A Neighborly Approach to Saving Low-Income Housing : Activism: Taking advantage of a new federal law, more than 400 tenants band together to buy their apartment buildings.

Separated by 10 miles of Los Angeles freeway, Chris Saavedra and Henry Page had been strangers, unaware of their common fate. But last fall, the 26-year-old college student and the 64-year-old former factory worker learned that the same landlord owned their apartments and that plans to sell those buildings could cost them their homes.

Today, taking advantage of a recent federal law, they are knocking on their neighbors’ doors, holding meetings in stairwells and laundry rooms, and organizing tenants of 19 buildings from West Adams to East Hollywood in hopes of buying the properties.

None of the more than 400 tenants is a veteran activist, but they are fueled by their need for affordable housing and their fear of being priced out of the market if their landlord sells.

“That’s what brings everyone together,” Saavedra said. “You don’t have an apartment, you end up homeless or in one of those hotel rooms downtown. It’s a very basic need.”

Their fledgling organization, the Los Angeles Stoneridge Tenants Rights Enforcement League is already making history. Nowhere else in the country are tenants of this many buildings organizing to purchase their apartments under the new law, said Larry Yates of the Low Income Housing Information Service. And in a city where neighborhood and ethnic lines are sharply drawn, the group is helping to unite Angelenos of different races, ages, languages and neighborhoods.

“There was a lot of discussion after (last spring’s) uprising about what communities did not have--leadership skills, business experience, control over land and capital,” said Steve Cancian of the Coalition for Economic Survival, the group that introduced the tenants to each other. “The kinds of things that make people feel alienated from their society are the kinds of things that tenant buyout (addresses).”

The buildings were purchased by a limited partnership in the 1970s with low-interest loans from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. In exchange for the loans, the partnership, headed by William G. Bloodgood, agreed to keep the apartments affordable for low-income people.

Now, Bloodgood has the option of paying back those loans and selling his buildings. He has filed a notice with the government expressing his interest to sell but has not made a final decision about timing or a buyer. “We want to sell (the buildings) if we feel we are getting a reasonable price,” he said in an interview. “I’m glad to see the tenants taking an interest.”

If he does sell to another private owner, the buildings would not have to remain affordable housing units. Federal guidelines mandate that such housing cost qualified tenants no more than one-third of their income. Page, for example, pays $321 a month for a Mid-City one-bedroom apartment.

A new owner would not be obligated to continue federal subsidies and could raise rents to to a level that the majority of Bloodgood’s poor and working-class tenants could not afford.

But under the 1990 Federal Low Income Housing Preservation and Resident Home Ownership Act, tenants can preserve their affordable rents by forming a cooperative to purchase their buildings with government financing. So far in Los Angeles, tenants of only one such building--the Mission Plaza Tenants Assn. in Lincoln Heights--have signed a purchase agreement and are applying for HUD financing.

Bloodgood’s tenants have just embarked on the long and complicated process. They sent a letter to Bloodgood last month, asking to meet with him about buying the apartments; they have not yet heard a response. Although tenants have the right to make the first purchase offer, building owners are not required to sell to tenants.

If Bloodgood does agree to sell to the residents, the federal government will provide nearly all the financing. Tenants will continue paying their rent and will not have to put up any cash.

“We will be the owners as long as we live here,” said Page, sitting in his Mid-City apartment, an afternoon breeze blowing through the pink lace curtain that serves as a screen door. “When we move out, somebody else moves in, and it will stay affordable.”

Tenant leaders in Bloodgood’s buildings say they look forward to the control they will have over the conditions of their apartments. In Saavedra’s East Hollywood building, for instance, tenants want to install an intercom system at the front entrance to so they can stop suspected drug users from gathering in the basement laundry room.

As owners, the residents would also decide who manages their building, a job currently performed by Stoneridge Management Co. Residents have complained to city officials that the company, in what they call an effort to hold onto its management contracts, has tried to intimidate tenants and spread misinformation to dissuade them from organizing.

One resident said she was told that LASTREL activists would be evicted. Others said they were told they would have to put up a cash down-payment to buy the building. Officials from the management company could not be reached for comment.

Bloodgood said that although he owned the management firm in the 1970s, he no longer has a stake in it. “Whoever we sell the building to will be the ones that decide who runs the building,” he said. “It won’t be my decision.”

City officials are watching to guard against any improprieties. “This (law) allows tenants to control the management of their buildings through tenant cooperative ownership,” said Rebecca Logue, housing planner and economic analyst for the city’s Housing Department. “When property managers try to dissuade tenants from being involved . . . that sends up a red flag.”

Logue is anxious to see this deal work. The average poor Los Angeles County household--defined as a family of four earning less than $13,924 a year--spends more than 77% of its income on rent.

In Los Angeles, there are 11,000 privately owned units with government subsidies, Logue said. If those units are lost, “it would probably take every nonprofit in this city 10 years to create that much housing,” Logue said.

But there’s a lot more to the LASTREL plan than simply keeping rents down. In a city known as one of the most ethnically divided in the nation, theirs is an effort to unite cross-town neighbors who otherwise would never have spoken to one another.

The tenants are African-American, Anglo, Latino, Filipino, Korean and Vietnamese. They are senior citizens living on Social Security, students, working poor families--as Page says, “they’re working all the time, but they just don’t make enough money.” Meetings are conducted in Spanish and English, and the group has elected officers representing each of the major ethnic groups living in the buildings.

Kerry Johnson, LASTREL’s president, said he is getting to know his neighbors for the first time in the 12 years he has lived in his Hollywood apartment building.

“Honestly, we were like strangers before,” he said. “We’re tighter now as a building. We’re kind of looking out for each other.”