Sweeping Changes : Costa Mesa Activists Push City to Upgrade Apartments, Monitor Upkeep

At night, when Irene Benitez lies in bed, breast-feeding her daughter, she often sees cockroaches scurrying across the walls of her Shalimar Drive apartment. Sometimes she sees them crawl in through the kitchen window, from the trash-littered alley in back.

Four months ago, she asked the woman who collects her $700 monthly rent check to get the landlord to help. But nothing came of her request. Now, her 3-year old son, Fidelmar, is covered with bug bites and she worries about what has caused the spots that often make him scratch and cry.

“My son sleeps with me at night now, and I try to cover him up with blankets to protect him,” Irene said in Spanish. “I fumigate every 15 days, but it doesn’t help.”

Benitez is not alone.

In a recent city survey, 74 apartment complexes scattered throughout low-incomes areas in Costa Mesa, including the one on Shalimar Drive where Benitez lives, were found to be in violation of building or safety codes. In some cases, conditions were such that they could pose serious health risks to tenants, the survey also found.

But a group of Latino activists are trying to change all that. Led by members of St. Joachim Catholic Church, residents have spent the last few months organizing meetings, recording housing complaints and meeting with city officials. Now, they are nearing victory. At their urging, the City Council recently adopted the Neighborhood Improvement Strategy. Under the plan, code enforcement officers no longer have to wait for reluctant tenants to call and complain. Instead, the officers are being encouraged to take the initiative and “sweep” through apartments--armed with search warrants if necessary--to issue citations.

Landlords who have failed to respond to tenant complaints about unhealthful or dangerous conditions in the past may now find themselves answering to a judge.

“These property owners just rent out the apartments, pocket the money, and that is it,” said Patty Madueno, an organizing committee member at St. Joachim who pushed for the sweeps. “They don’t take any responsibility.”

More than $160,000 of federal grants earmarked for housing rehabilitation has been allocated to pay the salaries of additional code enforcement officers, and in some cases offer cut-rate loans to landlords who need to make repairs. Next month, the officers are slated to begin notifying errant property owners that the city will soon be knocking on their doors.

“We are looking for the most serious code violations, as opposed to just nuisance complaints,” said Muriel Berman, redevelopment project coordinator, who is organizing the campaign for the city. “The idea is to go after life-threatening and hazardous conditions.”

The Neighborhood Improvement Strategy is but one of several programs tried throughout Orange County in recent years, as cities struggle to clean up low-income areas.

Many times, the regular code enforcement system--which relies on residents to come forward--just doesn’t work. Because many residents don’t know their rights, or fear retaliation from their landlords if they complain to the city, they often put up with cockroaches, crumbling walls and a host of other problems, officials say.

“We really don’t get a lot of complaints from tenants. They are fearful the rent will go up or they may get kicked out, and they don’t want that,” said Sandi Benson, senior code enforcement officer for Costa Mesa. “It’s amazing how many really, really, bad situations are out there.”

However, threatening landlords with prosecution seems to get the job done. One of the most extensive sweeps occurred in Anaheim in 1990. A code enforcement officer was paired with a police officer to clean up the Jeffrey-Lynne neighborhood, where drug dealers once openly sold their wares to addicts, and graffiti covered the apartments in an area known as Tijuanita, or Little Tijuana.

As part of the effort, more than 800 apartment units were inspected and thousands of housing code violations, from leaky roofs to broken windows, were found. About a dozen landlords were taken to court and hit with penalties and fines.

Now, three years later, the funding has run out and the police officer has been reassigned. But the conditions are still better than they were before the sweeps, city officials said.

“We continue to have to go back, but it is nothing like it was,” said John Poole, Anaheim’s code enforcement manager. “We feel it is well worth the effort.”

Elsewhere, Fullerton officials are reinspecting 396 apartments that were targeted in a sweep three years ago near Valencia Drive. And in January, Santa Ana kicked off a program it calls PREP, for Proactive Rental Enforcement Program. A community task force selects areas and then code enforcement officers spend six months getting them cleaned up.

In Costa Mesa, landlords will be given two chances to get their property in order. After that, a hearing will be held, and if the owner has still not fixed the problems, the citation will go to the district attorney’s office for prosecution. Failure to comply could put the landlord in jail for up to six months and result in fines up to $1,000 for each offense.

“If we stick to our guns and don’t give unreasonable extensions, we could get to a criminal complaint within 100 days,” said Berman, Costa Mesa’s redevelopment project coordinator.

City residents are hoping for quick results.

On a recent afternoon at the apartments on Shalimar Drive, 6-year-old Adrien Naranjo raced his bike through an alley littered with trash, tires and broken-down cars. It looks more like a junkyard than an alley.

The area, once populated by Orange Coast College students, is now considered the turf of a local gang, and is one of the city’s toughest neighborhoods. A hodgepodge of brown and blue apartment buildings are stacked close together.

“They don’t have a playground, or an area for them to play, so this is it,” Madueno said, pointing to the alleyways, scarred with potholes and cracks.

Madueno, who has become the target of threatening phone calls since she began speaking out for tenants’ rights, serves as a spokeswoman for many in the predominantly Latino community.