Hopes Abandoned, and the Homes That Once Sheltered Them

Down these mean streets a woman must go who is not herself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.

Raymond Chandler wrote that line--or, actually, a male version of it--about the qualities of the fictional private eye.

But it seems an appropriate description of Sharon Perry as she makes her rounds on the mean streets of the San Fernando Valley. Not that the streets she drives in her white Toyota wagon are threatening. They are mean in that they deliver her to an unceasing procession of homes where she confronts despair and abandonment, where hope seems as untended as the green water in back yard pools.

Perry is an inspector for the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety. What she inspects are abandoned houses. What she does is order them boarded up, repaired or demolished. Perry’s beat covers most of the Valley, and she has no shortage of work. At any given time she has 250 abandoned structures in her files, and the workload has increased as the recession has deepened.

“We’ve been getting a lot more abandoned houses,” she says. “It basically follows the economic picture. A lot more are in some of the nicer areas of the Valley, too.

“Pools. I get a lot of houses with pools now. It didn’t used to be like that.”

And though classified as abandoned, the houses are not always empty. Perry has encountered squatters, drug dealers, gang members. She even once found a corpse in an abandoned house.

“People pop up a lot of the time,” Perry says. “The dead bodies aren’t as scary as the live ones.”

Her first stop this Wednesday morning is a house on Cedros Avenue in Panorama City. There is a junked truck in the driveway, the front fence has collapsed and windows are broken out along the shabby front facade. Perry has been here before. She tried to make an inspection alone but backed off when she saw a man in the yard carrying a machete. This time she waits for Los Angeles Police Officer Ed Evans, whom she called earlier, to arrive.

They go through the gate together. An eerie silence greets them, shattered by the crow of a rooster somewhere close by.

The front door is unlocked. Inside, the house is empty. But it hasn’t been for long. There are dirty mattresses on the floors, piles of clothing and food wrappers. The meager belongings of meager lives. A fly rises from a trash pile and buzzes against a window so dirty it admits almost no light.

“People are obviously living here,” Perry says after stepping back into the sun. “A lot of times they aren’t inside when I get to a house. When it is nice weather, they get up and go out. When it’s rainy, that’s when they stay inside.

“I hate going out on inspections on rainy days.”

With a staple gun, Perry posts cardboard “VACATED” signs on the doors. Evans says police will now keep an eye on the place and arrest trespassers. Perry also fills out an abatement order requiring the owner to rehabilitate or demolish the house. If the owner doesn’t comply, the city will do it and send him the bill.

“We’ve gotten rid of several places that were neighborhood blights,” Perry says after Evans has left. Still, she says, eliminating such problems often means moving transients along, detaching them from what little shelter they have.

“They move from abandoned house to abandoned house. I follow them. Sometimes they don’t have anyplace left to stay but these vacant buildings.”

Next stop, North Hollywood. The lawn in front of the tiny wood-frame house on Tujunga Avenue is littered with trash. On the side someone has parked a shopping cart.

It still holds a day’s worth of collected junk.

The house is locked, but through a broken window Perry sees mounds of debris.

Someone is sleeping beneath a blanket on the living room floor. He does not wake, even when Perry loudly calls out, “Building inspector!” She goes about her duty outside, noting the repairs needed on an abatement order.

“If he’ll just stay sleeping, that’s fine with me,” she says.

Five more stops, five more abandoned houses, five more mysteries.

“There are so many of them,” Perry says. “It gets depressing at times. In a lot of ways you become callous--you have to do your job. But you always wonder what happened. Sometimes it stays a mystery and sometimes you find out.”

Perry spends each morning in her office tracing ownership of the abandoned houses she posted the day before. Most often she finds that the houses are owned by banks through foreclosures or developers whose plans died with the economy.

Her last stop on this day is a home with a pool on a middle-class stretch of Maclay Street in Sylmar. The only hint that something could be amiss is the tall grass in the front yard. The house is locked, but in the back yard the rear fence has fallen and the pool is dangerously accessible to neighborhood children.

The pool is so clouded with algae, she can’t see the bottom in the shallow end. Through glass porch doors, an empty kitchen and living room can be seen. But in the back yard there are children’s toys scattered about. Toy boats and plastic bowling pins, lying as still as the green pool water. A rusting barbecue sits in the tall grass.

They silently shout the questions that sometimes bother her. What went wrong? Where did the family go?

“It’s weird,” says Perry, a mother of four grown children.

After posting the house and filling out an abatement order, Perry returns the stapler to the rear of the station wagon, where she keeps the tools of her trade: hard hat, snakebite kit, boots and flashlight.

There is nothing in the wagon to help her deal with questions that don’t always have answers.

At a nearby freeway exit on the way back to her office, she sees a homeless man holding a sign pleading for money. She says, “He could be one of the people who used to live in one of these houses.”

That, or one of the people about to move in.