Seismic Law Compliance Reaches 85% : Housing: The city pushes owners to complete work on remaining unreinforced masonry buildings by 1992 deadline.

Inspector Scott McGill called the dilapidated three-story apartment building one of the city’s “hard cases” as he walked down the bare floors of its long, narrow halls. Apart from graffiti, broken windows and leaking pipes, the building at 739 S. Coronado St. is long overdue for structural strengthening against earthquakes as required under Los Angeles law.

But 10 years after the Los Angeles City Council enacted new standards to prevent older masonry buildings from collapsing during a major quake, this apartment house is more the exception than the rule, city officials say.

After years of concern at City Hall over whether landlords would meet city deadlines--stepped up after the 1985 Mexico City earthquake--about 85% of the 1,652 residential apartment buildings have complied with the seismic safety law, according to the city’s Building and Safety Department.

The buildings house close to 150,000 people who tend to be among the city’s poorest tenants. Their owners have either completed the strengthening, have their buildings under construction to do the work, or have emptied them of tenants, according to Carl Deppe, chief of the earthquake safety division.

The 739 S. Coronado building is one of 200 where no safety work has begun, but Deppe says he is “hopeful” all buildings will be in compliance by the 1992 deadline.

That’s a big improvement over 1989 when building officials told the City Council that nearly a third of the apartment houses were still untouched.

But the ultimate fate of the 200 buildings where no construction has started--and another 50 where building officials say construction work is “lagging”--is unknown. These buildings house an estimated 18,000 people.

The building improvements have also meant higher rents in most of the completed buildings, because the city allows owners to pass on much of their expenses.

Throughout the last decade, housing advocates and officials alike worried that owners of these old structures, which tend to have the city’s lowest rents, would tear them down rather than pay to do the work. So far, about 13% of these residential buildings have been vacated or demolished, displacing more than 20,000 people.

“What is encouraging is the demolitions have been less than we feared,” said Barbara Zeidman, director of the city’s Rent Stabilization Division.

But the remaining unstrengthened structures are still a question mark. “I fear for their loss,” she added.

“These are the toughest,” Deppe said of the remaining buildings. Building inspectors are “zeroing in” on the laggards, he added, but “they represent a much more difficult compliance problem.”

Enforcement has been stepped up since 1989, Deppe said, to focus on these residential owners. He said some owners “need financial help, there’s no doubt about that. But for the most part it’s a matter of pushing them.”

The City Council’s 1981 ordinance ordered owners to vacate or demolish unreinforced masonry buildings built before 1933 if they failed to upgrade the buildings to modern construction standards adopted. Most are located in downtown, Hollywood, Westlake, Wilshire and South-Central areas.

As of now, Deppe said, 956 buildings with 26,922 housing units have been fully strengthened, and another 282 are under construction.

Many of the remaining buildings are small, two-story buildings in the South-Central area that have small stores on the ground floor and a few apartment units above.

Stephen E. Perry, owner of one such building on the corner of South Central and Vernon avenues, said he was leaving his property vacant rather than doing seismic work for two reasons: the cost of the work, which contractors estimate averages $7 to $10 a square foot, and his belief that his corner site will someday be valuable to a developer.

Perry is leaving the building empty until he gets a good price for it, he said. “I’m waiting like the Indians didn’t wait in Manhattan.”

Some owners, however, question whether the seismic work will actually protect the buildings or their occupants in the event of a large earthquake.

“Inspectors and contractors have told me they hope they’ll stay up, but there’s no guarantee,” groused one owner, who asked that his name not be used.

“That’s true, there’s no guarantee,” Deppe said. “But there is a much better chance of the building surviving an earthquake, preventing collapse in a moderate to major earthquake, if it’s strengthened. An example is the (1987) Whittier Narrows earthquake, where strengthened buildings performed far better than unstrengthened ones.”

Compliance has been slower among the 6,444 commercial properties covered by the law, Deppe noted, where 1,000 buildings have still not started construction. Deppe believes some owners have had financing problems not experienced by residential owners, who can obtain assistance through city loan programs.

Increased enforcement, Deppe said, has included intensive monitoring by inspectors, as well as lawsuits--11 so far--filed against apartment owners who have failed to comply.

Another five landlords have had their tenants’ rents taken away through the city’s Rent Escrow Account Program, which authorizes the city to seize rents until housing codes, including seismic reinforcement, are met.

Alan Devenzin, owner of 739 S. Coronado, is no stranger to the rent escrow program. His building was placed under its jurisdiction last December for longstanding electrical, plumbing and other problems. The 31-year-old Inglewood process-server said this was just one of many setbacks he has faced since he acquired the 78-year-old structure in 1988.

He has already been prosecuted by the city attorney several times for various housing violations, he said, and spent nearly six months of the last year in jail because of it. The building remains in bad condition, he said, because “I don’t have any money to repair it.”

Devenzin knows he faces more prosecution for failing to do the earthquake work. “The city’s already filed lawsuits against me and I have no money,” he said. “I don’t know why they are going to file another.”

Devenzin said he bought the building with a small down payment, but had no experience operating an apartment house, and didn’t know the extent of its dilapidation. Now all he wants to do is get rid of it.

“I was naive,” he said. “I wanted to own some property. It’s the American dream. But this has been a serious nightmare.”