City Orders Skid Row Hotel to Be Evacuated

The city took the rare step on Monday of ordering the evacuation of a filthy, dilapidated Skid Row hotel in downtown Los Angeles because of conditions described by City Atty. James K. Hahn as too “dangerous” for continued habitation.

Police and city Housing Enforcement Task Force inspectors posted notices giving 24 hours for a small, but unknown, number of permanent residents of the Olympia Hotel--along with transients, drug users, drug dealers and prostitutes, who have illegally broken into rooms--to leave by 10 a.m. today.

Water and power to the hotel at 1203 E. 7th St. is scheduled to be shut off today.

People have continued to live in the Olympia, despite flooded hallways, broken windows, cockroach infestations, human feces on the floor of inoperable bathrooms, no fire protection and conditions so dangerous that a security guard says he doesn’t go into the hotel at night.

The landlords charged $300 a month for one room, with a bathroom shared with others.

“At night here, it’s like a movie, but when we see a movie you say, ‘there’s no place like this,’ but there is,” security guard Devin Lesser said Monday.

Recently, a guard hired by the manager to protect the building and its residents was killed, Lesser said. After that, he said, the security firm who had hired the guard refused to provide further security for the hotel.

Hahn described the evacuation as a “drastic step to deal with a drastic problem” in view of the need for affordable housing. But, he said, in the Olympia’s case, “We have conditions so dangerous that people simply cannot continue to live there.

“There was not a single smoke detector working in the entire building,” Hahn said.

A handful of families ordered out of the building will be aided in finding another place to live by Las Familias del Pueblo, a nonprofit organization that helps Skid Row families move out of the blighted area, Hahn said.

The city’s closing of the Olympia is unusual, according to city officials, but not unprecedented. The Travelers Hotel, on nearby Ceres Avenue, was ordered closed about two years ago because of chronic drug-trafficking and slum problems.

The city attorney said that his office planned to take criminal charges against co-owners of the Olympia, identified as Shlomo Bina, 47, of San Marino, and Daryoush Daian, 33, of Beverly Hills, for their “failure to repair slum conditions at the Olympia.”

Deputy City Atty. Stephanie Sauter, who heads the city’s housing enforcement unit, said prosecutors will ask the court next Monday to revoke the probation of Bina and Daian growing out of a Feb. 1 conviction. The two were given a deadline to repair the Olympia.

“We will ask for Bina and Daian to be ordered to seal the Olympia and keep it sealed until they have completed the sale of the property,” Sauter said.

The hotel owners could not be reached for comment Monday. They are in the process of selling the hotel to the Skid Row Housing Trust, a nonprofit organization that buys substandard area hotels and refurbishes them.

Monday’s evacuation order was the second Housing Enforcement Task Force action against Bina and Daian this month, according to the city attorney’s office.

They were charged on May 3 in a 39-count criminal complaint growing out of slum conditions found last June in the four-story, 51-room Crescent Hotel at 617 E. 5th St. in central Los Angeles, prosecutors said.

The two are scheduled for arraignment in that case on May 24 in Los Angeles Municipal Court.