‘Bootleg’ Rentals: Be It Ever So Humble, It’s Also Illegal : Housing: The affordable apartments have become an irksome fixture in garages and spare rooms throughout the L.A. region, officials say.
Dennis Cassity’s beach house is a modest place, really. OK, so it’s a garage.
But such a cozy garage. Tiled bathroom, kitchenette, wall-to-wall carpeting, a patio with an ocean view, only steps from the sand, on one of the better streets in Hermosa Beach--all for about $100 a month less than the cheapest one-bedroom in town.
“Of course, I knew it was illegal,” the 40-year-old computer repairman said with a laugh, recalling when he moved in 4 1/2 years ago. “I was born and raised on the beach. I know a bootleg (apartment) when I see one. But I was going through a divorce and, well, you throw in two ex-wives and child support--I just wanted something I could afford.”
So Cassity settled for a rental on the beach side of Hermosa Avenue and the wrong side of the law. And though he has been comfortable there, he was not surprised last month when he learned his apartment had been built without a permit in a place where apartments are not allowed. His landlord gave him the word last week, he said--he has to be out by the end of June.
Welcome to the underground of the Southern California real estate market, where one man’s misdemeanor is another man’s home. No one knows exactly how many “illegal dwelling units” there are in the Los Angeles area, but planning and building authorities say they have become an irksome fixture in garages and spare rooms throughout the region and a particularly troublesome problem in the beach cities.
City officials hate them for the crowding and safety hazards they cause, claiming that they make a mockery of zoning laws. Renters, on the other hand, say they are one of the few sources of affordable housing for young adults, single parents, the elderly and the poor in densely packed and high-priced communities.
In Manhattan Beach, where a one-bedroom apartment rents for $750 a month or more, about 100 bootleg complaints a year are filed with the city’s residential zoning inspector. Culver City, on the cramped Westside, launched a crackdown in March. Redondo Beach, which logs about five bootleg complaints a month, last year caught a landlord on the city’s north side who had lined his wine cellar with bunk beds and rented it out to 16 immigrants.
“Illegal units have been a problem for as long as I’ve been here, and that’s been since 1978,” said William Grove, director of building and safety for Hermosa Beach. “At any one time, we’ve got a solid core of 25 to 30 cases.”
Every few years, he said, the city launches a new enforcement campaign, but the problem always seems to return. The most recent get-tough effort involved hiring a special prosecutor in November to concentrate on enforcing the city’s anti-bootleg laws.
The first of those special prosecutions is scheduled to go to trial May 9--against Cassity’s landlord, Edward W. Roszyk of Redondo Beach. Besides Cassity’s cheery bachelor apartment, Roszyk is accused of having added at least two other illegal units to single-family homes he owns, one taking up 120 square feet at the back of a Manhattan Avenue garage, and the other in the garage of a shingled cottage down the street from Cassity’s place.
The units have prompted city prosecutors to charge Roszyk with a dozen misdemeanor violations of the Uniform Building Code, the Uniform Plumbing Code and the Municipal Code.
One afternoon last week, Roszyk tacked up hand-lettered “For Sale” signs on two of the three properties named in his case. On one of the properties, a handyman dismantled what court records say had been a garage apartment with an extremely low-slung loft bed.
Roszyk declined to comment on the charges. But interviews with the city’s prosecutor and court records indicate that he is taking steps to cooperate with the city. If he complies, the city may drop the charges.
But, according to an affidavit by city building inspector F. Paul Conreal, Roszyk has been reluctant in the past. He was offered the chance last summer to voluntarily shut down his bootlegs, and “his response was that he would not do anything (to comply) because he felt there was selective enforcement . . . and he was being singled out and harassed.”
Roszyk’s tenants--and other supporters of bootlegs in the beach cities--say he has a point.
“I don’t think the landlord was that much in the wrong,” said 24-year-old Jeff Gunn, who said he paid Roszyk $400 a month for one of five units in what was supposed to be a single-family home with a garage.
“There’s garage conversions everywhere--everyone wants to live by the beach.”
