Indigent Tenants Evicted From Pacoima Motel : Housing: The city condemned it because of health and safety violations that included raw sewage running into the street.

In a scene of confusion and despair, at least four families and about two dozen other indigent tenants were forced from filth to uncertainty Monday as the city moved to condemn a badly deteriorated residential motel in Pacoima.

City officials and charity workers offered evicted residents of the Olive Motel on San Fernando Road rides to the Valley Shelter in North Hollywood, as well as impromptu advice on how to deal with the county welfare bureaucracy. But as they gathered up their modest belongings and calmed their children, many said they could not decide what to do and were afraid to leave behind furniture, trucks and other items too big to take to the 30-day, emergency shelter or the homes of friends.

“My furniture. Oh, God,” said Maria Rutilia Estrada, 54, a temporary factory worker who said she had lived in the court-style, 18-unit complex since 1971 and has no place else to go.

The Los Angeles Building and Safety Department ordered the motel’s crude, wooden cabins vacated and boarded up by Monday because of violations that included raw sewage running into the street.

The violations capped a series of problems at the motel at 10867 San Fernando Road, which police said has been the scene of prostitution and drug-dealing in recent months.

G. Martin Jacobs, an attorney representing tenants, said residents paid $80 a week in rent until utilities were shut off last fall. After that, several families moved out and were replaced by squatters, who brought crime to the motel, Jacobs said.

Jacobs said he has been negotiating with owner David Reza, so far unsuccessfully, for relocation money that would enable the evicted residents to find new apartments.

Reza, who runs a furniture business in Simi Valley, was not at the motel Monday and could not be reached for comment. His attorney, Gerry De Simone of Van Nuys, said Reza is being unfairly blamed for all the problems at the motel, which he claims began to deteriorate severely while owned by Rod Daniels of Granada Hills.

Daniels claimed in a separate interview that the problems were carried over from Reza, from whom he bought the property in 1988. Reza reacquired the site last fall through foreclosure.

Utilities were shut off last September while the complex was in a foreclosure proceeding, Jacobs said. Since then, he and tenant Susana Ramirez said, tenants have been cooking and heating bath water on hot plates. Electricity came through makeshift wiring that was visible Monday, while flies buzzed over pools of raw sewage and piles of garbage.

Daniels said Monday he purchased the motel without knowing it was the subject of numerous complaints. He said he stopped making mortgage payments within two or three months, forcing Reza--the mortgage holder--to foreclose last November.

“Even while it was under foreclosure, we were repairing and rehabbing. When it went back to him, that’s when it became the mess it’s in right now,” Daniels said. He said he was an innocent target of citations issued against Reza.

But De Simone said Daniels was responsible for having the utilities shut off because he had not paid his bills, and he said Daniels’ firing of a longtime residential manager triggered an influx of undesirable tenants that made the motel a constant nuisance. De Simone also said Daniels had resisted the foreclosure, doing all he could to save his ownership.

The motel’s future was as unclear as that of its residents Monday. Carney said the city generally discourages demolition in favor of renovation. But Jacobs said police were eager for the complex to be razed to prevent further squatting and crime and that city and county officials were attempting to speed the motel’s demolition by obtaining the necessary waivers.

“Neither one of these landlords thought one whit about the people who lived there and that’s the bottom line,” said Jacobs, adding that he would urge the city to prosecute Reza and possibly Daniels. “I think what they’ve done is criminal, not just negligent, to allow the people to live like that.”