Fed-Up Tenants Take Over : Housing: Renters form an association that buys their neglected, decaying building with federal funds--a first for L.A.
In the beginning, the residents of Cambria Apartments were no different from tenants in other slum buildings in Los Angeles.
They slept in cramped apartments amid roaches and rats. They breathed the stench of urine and feces that wafted from vacant rooms and hallways teeming with acrid trash. They bathed with pails of water in bathtubs with broken plumbing.
The 30 tenant families--most of them poor working Latinos who spoke little English--were frustrated, but they didn’t move out or vandalize the building.
Instead they mobilized. With moxie and guidance from a tenants rights group and public interest lawyers, they helped form Communidad Cambria, a nonprofit association that bought the building with federal funding.
They are the first tenants in Los Angeles involved in buying a privately owned slum dwelling, according to Barbara Zeidman, assistant general manager of the city Housing Department. City officials hope the transaction will become a model for other purchases.
The tenants, several of whom are on welfare or out of work, could not contribute any of their own money to acquire the building. All of the $600,000 for the purchase was provided by the city Housing Department through federal community development block grant money.
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The experience still amazes the tenant leaders, four single mothers who sat nervous and insecure at initial meetings, but who have grown into astute advocates, aware of their rights and the law.
“ Somos los duenos ! (We’re the landlords!) Los duenos !” exclaimed Teresa Marcial after escrow papers were signed at a May 31 tenant meeting.
At first, Marcial had doubts. “We’re Hispanic people without much money, without experience in these things,” she said. “We’re looked at as little people with no sense.”
In her native Mexico, getting involved in protests was never part of Marcial’s life. A petite woman with a raspy voice, she needed an inhaler during the first tenant meetings to ease her asthma attacks when she got too angry. Now, she leaves the inhaler at home and serves as board president of the group that owns the building.
There are a handful of tenant purchases under way in the city, but all involve buildings where the rents are subsidized by the federal government. And these buildings are in much better shape than the Cambria Apartments, which are still plagued by graffiti-scarred walls, garbage-strewn vacant apartments and drug-dealing cholos.
The move to buy the building at 738 S. Union St. in the Westlake district began merely as an effort to force the landlord, Morris Davidson, president of Allied Ventures in Westwood, to clean it up.
The once-grand structure, with 66 units in a three-story walk-up, began to seriously falter three years ago from poor management and neglect, city officials said. But tenants said Davidson ignored their complaints. Violations reported by city building and safety inspectors prompted few repairs, said Richard Bobb, the deputy city attorney who heads the city attorney’s slum housing task force. So the tenants started a rent strike and turned to the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles and Inquilinos Unidos, a tenants rights organization, which ultimately encouraged them to buy the building.
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By early 1993, Legal Aid attorneys were teaching the tenants about their rights. A UCLA planning professor, active in housing rehabilitation projects throughout the state, joined as a consultant. And the head of a group that organizes resident takeovers helped find funding.
Meanwhile, Davidson reneged on his mortgage payments and was foreclosed by the titleholder, who lived in Minneapolis and just wanted to sell the building, according to an attorney for the titleholder. Efforts to reach Davidson were unsuccessful. His company no longer has a listed phone number and the city attorney’s office said the firm has gone out of business.
“The tenants have been living under really bad conditions for a very long time, but they’re unified and they have a clear sense of where they want to go,” said Elena Popp, an attorney for Legal Aid, who has helped the tenants hone their leadership skills.
A seven-member board consisting of three tenants and four community representatives heads Communidad Cambria. The board sets guidelines, enforces the rules for the building and handles administrative work. No decision is final until tenants vote on it.
“We’re in the incipient stage of a resident movement,” said Neil Richman, a UCLA urban planning professor who helped establish Communidad Cambria.
The purchase of the building doesn’t instantly solve the problems that have festered for years. The beige stucco edifice looks nearly uninhabitable, with boarded-up windows and rickety stairwells and fire escapes.
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Communidad Cambria is embarking on a renovation project to convert the 100-square-foot singles and studio apartments to one- and two-bedroom apartments. Over the next year, the 91-year-old structure will receive new kitchens, bathrooms, floor tiles and staircases. Repairs will be paid for with federal block grant money.
For Josephina Guzman, 40, of El Salvador, this means that she and her two children will no longer have to walk to a hall bathroom from their single-room apartment and will have a legitimate kitchen, instead of a refrigerator propped against the wall and a hot plate crowded with pots.
“Sometimes you live in a condition for so long and you start to think that’s the only way you were meant to live,” said Guzman, treasurer of Communidad’s board of directors. “But I had to believe something better would happen because my kids were getting too old for us all to live on top of each other like that.”
