Miracle Riled : Tenants, Landlords at Odds Over Razing of Apartments

Two years ago, when developers tore down Barbara Caplan’s apartment house on Detroit Street, she moved only a few blocks away, determined to stay in a neighborhood she loved for its gracious old buildings and sense of community.

Caplan’s new landlord assured her that he was against the redevelopment rippling through the neighborhood, and that he had no interest in selling out. A year later he did just that. In June, Caplan once more packed up her belongings and teen-age cat to escape the wrecking ball.

Such is life in 13 square blocks of Miracle Mile just north of Wilshire Boulevard. Nearly 50 small apartment houses have been bulldozed in the past four years to make way for much larger “luxury” buildings that are dramatically transforming a slice of old Los Angeles. The explosion of demolitions and construction has given the neighborhood something of a post-earthquake quality. Streets are potholed from heavy equipment, and vacant lots sit for months, as conspicuous as a missing tooth.

Hundreds of tenants have been evicted as 60-year-old period revival buildings with wood-beamed ceilings and hand-plastered walls have fallen one by one, replaced by new stucco apartment houses with rooftop swimming pools, two-tiered parking garages and markedly higher rents.

The changes in Miracle Mile have been wrenching, breeding resentment and anti-development efforts on the part of renters, an eclectic mix of struggling artistic types, elderly and young professionals. They mourn the loss not only of fancifully designed ‘20s and ‘30s buildings with gables and towers, but also the destruction of relatively affordable housing, intimate streetscapes and a way of living that is increasingly hard to find in Los Angeles as demands for greater density, preservation and affordable housing clash.

“We’re all like these fleeing refugees looking for a home,” lamented Mark Rosman, a 33-year-old film director and writer who lived in the same Hauser Boulevard apartment house as Caplan before it was leveled earlier this summer. “What neighborhood is next? Do I go south of Wilshire? Do I go north of Beverly? When are those places going to start going?”

Even residents of the new apartment houses seem to have mixed feelings about the metamorphosis of Detroit, Cloverdale and nearby streets. “I think it’s a shame,” said Chris Bomkamp, a USC senior who fled university housing for a new, $1,200-a-month, two-bedroom apartment in Brighton Villa. “It’s the mentality of making a quick buck. And older people and people who don’t have the money are being pushed out.”

The tear-downs began in 1987, after a Los Angeles company, Homestead Group Associates, decided that the centrally located and increasingly trendy district was ripe for redevelopment--particularly since it always had been zoned for density more than double what existed with the six- to eight-unit, two-story apartment buildings that dominated the area.

When word got around that Homestead had bought a dozen apartment houses and planned to raze them for new buildings, a tenants group sprang up in vocal opposition. Members staged protests and tried to get historic preservation protection for the neighborhood and a moratorium on the demolitions. When they failed, rebuffed by a City Council intent on creating more housing, the activists splattered red paint on the vacated buildings to symbolize blood.

The tenant leaders moved away and the group dissolved, but resistance to the redevelopment has simmered. As other companies followed in Homestead’s wake and the new buildings popped up on block after block, so did anti-development graffiti.

“Ugly.”

“Overpriced.”

‘Another example of post-Modern urban blight.”

“Their construction is our destruction.”

Such scribblings appeared overnight on construction fencing and advertisements for the new apartment houses, vying with the developer descriptions of “luxurious,” “sassy,” and “fitness and leisure apartments.”

The graffiti struck a chord with Denise Robb, a legal secretary and stand-up comic whose Cloverdale Avenue apartment is virtually surrounded by new buildings. She and her boyfriend started to organize another round of opposition to the development.

In the past six months, her group, the Miracle Mile Action Committee, has picketed construction sites, shouting such phrases as “Stop corporate greed,” and gone to City Hall, asking again for historic protection for the neighborhood or a decrease in density.

“All the buildings I thought were so beautiful were being torn down like that,” Robb said, snapping her fingers. “You see the fence, the wrecking ball and it’s gone. It’s like it didn’t even exist.”

