COLUMN ONE : 2nd Wave of Quake Destruction : Some owners let ‘ghost town’ properties go into foreclosure, leaving stubborn criminal havens. Officials say drastic solutions may be required to avoid festering problem.

If the collapse of the Antelope Valley Freeway and fatal cave-in of the Northridge Meadows Apartments were among the most vivid images of the January earthquake, the clusters of quake-damaged “ghost towns” are destined to become its most stubborn legacy.

Once working-class neighborhoods buzzing with activity, these pockets of destruction and misery sit mostly vacant, with only about half of the crumbling buildings undergoing repairs while the others have become trash-strewn lairs for scavengers, vandals and drug dealers.

Visions of a festering urban nightmare prompted Los Angeles officials to seal off many of the 507 ghost town properties and launch a multi-pronged attack backed by a massive infusion of government loans. But despite such aid, neglected properties continue to decay--in some cases suffering more damage than from the quake--increasing repair costs and putting entire neighborhoods at risk.

Looters have moved like locusts through the cracked and leaning rooms of Bud Goldshine’s 35-unit apartment building in Granada Hills, taking everything of value, including the rooftop solar panels. His original repair estimate doubled to $300,000.

And then came the final insult: Scavengers put their own lock on the gated complex’s entrance.

“I try to stay away from the building as much as I can,” said Goldshine, whose property is in foreclosure. “It’s just too hard for me to look at.”

As grim as Goldshine’s experience has been, he is far from alone. There are clear signs that many of the ghost towns’ 11,000 damaged dwelling units--particularly those in debt-laden buildings in poorer areas--will haunt the city’s recovery effort for years:

* Seven months after the quake, no repairs had begun in more than half of the severely damaged ghost town properties, according to a Times survey of buildings and building permit records.

* Nearly a quarter of the owners of the most devastated ghost town properties say they do not plan to rebuild and many say they will allow their buildings to fall into foreclosure, according to interviews with more than 40 landlords representing 63 ghost town properties. Another 20% of those landlords say they are still uncertain whether they will rebuild.

* As recently as last month, city housing officials identified three new ghost towns--increasing the total to 15, mostly near the quake’s epicenter in the San Fernando Valley but also in Hollywood and the Mid-City areas. Total ghost town damage has been estimated at $140 million, and that figure is expected to grow.

Although Los Angeles had never before experienced a calamity of this magnitude, urban planners and development experts say lessons from natural disasters elsewhere signal that a long, drawn-out struggle lies ahead.

For example, the 1989 Loma Prieta quake destroyed about 9,000 apartments, hotel rooms and condominiums, primarily in the San Francisco Bay Area’s working-class neighborhoods. Four years later, only half of the multifamily units had been replaced, partly because of funding delays and gaps in government recovery programs.

Even worse was the experience at Naranja Lake, a South Florida neighborhood of 4,000 before Hurricane Andrew hit in 1992. Not long after the winds died down, squatters, prostitutes and drug dealers took over those homes that were not flattened.

While property owners fought a two-year legal battle with contractors, insurance companies and each other, hundreds of homes deteriorated. As of this month, everything had been bulldozed except for one high-rise building.

“It was a miserable, miserable situation,” said Tom David, director of We Will Rebuild, the private foundation established to rebuild South Florida after the disaster.

In Los Angeles, the 15 pockets of damage left in the wake of the Northridge quake share many similarities, beyond merely meeting the official definition of a ghost town: A cluster of apartments and condos with 100 or more dwelling units that have incurred at least $5,000 in damage per unit.

In almost all ghost towns, chain-link fences encircle split and boarded buildings, their yards overgrown with weeds and littered by trash, discarded furniture and chunks of fractured concrete. Graffiti are scrawled on the outside of many buildings--some of it gang tags, some unheeded warnings not to trespass.

Even the buildings are similar, many simple stucco structures built in the 1960s when building codes were more lenient. (In fact, some experts believe that the relaxed construction standards shared by many ghost town buildings led to their demise.)

But the pace of repairs is inconsistent; landlords with property in more affluent areas move more quickly than those who own buildings in poorer areas. On a recent weekday morning, the din of power saws and cement mixers roared through a Sherman Oaks ghost town. But across the Valley, in an abandoned North Hills apartment, prostitutes and other transients slept peacefully, no construction work within earshot.