Communidad Cambria’s goal is to create a resident-controlled nonprofit housing cooperative in the next two years by phasing out three of the community representatives and giving tenants majority control, said Richman. Tenants pay rent toward maintenance but do not own their individual apartments. Operating as a cooperative would allow them to own their units outright.
For now, Maria Contreras, 50, is concerned with two things: assuring that all the tenants can work together to make improvements and getting rid of cholos who sometimes sneak into vacant apartments, ransack them and frighten tenants.
Residents have made repeated complaints to police and have met with officers regarding community patrol efforts in the area. Officer Webster Wong of the Rampart Division said Los Angeles police have talked to gang members in the building and have suggested ways for the residents to secure the structure so people who do not live there cannot get in. In the meantime, Communidad Cambria has hired a private security service to patrol the building.
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When Contreras moved into her one-room apartment with her two children 11 years ago, there were no cholos, only a lackluster, low-income rental with a list of woes--but the landlord usually made the repairs, she said.
Tenants said chronic problems--broken windows, corroded plumbing, roaches--began after the building was taken over by Davidson in 1991.
As she sat on a soiled yellow couch draped with a bleached-white comforter, Teresa Lopez, 48, said a former building manager made threats to call the Immigration and Naturalization Service on some tenants who would not pay rent.
“I went through hell in this building,” she said, adding that the manager once threatened to kick her out because she wouldn’t pay rent unless repairs were made.
By October, 1992, the tenants were fed up with the ramshackle conditions. Some feared the manager and left. Squatters took over other vacant units and the building became a haunt for troublemakers, Marcial and Contreras said.
Several tenants sought help from Legal Aid, started a rent strike and put that money into an escrow account.
Instead of making repairs, Davidson fired the building manager and stopped paying the bills--electricity, garbage collection, a $3,000 debt for gas--and the mortgage, said officials in the city attorney’s office.
“We just had to start taking over because there was no one to do it for us,” said Guzman, who joined other tenants in collecting money to pay utility bills and in a massive cleanup of worm-infested trash that cluttered the hallways.
With no results from the rent strike, the tenants turned to Pico-Union-based Inquilinos Unidos (Tenants United).
“People were getting so discouraged, and with the gang members and drug dealers around they really feared for their lives,” said Enrique Velazquez, director of the 14-year-old advocacy group. “And they were just tired.”
One option, Velazquez told them, was to find a way to buy the building.
“When Enrique said for us to buy the building, we laughed,” Marcial said. “We didn’t think it was possible to go to that extreme.”
The process gathered speed.
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Marcial, Guzman, Lopez and Contreras were chosen as tenant leaders. The women and several other tenants religiously attended meetings as many as five nights a week with Velazquez and Popp. By the spring of 1993, skepticism among some tenants started dying down and participation rose.
Richman joined the effort last summer, pulling together Communidad Cambria. Allen Heskin, president of the nonprofit California Mutual Housing Assn., a 2-year-old organization involved in resident takeovers, agreed to help find funding and cajole the owner into selling the building.
Heskin patterned the purchase after New York City’s 20-year-old homesteading program, which lets tenants or squatters buy slum buildings and take responsibility for keeping them up to code, using city funds.
By last fall, the city had offered its support, Communidad Cambria had been formed and loan applications were in place. The biggest hurdle was getting the landlord to sell.
That July, Davidson pleaded no contest to 40 counts of code violations in the building and walked away from it. The charges were brought by the city’s slum housing task force. Jill Adler of Minneapolis, whose family had held the note on the building since the 1950s, reluctantly took over ownership and inherited an eyesore with thousands of dollars of bills, rent-striking tenants and the title of slumlord.
“It was a nightmare experience for my client, because living in Minneapolis she had no idea what was happening with the building,” said Benjamin Pynes, Adler’s attorney in San Diego. “All she wanted were her payments and all she got were hassles from these (tenants).”
After Adler hired a building manager, the tenants agreed to end their 10-month rent strike. Soon after, Adler put the building up for sale in September for $1.2 million. Within a week the price dropped to $700,000 and finally to $600,000. Under the guise of an organization run solely by UCLA professors and after months of maneuvering, Heskin persuaded Adler to sell the building to Communidad Cambria.
“We had to keep the issue of the tenants’ interest in buying the building quiet or else (we thought) the owners never would’ve agreed to sell the building,” Heskin said. “She had to believe in us. We knew she definitely didn’t believe in the tenants.”
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At times the tenants didn’t believe in themselves, either. Marcial, now president of the board, vice president Contreras and Guzman became discouraged at even the tiniest problem in acquiring the building. But once the escrow papers were signed, the mood instantly changed.
“We’re the owners now,” Contreras said. “My son still tells me I’m fighting for something that’s not mine. But I tell him that I own this place, and as long as I’m living here it belongs to me.”
