informed Smith that he was trespassing in the building, since it had been declared uninhabitable, and that the eyesore would be destroyed. Two days after Christmas, the city knocked down the small stucco house.
“I’ve lived here since elementary school, and I’ll have to move to Skid Row after they tear it down,” Smith, 33, said a few days before the house was razed. He wrung his hands and, in a panicky voice, recited prayers. He said he was unable to find his mother, whom he believed was living in Florida.
“I don’t know what to do,” he said. “I’m sad. I have to find something, but I don’t know how.”
Franklin James, a paraplegic who slept in his old Cadillac in Smith’s driveway, said he and the others are too poor to rent even the cheapest apartment.
A victim of severe rheumatoid arthritis, James, 53, is on a waiting list at Rancho Los Amigos Medical Center to get a pair of artificial knees that will let him walk again, he said. He lives on $380 a month in Social Security benefits.
“I’m not sufficiently able to get housing,” James said. “I’ll have to park my car on the street after this, but it’s hard to find a safe spot.”
Owners who are fighting to save their property, such as Kirksey, wonder if the city has lost track of its original purpose.
Frustrated by red tape that prevented her from getting a loan from the city’s Community Development Department, Kirksey and her brother finally were forced to spend their $7,000 life savings to make repairs on the fire-damaged duplex in South-Central.
The city has ordered her to enclose and finish the house, for an estimated total cost of $40,000. The dwelling has on two occasions attracted homeless squatters.
But Kirksey faces a Catch-22 situation. The Community Development Department required that she insure the home before it would approve a city renovation loan. Kirksey could not get such insurance, however, because the home is open to the elements and considered a bad risk.
So, after spending $7,000, Kirksey persuaded a builder to do $13,000 worth of work on credit. She is at a loss to find the $20,000 to finish the job.
“We wanted to rent this duplex to two low-income families,” Kirksey said. “We are good people. . . . The city doesn’t care if we lose everything. It just makes you sick.”
Slaughter, appreciative that Kirksey is trying to save a house that would cost $140,000 to build from scratch, has granted time extensions. But, he said, Kirksey “is not out of the woods yet.”
Unlike Oakland and Boston, there is no coordination between Los Angeles city agencies to help such owners. “We don’t communicate with other agencies aside from the police, but that is being looked at,” said Building and Safety official Johnson.
Oakland’s so-called Beat Health program uses city codes and an array of city agencies to force owners to fix derelict houses and throw out drug dealers. A Housing Conservation team ushers offending owners through the bureaucracy, helping them get loans.
“To tear down housing that could be rehabilitated is stupid,” said Oakland Police Sgt. Bob Crawford, supervisor of the Beat Health program. “I’m not saying L.A. is stupid, but we just wouldn’t do that in Oakland. If you go in there with a hard-line attitude, please understand, you will lose the housing.”
“Financially speaking, it’s crazy when demolitions cost thousands of dollars and rebuilding costs are sky-high,” said Peter Welsh, director of Boston’s Inspectional Services. Los Angeles, he said, “should think about turning eyesores into opportunities” by making sure owners get the help they need.
But Los Angeles officials defend Operation Knockdown, especially in light of what they say has been an increase in the number of abandoned homes in the city.
“Until we come into the picture, (wayward owners) are just waiting for the land to appreciate,” Johnson said. “Unfortunately, the neighbors get caught in the middle.”
Johnson said city officials are looking into ways to improve Operation Knockdown--such as fixing some homes--but that the program’s success in wiping out magnets for crime “is something we are really pleased with.” However, officials said they have no statistics on the program’s impact on crime.
Operation Knockdown has its supporters in the community too, among everyday families horrified by the transformation that crack can bring to a decent street.
Dorothy and Robert Malone recall the year that the building next to their neat, picket-fenced home on East 51st Street in South-Central was taken over by drug dealers.
Robert Malone said the violent group lived in such squalor that “giant rats came around, so big that they dragged my rat traps away.”
“I cheered the day they tore it down, and I’m speaking for my neighbors when I say that,” said Dorothy Malone.
But for families in the troubled 1100 block of East 47th Place, where the city has bulldozed two houses, the demolitions have had no effect. The block, frequented by speeding cars and bursts of gunfire, is as drug-ridden as ever, they said.
“All they’re doing on 47th is tearing down black folks’ housing,” said one man who requested anonymity. “I live in this neighborhood and I see drugs every day.”
BACKGROUND
Operation Knockdown was initiated on Jan. 6, 1989, to attack what was perceived as a rising problem of abandoned properties serving as crack houses or gang hide-outs. In 1988, before Operation Knockdown, the city tore down only 35 such “public nuisance” homes and other buildings. Under the program, the city has leveled 215 homes and other buildings.
