Slumlord Traced--It’s the City : Housing: Los Angeles owns 17 houses and two apartment buildings where shabby conditions and community problems are not unusual.

The wood frame home on Palm Grove Avenue is a typical eyesore: The paint is peeling, weeds abound, part of the porch is missing and graffiti covers a front-yard tree. Neighbors said the West Adams house became a hangout for drinking and drug-dealing gang members.

But the real surprise came when a businessman, frustrated by the lack of response from city officials and police, discovered the identity of the absentee owner: The city of Los Angeles.

“We were shocked,” said Gloria Walker, president of the local Neighborhood Watch. “Here we are paying taxes and asking the city for help.”

Unfortunately, when the city is a landlord, shabby conditions, eyesores and community problems are not unusual. Through a variety of circumstances, ranging from lawsuits to abandoned improvement projects, the city has become the owner of 17 houses and two apartment buildings in Watts, Venice, West Adams, Hollywood and Pacific Palisades.

While the community problem caused by the house on Palm Grove was extreme, deterioration is common at homes under city control. On a recent tour, one house was covered with graffiti, and neighbors said it had been that way for a year. Another had been badly burned, and a third was boarded up, with overgrown dead shrubbery in the yard.

“The city has not been a good neighbor,” said Cato Fiksdal, a Pacific Palisades resident who lives across the street from several homes that the city owns on De Pauw Street. “How would you like to live across the street from a house that’s boarded up, with weeds a foot high, because the owner doesn’t want to bother doing anything about it?”

Fiksdal’s wife, Helena, said the presence of the vacant city homes “makes it seem like an abandoned area.”

The poorly maintained city rentals seem to run counter to City Hall policies. The Los Angeles city attorney’s office has a high-profile slum housing task force to prosecute--and even jail--landlords who neglect their properties. The office also files dozens of abatement cases each year in which owners of properties that have become public nuisances stand to lose their homes if they fail to correct the problems.

“The city as a landlord doesn’t do what they would demand of you,” said West Adams homeowner Henderson Isadore, pointing to a tangle of dead bushes and overgrown weeds next door at a boarded-up city home on 24th Street. Dead vegetation is a fire hazard, but records show the Los Angeles City Fire Department has not cited the house.

“If my yard looked like that they’d have me downtown next week,” Isadore said.

The houses and apartments are among 150 properties the city leases out on a monthly or yearly basis under the supervision of the General Services Department. Most of the other sites are rented for advertising billboards, parking lots, pipelines, as well as office space for government use or nonprofit social services.

“We are reluctant landlords,” Guy T. Seegall, the General Services property manager, said of the residential rentals. Seegall explained that his office, which has no budget to maintain the homes, inherits them when other city agencies acquire them.

The house on Palm Grove had previously been used for a Community Development Department neighborhood project. A Craftsman bungalow in Hollywood was purchased 20 years ago for a long-since-abandoned street-widening project. In Pacific Palisades, more than a dozen homes bordering Potrero Canyon were purchased during the last decade to settle a lawsuit.

Owners there claimed the city’s storm drainage system had undermined the canyon walls, making their homes unsafe and unsalable. The city paid $10 million to take over 21 properties and demolished several.

Now, General Services rents out 10 houses while work is done to fill in the canyon. Afterward, officials say, they hope to recoup some of the city’s expenditures by reselling the properties. Two former rentals are boarded up and vacant.

Councilman Nate Holden, who has both the Palm Grove and the 24th Street houses in his district, said he is angry at the way the properties are maintained.

“General Services should meet the minimum standards of maintenance we require of the private sector,” he said. “It’s a double standard. It’s not fair. And it’s not right to the taxpayer, because it’s their investment, and their investment is not being protected.”

But General Services officials say they have no extra funds or staff for maintenance and repair of the residential properties. “We’re essentially a property management company without resources,” Seegall said.

The future use of the properties is often unclear, making rehabilitation a questionable investment, added John Cotti, the department’s assistant general manager. “Why would we put a tremendous amount of money in if they may be demolished?” he asked.

Most city rental agreements make repairs and maintenance the tenants’ responsibility. But often tenants don’t keep up the houses, and the properties decline to the point where demolition seems the best option. That happened with the house in Hollywood, on Hillcrest Road, where vandals burned it so badly that demolition is scheduled this month.

Conditions at the house on Palm Grove declined as well. But neighbors finally decided to act when gang members, who hung out there, began to terrorize the community. “A lot of us got together and went to Southwest (LAPD) Division but we seemed to get nowhere,” said John Jebb, a local artist.

Then Bruce Campbell, a real estate broker whose office is nearby, decided to search city records to find out who owned the home. After some effort, the answer emerged--it was the city itself.

“This is a joke,” Campbell said, outraged. Once the ownership was made clear to Holden, the police and the mayor’s office, Seegall asked the city attorney to evict the tenant.

Until that point, Seegall said, he had not monitored the conditions of the property. “We are so shorthanded,” he said. “We just don’t have the people to look at every single rental property we have.”

Despite the conditions, tenants in these city-owned properties are getting a good deal, often paying lower than the market rates.

The $260-a-month Palm Grove rental is about $600 less than normal, according to local broker Campbell. On Venice Boulevard, in an apartment building a short walk from the beach, rents were between $475 and $500--”about a third,” one tenant said happily, of prevailing rates. Homes in Pacific Palisades that rent for between $1,200 and $2,700 are several hundred dollars below market, according to local real estate agents.

The city does not always move quickly if the tenants don’t pay. The last tenant in the Hollywood house left after failing to pay rent for 14 months, according to records. The tenant on Palm Grove, charged $260 a month for the three-bedroom home, has not paid rent for 16 months and owes $4,360, according to court documents.

Cotti said he did not know why it took so long to move to evict the tenant. “I’m sure it was an oversight,” he said.