MAKING A DIFFERENCE : One Agency’s Approach: Flex Legal Muscle for Tenants
With few exceptions, unsubsidized “entry level” housing for Los Angeles’ poorest residents is virtually synonymous with barely affordable and barely habitable dwellings according to housing advocates. Thousands of renters reside in substandard housing and services to ensure that buildings meet the city’s code were limited long before the Northridge earthquake added pressure to maintain Los Angeles’ housing stock. Since 1980, the Inner City Law Center has helped the city’s poorest tenants in their fight for repairs of seriously substandard buildings. Lawyers and private law firms donate services and work with the center’s staff to sue for building repairs and money damages for tenants. In 14 years, the center has yet to lose a single case. Judgments and settlements for their clients average more than $100,000. The center combines slum housing litigation with services to secure safe, decent housing for the disabled homeless. It serves more than 3,600 clients each year.
CASE STUDY
1985 Inner City Law Center initiates lawsuit on behalf of 81 people living in a Pico Union slum apartment. Center director Nancy Mintie describes building conditions as “hellish.” According to the tenants, one mother living there miscarried her twins after being attacked by a rat in her apartment, and another family lost their firstborn during the winter after he contracted a respiratory illness in their unheated apartment that had broken windows and no hot water.
1990 After four years of litigation with co-counsel from the law firm Talcott, Lightfoot, Vandevelde, Woehrle & Sandowsky and attorney Barb Blanco the Inner City Law Center helps plaintiffs to settle the case for $1.25 million. A substantial amount of the money was paid up front. Some tenants bought their first homes with the funds, others started businesses or moved to apartments in safer neighborhoods.
1991-93 Collection problems on the remainder of the settlement arise. The landlord stops payments altogether after skipping some installments. An insurance company that signed the settlement agreement goes into receivership and refuses payment. Center staff pursues parties and pressures them to make a payment of $247,500 in mid-December.
ONE PERSON’S EXPERIENCE
Luz Duenas
Student, 25, Los Angeles Community College, lived in building cited in 1985 lawsuit with five of her nine siblings and her parents who were plaintiffs in case. Luz and her family moved into a Los Angeles home purchased three years ago with proceeds from her parents’ share of the settlement.
We used to live in downtown L.A. over by Union and 8th, and we had some problems with the building. We wouldn’t have water sometimes for a week, sometimes for a month. There were a lot of rats and cockroaches. One day my two little sisters were taking a bath and part of the ceiling fell down on them. The area has a lot of gangs and drugs and the front door to the building was always open. It’s a very dangerous place to live.
The Inner City Law Center helped everyone in the building to get the landlord to keep the front door locked, to put new carpet and painting in the building, to get us hot water and electricity everyday. They also helped my parents and the other people who lived there to file a lawsuit.
If this hadn’t happened I think my life and my sisters’ would have been totally different. I probably would have just worked to help my parents, and school would have been very far away.
Thinking that you have other choices is so important. The center showed us there was something else for us other than the conditions we were living in. You can live better and have a better life. They taught us not to be scared of raising your voice to be heard and to say, “Hey, I’m a human being.” And they showed us how to work to make sure that other people don’t take advantage of you because you stay quiet.
There are a lot of people who are still living in conditions that our family lived in. They need to raise their voices and get together and do something. It is possible. If you get together you can make a big difference.
TO GET INVOLVED
For information about support, donation or volunteer opportunities with the Inner City Law Center call (213) 891-2880. Staff are available to travel to give a “Know Your Rights to Decent Housing” presentation designed to educate groups of low-income tenants about their rights and the center’s services.