A Manhattan Beach renter, who spoke on condition that her name be withheld, agreed.
“I’d rather have a lot of little houses for people than these big, giant houses they’re putting up in Manhattan Beach that I’ll never be able to afford unless I win the lottery,” the woman said.
She does not live in a bootleg herself, she added, but she shares a house in which one bedroom has illegally been converted to a bachelor apartment.
“If my landlord can cheat and, in turn, save me money, I’m not going to tell on him,” she said, adding that as a resident, she is far more offended by the trend toward tearing down little beach cottages and erecting two- and three-story mansions in their place.
“You want to talk about codes,” she said, “let’s talk about these people who block everybody’s view with 5,300-square-foot homes in tiny little love shack zones.”
But there’s another side of the argument: the side, for example, of the people who live next door to illegal apartments. Consider the observations of Roy A. Judd, who lives next door to the Roszyk property where Gunn lived.
“He (Roszyk) is getting $2,600 a month total income off what’s supposed to be one single-family dwelling,” Judd said. “But there are six people living there with no legal parking places, and so there are six times the cars, six times the trash and six times the people going in and out at all hours of the night.”
For the first few months after Roszyk remodeled the house next door to Judd’s in 1984, Judd said he didn’t complain because the tenants there were friendly and quiet.
“But then they moved out and he rented it to a bunch of party animals who seemed to live in split shifts,” Judd said. “There were 24-hour-a-day parties. Twenty people in the hot tub at 2 and 3 in the morning. . . . Finally enough was enough. The neighbors declared war.”
Judd fired off a flurry of letters to City Hall. Other neighbors followed suit. At one point, he said, about 15 people marched over to the city manager’s office to complain about the bootleg and the noise.
Such feuds, city officials say, are the most fruitful source of tips about illegal apartments. In Roszyk’s case, it was the complaints of his angry neighbors that prompted the city not only to crack down on him, but finally to hire the special prosecutor.
And the battles can be bitter. In 1988, for example, the annexation of the unincorporated Orange County community of South Laguna to Laguna Beach left the city with 119 new complaints about bootlegs. When the city launched an effort to phase the units into compliance, the result was an all-out war.
A recall campaign was launched, and city officials soon found that their own building records were being probed. The community development director got caught with an illegal addition. A city councilman was nabbed with an improper den off his garage. But most dramatic was the case of building inspector John Hingula, who ended up suffering an anxiety attack and quitting his 10-year job because the pro-bootleggers revealed that his mother-in-law had a bootleg and the inspector hadn’t cited her.
As soon as the complaint arose, Hingula had it corrected, city officials said. But the incident “became political,” Hingula told The Times afterward. When he passed out at work on the day after he removed the stove and opened up the wall that had turned his mother-in-law’s house into a duplex, he decided to quit his job, he said. Former co-workers at Laguna Beach City Hall said he has since moved with his family to El Salvador.
One problem with bootlegs, city officials say, is that they are rarely built in compliance with fire and other safety codes, and so can be hazardous for the tenants.
“I saw one guy try to rent out what he called a ‘single’ that consisted of a 6-foot-high basement area that was 60 square feet, with the appliances plugged in next to the water heater for the main house,” said Mike Magdaleno, senior code enforcement officer for Redondo Beach. “The appliances were a hot plate and a microwave, and the ceiling was so low that you bumped your head every time you walked up the stairs.”
Often, Magdaleno and others say, the inhabitants of such places are elderly people. In those cases, city officials say the best they can do is to bend the rules to give the landlord and tenant extra time, so the tenant can find a new home.
“But it’s a very sensitive and delicate social issue,” added Kyle Butterwick, community development director for Laguna Beach.
Only rarely do bootleg cases reach the point of criminal prosecution. Most of the time, just the threat is enough to prompt a landlord to dismantle the unit and evict the tenant, authorities say.
“But then the property changes hands,” said Manhattan Beach zoning inspector Bee Wilkening, “and another . . . ‘creative’ owner thinks that maybe something can be done with the property.
“And wouldn’t you know it,” said Wilkening, laughing, “the complaints you got before start coming around again.”