“Clearly, in stronger-market areas the revival is moving along more rapidly,” said Robert T. Moncrief, major projects director for the city’s Housing Department. “You will have properties in weaker areas where owners will walk away and banks will end up foreclosing.”

Indeed, Sarin Sam, the owner of a 14-unit complex in a gritty North Hills neighborhood, said he didn’t bother to seek government help to rebuild and allowed his property to fall into foreclosure because “even without the earthquake, this place was going to go down anyways.”

Los Angeles officials, learning from the successes and failures of other disaster-stricken cities, quickly made the ghost towns a top priority in their rebuilding effort.

The city’s objective is a quick recovery. The longer repairs are delayed, the longer buildings sit vulnerable to the destructive reign of the elements--natural and criminal.

In July, the city assembled a task force that has worked to broker deals between lenders and landlords to help financially troubled owners get a break on mortgage payments so they can rebuild. If a bank is willing, the city will provide zero- or low-interest repair loans from a $310-million pool of federal disaster aid and local housing funds. So far, the city has agreed to loan $30 million

In addition, the Small Business Administration announced in June that it would give top priority to loan requests from ghost town property owners. By mid-September, the SBA had approved 133 loans totaling $45 million to ghost town property owners, rejecting another 68 requests--an approval rating higher than that for the rest of the city.

Urban planners agree that such rebuilding efforts are the only reasonable strategy, even in a city with a stagnating population and a depressed housing market.

“What are the alternatives?” asked William Fulton, publisher of the California Planning and Development Report. “You can allow the ghost towns to remain ghost towns, or the other alternative is to bulldoze everything and start all over.”

Edward Soja, chairman of UCLA’s urban planning program, warns that the biggest mistake governments have made after other disasters was offering a “one size fits all” recovery program that fails to address those financially troubled properties in poor neighborhoods.

“The absence of special programs for the most seriously affected people, those unable to respond, is the primary tragedy,” Soja said.

In fact, 6% of the most severely damaged properties are already in default because their owners have failed to make mortgage payments for at least four months, according to property records. Defaulting is the first step toward foreclosure.

For those hard-luck cases, city officials have begun to offer another plan: pairing struggling landlords with nonprofit organizations interested in providing low-income housing.

When that approach doesn’t work, officials say, they plan to begin the process of razing those buildings where no repairs have begun by January. “I think you are going to see this city reaching decisions about demolition faster” than normal, said Barbara Zeidman, assistant general manager of the city’s Housing Department.

Such drastic measures are necessary, they say, to stop the ripple effect that began within days of the quake as entire neighborhoods shut down, cutting off foot traffic to nearby business districts and threatening to turn them into commercial ghost towns.

In a Northridge mini-mall, the quake has already closed a dry cleaner and video store. The only clients keeping Jaleh Rimando’s NY Subs sandwich shop open are the hungry construction workers rebuilding the nearby ghost town apartments.

“If they weren’t here I’d have to close the business,” Rimando said. The ghost towns’ neighbors have their own problems. Not only do their stable, undamaged neighborhoods face almost certain declines in property values, but in some cases they are already fighting roaches and rats migrating from the vacant buildings.

A neighbor of the most famous ghost town building--the collapsed Northridge Meadows Apartments where 16 people were killed--said he has watched a burgeoning population of rats grow strong dining off his two orange trees.

“One time, I hit one with a flat-head shovel but it just kind of got stunned,” he said.

Although the name ghost town gives the impression of inactivity, the enclaves are actually alive with activity.

Skateboarding teen-agers have descended on the drained swimming pools of a Granada Hills ghost town. Prostitutes are turning tricks in vacant Sylmar buildings. Gang members chug beer in abandoned North Hills apartments. And the ghost town in the West Adams area has become the haunt of crack smokers.

Police said reported crime is down about 20% in those neighborhoods, but they concede that numbers don’t tell the whole story because fewer residents remain to make reports. They believe unreported crime is up, particularly trespassing, vandalism, theft and prostitution. Trespassers are also suspected of starting fires in ghost town buildings, causing millions of dollars in damage.

Even the city’s fencing and boarding of ghost towns has not kept out the homeless and what one apartment owner described as the “sophisticated” looters, one of whom was arrested carrying a shopping list for his haul.

“We just wait for the security guards to walk by, then we sneak in,” a 17-year-old youth said as he and two friends sat in a dark North Hills apartment recently. “(Some people) use the place to store drugs or guns, but we just drink here.”