The resurgent renter opposition has infuriated many owners of the older buildings, whose properties are more valuable as a four-story building lot than as a two-story apartment house.

“All these kids care about is low rents,” snarled one landlady as she watched a small protest at a neighborhood construction site earlier this year. “In two years’ time, half of them won’t even be living here.”

Another landlord, Jeffrey Fader, who owns 12 older buildings in the area, has taken a cue from Robb and organized the district’s property owners against the downzoning efforts.

“I don’t want my values diminished,” stressed Fader, sitting in his Fairfax Avenue office under photographs of his buildings, named after family members. He insists that he has no plans to sell his properties, but would nonetheless “like the option to get as much money for them as I can.

“For the tenant to tell the landlord what to do is very communistic,” he complained. “This is a free country. It’s a capitalistic country.”

Others in his group argue that it makes no sense to downzone the area when it is bounded by two of the city’s major commercial thoroughfares, Wilshire Boulevard and La Brea Avenue, making it a logical spot for higher density.

“If you’re going to stop housing, you’d better stop commercial development,” remarked Shane Astani, whose company, Astani Industries, is a partner in three new buildings and is constructing a fourth on its own.

Lobbied by both sides, the city councilman for the district, Council President John Ferraro, has adopted a middle-of-the-road position. His office recently drew up a proposal that would not stop the tear-downs but would lower density and height limits, as well as adding requirements for guest parking at the new buildings.

“It won’t be as attractive to demolish,” suggested Ferraro, who said his office is concerned not only about increasing congestion in the district but also about the loss of affordable housing.

“We’re tearing down affordable housing and building housing that is not affordable,” remarked Renee Weitzer, Ferraro’s planning deputy. “All the new buildings have higher rents than the old buildings.”

Fader’s one-bedroom units, for example, rent for $625 to $725 a month, about $200 less than the new buildings charge. Unlike the older apartments, the new units are also not subject to rent controls, which do not apply to buildings constructed after 1978.

Ferraro’s answer is to require the inclusion of low-income apartments in new buildings. Along with a density reduction, his proposal, which must go before the city Planning Commission and the council, would require that 15% of the units in newly constructed apartment houses be set aside for low-income tenants.

Another compromise addresses the eviction of the elderly--one of the major rallying cries in the crusade against Homestead’s development plans four years ago. The company agreed to help establish a 28-unit housing project for low-income senior citizens.

Homestead found a nonprofit foundation connected with the Jewish Federation Council to operate the $3-million, HUD-subsidized project, which will require yet another demolition and more evictions. It is to be built on a corner now occupied by a three-unit building Robb’s group has vainly tried to save, at 4th Street and Cochran.

In the meantime, the higher rents of the new buildings have made them more difficult to fill than the developers originally anticipated, said Marty Shelton, a broker with CB Commercial. Rent discounts and leasing concessions have helped attract tenants, but still, some of the new apartment houses have vacancy rates of 10% to 25%. “Open House” signs and “Now Leasing” banners are ubiquitous, permanent fixtures on the pebbled stucco walls of the new apartments.

For all the venom heaped on them by development opponents, the new buildings do have their fans. “It’s an instant building, but I enjoy living in it,” said a recent transplant from Chicago. “It’s sort of a pleasure to have my first dishwasher and air conditioning.”

He added that he thought the neighborhood was well rid of some of the old apartment houses, which he called “dumps.” Yet, he too had reservations about the wholesale redevelopment of the district.

“I wouldn’t like to see them all go. I would like to see a cap put on the new buildings. It’s getting a little out of hand, especially when they can’t fill them.”

After a long and frustrating search, Caplan, a legal secretary and dance instructor with ramrod straight posture, went west to a 1950s building in Beverly Hills.

“It ain’t what it was,” she said with a sigh, grieving for the charm, space and closets she lost with the destruction of her Miracle Mile home. “I still get sad when I think of that place.”

Changing Neighborhood

The Miracle Mile apartment district has been the site of ongoing demolitions as older buildings are torn down to make way for much larger complexes.