Livable Doesn’t Mean Slums : Housing: There are remedies, but Los Angeles must have the will to help the disenfranchised.
Lourdes has lived in her Los Angeles apartment in an aging building for 13 years. The roof leaks so badly that the slightest drizzle forces her family to spend the night moving the beds to avoid the rain. Biting cockroaches infest her apartment, and one evening she caught 11 mice. Recently, a hot-water faucet stuck and she could not turn the water off. She immediately told the manager, but the water continued running for several weeks before the faucet was fixed.
The government has cited the building over and over for more than 15 years for health, building and safety violations. But a succession of landlords has continued to neglect the building. Although the city finally filed a criminal complaint against the current owner, the deputy city attorney handling the case confirmed that the court will most likely impose only a token fine and probation. Any repairs will undoubtedly be cosmetic, enough to fool the inspectors--like they did a year ago--but not to fix the real problems.
Recently, Lourdes and other tenants of the building, concerned about retaliation, met in a room at a nearby business to discuss their common problems. When the landlord found out, he angrily called the business and demanded that it cancel the meeting. He then stood on the street and noted which tenants attended.
Unfortunately, Lourdes does not have real options, other than moving--if she could find one of Los Angeles’ few affordable apartments without similar problems. Although state law allows her to use up to one month’s rent to make repairs, her problems cost far more to fix than that. She could try withholding rent but would risk getting her family evicted.
Lourdes’ situation is hardly unique. A year and a half has passed since a fatal fire in the Westlake area pointed out the shortcomings in the city’s code enforcement efforts, and more than four years have gone by since The Times ran a series on slumlords’ ability to beat the system. Yet little has changed.
The Building and Safety, Health and Fire departments are overworked and do not inspect or follow up on a vast number of violations. Moreover, they have almost no tools to enforce their orders. The city attorney’s office can handle only the worst cases, which even then don’t often result in significant penalties. The Housing Department has a program that gives tenants modest rent reductions and allows them to pay their rent to a city escrow account until repairs are made. Yet that program depends on an initial referral from a building, health or fire inspector, which often does not happen. Tenants also face retaliation if they pay their rent to the city.
This does not mean that there are no solutions. One proposal, which the City Council endorsed in concept last year, would allow tenants to get rent reductions without waiting indefinitely for a referral from another agency. But the proposal has languished. The Building and Safety, Health and Fire departments also could find better ways to enforce orders in cases that do not result in criminal prosecutions. Of the three agencies, only Building and Safety imposes noncompliance fees--sporadically--yet makes no effort to collect the fees unless the landlord needs to take out a permit. Automatic fines that mount if unpaid and become a lien on the building would put more teeth into the agencies’ orders. A city that can collect parking-ticket fines can surely find ways of collecting fees for health and safety violations. A city audit done after the Westlake fires also proposed that all apartment buildings be inspected upon sale, rather than only upon complaint from intimidated tenants. The cost of such inspections could be covered as an escrow fee or by fees imposed on buildings found in violation.
There is no shortage of ideas for preventing our affordable housing stock from further deteriorating into slums or disappearing altogether. The question is one of political will. Low-income, disenfranchised parents and children with little political clout are the ones who live in substandard housing. The city must not continue to let its most vulnerable residents suffer blatant violations of health and safety laws by themselves, with little effective help from the government.