The owners are stuck with the frustration, and the bills.

“About six different times I have put chains and locks on the front door of the fence and people have cut them,” Cesar Olmos said of his 14-unit Hollywood apartment building.

The North Hills neighborhood near Orion Avenue and Parthenia Street--with its history of pre-quake crime and poverty--probably has the worst crime problem of all the ghost towns.

Before the quake, the two square miles patrolled by Los Angeles Police Officer Henry Acosta routinely accounted for 20% of the crime in the Devonshire Division’s 52-square-mile jurisdiction.

But now, Acosta said, the crime has moved into the area’s 11 vacant buildings, where it is harder to see and stop. Prostitutes, who once did business primarily in and around the low-rent motels on Sepulveda Boulevard, have set up shop in the vacant units, taking advantage of the free rent.

On a recent search through a 40-unit complex, Acosta stepped over shards of glass, spent condoms and the instruments of crack cocaine use: disposable lighters and glass pipes. The stench of decaying food and clogged toilets filled the air.

Kicking in a barricaded door, Acosta found a startled, shirtless man. The man said he was homeless but Acosta showed no sympathy, telling him: “This is someone’s house. You don’t belong here.”

Although the front of the complex was sealed off by an eight-foot chain-link fence topped by razor wire, Acosta pointed out a fallen brick wall at the back of the property. Neighbors said they see a parade of people enter the building nightly.

“We have got to do something, especially with all the abandoned buildings, or they are all going to go one by one,” said Eddie Gonzalez, a Neighborhood Watch captain on Orion Avenue.

In response to such complaints, the city’s Housing Department increased the number of guards from two to 10 at the North Hills ghost town and have armed some guards. A team of mounted police were also assigned to daylight patrols in the area this month, even though residents say things get worse at night.

Such crime has flourished partly because the owners of many apartment buildings--the main housing stock of the ghost towns--have for years been teetering on the edge of financial ruin, leaving them unable to afford repairs.

Before the Jan. 17 quake, Valley apartment owners suffered heavy losses from a nearly double-digit vacancy rate, declining rents and drop in apartment building sales prices of about 1% per month since mid-1990.

“Before the quake, I had never seen so much financial suffering. And now it’s worse,” said Dan Faller, president of the 12,000-member Apartment Owners Assn. of Southern California.

Owners of the most severely damaged ghost town properties cited myriad other obstacles blocking their recovery, including inflexible mortgage lenders, reluctant insurance companies, a sluggish government loan process and fears of mounting debts.

Also weighing heavily on many landlords’ minds is uncertainty about whether they will be among the few or the many in their neighborhoods to rebuild. No one wants to go into debt to make repairs only to find that the rest of the neighborhood still looks like a war zone.

“Small guys like myself need some reassurance,” said Dennis Carter, who owns an 11-unit apartment complex in Sherman Oaks that partially collapsed in the quake. “I’m afraid the rest of the neighborhood won’t come back.”

For condo owners, rebuilding can be particularly complicated and frustrating. In addition to applying for loans and battling with insurers, they must reach group decisions on whether to rebuild. In many cases, emotions run high and nerves are frayed.

“Everybody is really burned out just getting this far,” said Wayne Lipschitz, who recently resigned as president of the Carlyle Towers condominium association in Sherman Oaks, saying the job consumed his life. Unless something miraculous happens quickly, he said, he will probably walk away from his $45,000 in equity. He predicts many in his building will follow.

Although development experts forecast that Los Angeles’ housing market will rebound in four or five years, they say many property owners will not be able to wait out the bad times.

“The contemporary conditions are such that it will make any kind of quick and complete recovery very, very difficult,” said Soja, the UCLA urban planner.

As city officials, landlords and police wrestle with the financing and crime problems and press for additional security and quick repairs, a lingering question stalks the recovery effort: Will images of crumbling buildings and wholesale looting slow tenants from returning to the ghost towns once they are rebuilt?

It’s a question Victor Garcia answered for himself just hours after the quake: He is never coming back to the Reseda condo where he lived for four years until it collapsed into the first-story carport.

Bad memories, the 45-year-old machinist said, have made it nearly impossible even to visit his old neighborhood, where the building is being razed. “Sometimes we’ll drive by, and it’s dark, it’s ugly. I try to think that it is just a memory, but to be here is reliving it.”

