‘Heartbreak Hotel’ Raises Questions on Long Beach’s Enforcement of Codes

At the entrance to the run-down California bungalow at 932 St. Louis Ave. is a collection of notices tacked to the wall. One warns against using hot plates in the rooms. Another discusses the Bible. A third is a city Health Department permit for a six- to 10-room hotel.

The trouble with the city permit is that it was granted last August for a building that appears to violate any number of city codes. Following up complaints from disgruntled tenants, city inspectors have in recent months cited the house’s owner for more than a dozen health code violations ranging from cockroach infestations to no heat.

What’s more, the “Trevia Hotel,” as it is called, lacks the required business license, is located in an area that is not zoned for hotels and has illegal room additions, bad plumbing and faulty wiring, according to city inspectors.

“All this was done illegally,” agreed Roosevelt Anderson, who has lived in one of the rooms for about two years and also worked in the past as a maintenance man for the house’s elderly owner. Like several of the other tenants, he has stopped paying rent. Rents range between $300 and $400 a month.

“It’s a mess,” observed Steven Le Cheminant, a team leader who oversees Health Department inspectors. Asked how the landlord managed to obtain a Health Department permit, Le Cheminant replied: “That’s a good question. . . . We should have inspected it once a year.”

But there is no indication in the building’s file that it was routinely inspected--another example of what housing advocates contend is the city’s abysmal record of enforcing health and building standards in housing occupied by the poor.

“I know housing was not getting the routine inspections it should have,” Le Cheminant conceded, but he said his department has made considerable progress in the past six months in catching up with its caseload. With about half of the city’s fiscal year over, his inspectors have checked 60% of the 5,000 buildings they are supposed to visit every year, Le Cheminant said.

Last month the city auditor released a report on the backlog of cases in the Department of Planning and Building, noting that the department was so overwhelmed with complaints that it was unable to respond to many of them. The audit did not review the Health Department.

The tenants on St. Louis Street, many of them on disability or welfare, complain that in recent months they have at times been without water or bathroom facilities, have suffered through the season’s bout of unusually low temperatures without heat and have no cooking facilities.

“We don’t have nothing. . . . In my room it feels like a refrigerator,” grumbled Mealum Tillman, who lives in an addition in the junk-filled, paved rear yard of the bungalow.

Their landlord is Eli Howard, who says he is 101 and has owned the house for nearly four decades. “We’re not in violation,” said Howard, who was staying briefly in one of the Trevia’s rooms a week ago while his Signal Hill home was being fumigated.

As his ex-wife looked on from a wheelchair and a pot of food bubbled on a hot plate in his temporary room, Howard and his maintenance man insisted that the tenants had heat, that they had never been promised cooking facilities and that many of the problems they complained about were the result of their own abuse.

Asked to prove the units had heat, Bill Blomberg, Howard’s maintenance man, stuck his head down a dirt-encrusted heating vent in Anderson’s room and after about 10 minutes of tinkering finally got it working. Anderson said it was the first time in two years he had heat.

Howard has given eviction notices to Anderson and several other tenants, who have gone to Municipal Court to fight the eviction with the help of the Long Beach Legal Aid Foundation.

Blomberg said Howard is evicting the tenants because they are not paying rent and because he wants to fix the building up and sell it.

Legal Aid says they are being kicked out because they have dared to complain about the building’s slum-like conditions. “I think this case clearly is retaliation,” Legal Aid attorney Oliver Wang asserted.

Legal Aid attorney Dennis Rockway said he was amazed that the city had allowed the tenants to remain without heat since November.

“I was shocked to hear that the Health Department cited the place for no heat . . . in November and gave the owner 30 days to comply.”

On Jan. 7, the city prosecutor’s office sent a letter to Howard threatening legal action if he did not correct the health code violations by Jan. 18. In the meantime, the city building department is also investigating building code violations.

While Howard was making some repairs a week ago, several tenants said they were still without heat.

Le Cheminant said landlords had to be given time to make repairs and that it typically takes two to three months between the time a tenant’s complaint is first received and a case is referred to the city prosecutor.

While a case slowly wends its way through the enforcement labyrinth, Le Cheminant acknowledged, “it leaves (tenants) without heat, it leaves with them with a hole in the wall.”