EARTHQUAKE: THE LONG ROAD BACK : Gearing Up and Shutting Down : Low-Income Renters Are Expected to Be Among the Hardest Hit

While the earthquake and its aftershocks damaged thousands of apartments from the San Fernando Valley to San Pedro, the temblors have severely damaged only a relatively small number of the rental units in Los Angeles County and should not affect rents paid by most tenants, real estate experts said Thursday.

However, low-income renters will probably suffer the most in the quake’s aftermath because most of the apartments that sustained severe damage were low-rent, older complexes built before strict seismic laws were put in place, experts believe.

At the other end of the economic scale, high-income tenants in luxurious apartments will be able to continue getting discounts or other concessions from developers because most newer buildings emerged from the quake unscathed and the market for high-priced rentals is still soft.

“Most of the pain is being suffered by the poorest of the poor,” said Susan Delaguch, an aide to Hollywood area City Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg. “We had so little affordable housing to begin with, and now much of that is gone.”

Meanwhile, harried apartment owners continued to comb through their properties Thursday, frantically trying to assess their damage and line up repair workers while also attempting to ease their tenants’ jangled nerves.

Building owners who suffered damage faced the frustrating task of finding reliable contractors who can make repairs quickly, while those whose property was spared by the 6.6-magnitude temblor breathed a collective sigh of relief.

About 500 weary government inspectors fanned out across the county again Thursday, toting bundles of colored tags to hammer or staple on the doors of buildings they had surveyed.

Officials at the Los Angeles Building and Safety Department had hoped their initial work would be completed by this evening, but then said the inspectors would probably work well into the weekend.

While landlords expressed sympathy for tenants who could not enter their apartments to retrieve their belongings, they said compassion sometimes had to take a back seat to legal concerns.

Jerry Ham, who manages three small apartment buildings in the San Fernando Valley, said he could not let one family back into its home because a beam supporting the roof had split down the middle and he feared it might collapse.

“If I let these people in and an aftershock comes, they could get hurt and the owner will get sued,” Ham said.

“Even if nothing happens, the city might cite me for letting them into a building that’s unsafe. I can’t afford to be a nice guy.”

Although reliable figures were not available, estimates of the number of people temporarily left homeless by the quake ranged from 10,000 to 30,000.

Despite the damage, building inspectors have so far found only 2,500 homes and apartment units to be uninhabitable in Los Angeles County. The county has more than a million apartment units and the overall vacancy rate remains well above 10%--about twice the level of what officials consider normal.

As a result, experts said, the quake will put little upward pressure on rents for a typical two-bedroom apartment and will not result in a construction boom, because too many units will remain empty even after displaced tenants have found new housing.

“Anyone who thinks that replacing a few thousand apartment units will give the economy a big shot in the arm is mistaken,” said Ben Bartolotto, an economist at the Construction Industry Research Board in Burbank. “Most of the gains we get by a pickup in construction over the next several months are going to be offset by the losses that the economy is suffering right now.

Officials at the Apartment Assn. of Greater Los Angeles, which represents about 11,000 landlords in the area, had fielded more than 50 calls in the first few hours their office was open Thursday.

“Some landlords are looking for lawyers, but others are just looking for trash haulers,” said Kevin Postema, a spokesman for the trade group.

Phones were also ringing nonstop at the offices of independent engineers and architects who are trained to determine whether buildings are safe to live in.

“Some of the buildings I’ve seen are seriously damaged, but a lot of others look much worse off than they really are,” said Barry Schweiger, president of Building Surveys & Architecture in Torrance. “They’ve got lots of cracks and plaster is strewn all over the place, but structurally they’re quite sound.”

OTHER QUAKE BUSINESS COVERAGE

* Job losses not expected to equal those after riots. A1

* Insured quake losses are likely to top $2 billion. D2

* A survey of damage to Southland businesses. D2

* More questions about California’s recovery. D3

* Scam artists likely to prey on victims. D3

* Hollywood goes back to work. D5

* Hotel business expected to recover by summer. D12