Housing officials and development experts say there is no way to predict how many residents will share Garcia’s feelings and stay away because there is no precedent for a disaster as large as the Northridge quake.

“We really don’t know if (reconstructed buildings) will be filled until they are built,” said Jay Natelson, president of an Encino-based financial-consulting firm.

Already some apartment owners say they plan to offer lower rents and other incentives, such as one month’s free rent. Others expect the repairs to give their aging buildings a new glow and better marketability because newer seismic standards ensure that they will be stronger.

Robert Fragoso Jr., whose parents own two properties in Hollywood, said he expects to cut rents when he reopens in February. But even that, he concedes, may not be enough to bring the buildings back from the dead.

“We’re going to have a really tough time filling the complex,” Fragoso said. “It was hard hit and I think people will remember.”

Times staff writer Timothy Williams contributed to this story.

Ghost Towns / Quake-Damaged Buildings Stand Vacant, Vandalized

The devastation of the Northridge quake left pockets of vacant, damaged buildings throughout the San Fernando Valley and elsewhere, creating “ghost town” neighborhoods where drug dealers, squatters and prostitutes now operate away from the eyes of police and neighbors. A multi-pronged government plan has been launched to quickly repair the buildings and ensure that the structures do not deteriorate further. But already there is evidence that it will be a long time before many of the crumbling buildings are repaired.

1. Carlton

This ghost town is in the heart of Hollywood’s entertainment area.

Total buildings: 66

Yellow or red tagged buildings: 33

Total estimated damage: $6.32 million

2. Colbath

Many repairs have begun here, a testament to the strong demand for housing in the area.

Total buildings: 77

Yellow or red tagged buildings: 49

Total estimated damage: $15.5 million

3. De Soto

In the few buildings where repairs have begun, theft of building tools has slowed the recovery.

Total buildings: 11

Yellow or red tagged buildings: 7

Total estimated damage: $8.78 million

4. Devonshire

Demolition has already taken two buildings from this ghost town.

Total buildings: 9

Yellow or red tagged buildings: 5

Total estimated damage: $5.15 million

5. Hubbard

Few repairs have begun in this lower-income ghost town in Sylmar.

Total buildings: 13

Yellow and red tagged buildings: 12

Total estimated damage: $2.63 million

6. Plummer/Reseda

Trespassers are suspected in two major blazes in this ghost town.

Total buildings: 19

Yellow or red tagged buildings: 14

Total estimated damage: $17.2 million

7. Kingsbury/Blackhawk

This ghost town is one of the most dramatic examples of concentrated destruction.

Total buildings: 23

Yellow and red tagged buildings: 16

Total estimated damage: $15.3 million

8. Lassen

Damaged buildings in this ghost town provided housing for Cal State Northridge students.

Total buildings: 17

Yellow or red tagged buildings: 14

Total estimated damage: $14.4 million

9. Orion/Parthenia

The longtime crime problem in this North Hills neighborhood is now flourishing in vacant buildings.

Total buildings: 58

Yellow or red tagged buildings: 5

Total estimated damage: $14 million

10. Roscoe/Schoenborn

Vacant buildings in this ghost town are spread over a large area with many occupied homes in between.

Total buildings: 38

Yellow or red tagged buildings: 5

Total estimated damage: $2.26 million

11. Willis/Natick

No repairs have begun in half of the severely damaged buildings.

Total buildings: 44

Yellow or red tagged buildings: 24

Total estimated damage: $14.2 million

12. West Adams

This ghost town in the Mid-City area consists mostly of single-family houses.

Total buildings: 55

Yellow or red tagged buildings: 41

Total estimated damage: $1.2 million

13. Alabama/Saticoy

Many buildings in this ghost town have yet to be fenced off.

Total Buildings: 37

Yellow or red tagged buildings: 15

Total estimated damage: $12.3 million

14. Victory

No work has begun on any of the severely damaged buildings in this ghost town.

Total buildings: 9

Yellow or red tagged buildings: 5

Total estimated damage: $2.64 million

15. South Reseda

This ghost town stretches along Reseda Boulevard.

Total buildings: 31

Yellow or red tagged buildings: 8

Total estimated damage: $10.4 million

Total for all ghost towns

Total buildings: 527

Yellow and red tagged buildings: 253

Total estimated damage: $142.28 million