Slums in Lawsuit Have Made Gains : Housing: Only two of the 11 buildings are still monitored by task force for code violations. Officials believe improvements were result of the legal pressure.

Almost all the buildings were in poor neighborhoods, mostly inhabited by immigrants from Latin America. Old, dark and worn, there was nothing about them to attract attention--until they were named in the city’s massive lawsuit against owners and lenders.

Then those 11 buildings became the most famous slums in Los Angeles.

Now, nearly two years later, most of them have changed a great deal.

Even though the lawsuit has largely been stalled since its 1989 filing, enough repairs have been done that only two of the 11 buildings are still being monitored by the city attorney’s slum housing task force. That group targets buildings with the worst conditions and violations of health, building and safety codes for prosecutions.

“Oh, this building had problems, and for a long time the city inspectors were here all the time,” Gustavo Villanueva recalled Thursday. He has lived for three years at 823 S. Bonnie Brae St., one of the 11 buildings, near MacArthur Park.

But now the 29-unit apartment house is painted a soft gray, and a security fence encloses a well-kept lawn planted with decorative trees.

Inside, the halls have been carpeted, the walls are painted, and tenants say water no longer rains down from overhead pipes.

Three blocks away at the Cameo Hotel at 504 S. Bonnie Brae, a once-dark lobby is now brightly painted. Floors are clean.

“Everything works,” said Lasondra White, a 22-year-old nursing student who rents a $285-per-month unit.

“Sometimes when you file a lawsuit, the filing itself gets you want you want,” said Stephanie Sautner, the deputy city attorney who heads the slum task force and prepared the 1989 lawsuit, in conjunction with the Legal Aid Foundation and a private law firm. “I believe the buildings got up to code because of pressure of that lawsuit. We had 11 buildings that had not been brought up to code in 10 years.”

The two still under scrutiny are at 504 S. Bonnie Brae and 1917 S. Central Ave., Sautner said, but she described them as “much improved.”

Although most of the 11, located near downtown Los Angeles and Hollywood, are in better condition, they are still in troubled neighborhoods. On the street outside 807 S. Fedora Ave., a three-story building now neatly kept, neighbors point out the men selling cocaine beside the liquor store and complain of the fighting and shooting at the nearby apartment house controlled by drug dealers.

Conditions are not perfect, tenants and others say. At 2616 Idell St., a two-story former hotel just northeast of downtown in Glassell Park, 26-year old Domingo Beltran complained of cockroaches and fleas and said the plumbing only “more or less” works.

“The inspectors look for minimum compliance, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t problems,” said Jorge Cabrera, a Legal Aid Foundation paralegal assistant. As the agency’s liaison with tenants from the 11 buildings, he still hears complaints.

“There is always a danger, when buildings get off task force (supervision) and when the inspectors leave, that they can slip back,” Cabrera said.