COLUMN ONE : Fighting to Reclaim Blighted Buildings : As the number of abandoned structures rises, L.A. prepares to widen its war to roust squatters and gangs and track down errant owners.

Abandoned by its owner and invaded by drug addicts, the snug two-bedroom house on Hooper Avenue had become a disgusting mess.

Inside, walls were smeared with gang graffiti and floors were carpeted with trash, human excrement and the cigarette lighters that are calling cards of crack cocaine smokers. The arched front windows were shattered, covered with grungy pink bedsheets. Plumbing fixtures were gone. A homeless woman was running out the back yard.

That is what building inspector John De La Bretoniere found last week before he posted a no-trespassing sign on the broken front door of the house in South-Central Los Angeles. It was his second visit in a month, and this time he pledged to get the house boarded up and fenced off.

De La Bretoniere is on the front line of the difficult struggle to combat the debilitating effects of abandoned buildings. It is a fight that other urban centers waged, and often lost, two decades ago, but only now is becoming crucial to the health of some Los Angeles neighborhoods and to the city’s texture.

“If you don’t do something about a situation like this, eventually it’s going to spread to the next house,” he said, “and pretty soon it could be where there would be no one to buy houses and no sense staying in the neighborhood.”

As real estate values declined over the past two years, abandoned properties monitored by the city Department of Building and Safety increased 28%, to 1,381, most of them single-family homes. The number of city-ordered demolitions rose to more than 120 a year. That does not include the 1,800 or so other buildings left vacant by the Northridge earthquake in January or the more than 200 empty lots remaining from the 1992 riots.

“The trend is up on abandonment and that is pretty evident when you drive around the city,” said Capt. Roger Ruddick of the city Fire Prevention Bureau.

“It is a significant rise.”

In Hollywood, Watts, Pacoima and Westlake, the homeless often occupy these ghostly buildings. Fires they set to keep warm have gotten out of control more than 300 times this year and caused at least two deaths. Frustrated neighbors, still bravely tending their front lawns, worry about property values, rats and the likelihood of flames jumping roof to roof.

City leaders are seeking better ways to discourage abandonment. Perhaps even more difficult, they also want to prevent buildings from being taken over by squatters and the stripping of plumbing, wiring and even window frames by salvage-hungry vandals.

In recent weeks, the city’s attention has been grabbed by gruesome examples of what can go wrong with abandoned buildings. Dozens of squatters were rescued from a fire at the boarded-up Californian Hotel in Westlake, a man was tortured and murdered in a decayed Hollywood apartment building, and neighbors cheered the demolition of a Boyle Heights house that had been commandeered by a violent gang.

A City Council committee Monday is scheduled to consider proposals that would replace the traditional three-quarter-inch plywood window barriers on abandoned buildings with steel and possibly require floodlighting; make it legally easier for the city to demolish unrepairable properties, and encourage nonprofit groups to acquire salvageable buildings for affordable housing.

*

Also being discussed are better coordination among agencies fighting abandonment and a plan to create a toll-free hot line for citizen reports on vacant buildings.

But as other cities have learned, solutions are not easy and results are mixed amid confusing property rights, failed banks, intractable crime and limited budgets.

New York City has taken over and repaired 47,000 abandoned apartments, but is finding it too costly to act as landlord and wants to sell the units.

On the other hand, community groups in East Oakland have made strides in fixing vacant houses and helping low-income families buy their first slice of the American Dream.

“The success stories are great and they are real, but they don’t affect numbers in any meaningful way” compared to the national problem, said Mary Comerio, a UC Berkeley architecture professor who studies abandonment. She warns that Los Angeles should brace for a possible epidemic.

The relative youth of the housing stock in Los Angeles and the big increase in immigrants during a healthy economy helped the city avoid the urban wastelands that parts of New York, Chicago and St. Louis have become, she said.

Through the late 1980s, developers had to scour to find any abandoned property in Los Angeles, recalled city Housing Department official Ralph R. Esparza.

“The city market was so strong at the time that no one in their right mind would walk away from their property. Now, I think that you are seeing ownership interest dropping, especially at properties bought for more than their current market value.”

What’s more, many Los Angeles housing units need more repairs than landlords say they can afford. Adding to the wear and tear, newer immigrant families are more likely to double and triple up in one house or apartment because decent-paying jobs are harder to find.

“Los Angeles is finally catching up with the rest of the country,” Comerio said.

Abandonment “is a hard battle to fight if the basic market forces are causing a shift in demand away from the neighborhood,” said Tom Black, a resident fellow at the Urban Land Institute, a Washington think tank for developers. However, Black doubts that the problem in Los Angeles will become as severe as those in Eastern and Midwestern cities.

To be sure, no large swaths of Los Angeles are abandoned, despite pockets of ghost towns created by the earthquake. Although the slow pace has been criticized, federal grants and loans are expected to help restore or replace many quake-damaged buildings.

Still, parts of the city are losing buildings regularly, with single-family homes making up about 80% of the properties abandoned, records show.

On the wall above inspector De La Bretoniere’s desk, he keeps photos of more than 100 dangerously dilapidated houses for which he has arranged demolition in his 2 1/2 years at the building department’s contract nuisance abatement section. His nickname around the office is “the Hammer,” a friendly nod to the aggressiveness that twice led to him to finding corpses inside ruins.

*

Responding to community complaints, he and just five colleagues try to track down property owners and get them to repair or properly protect vacant houses, hotels, factories, warehouses and stores from vandalism. Months can be wasted trying to locate rightful owners and follow what some council members complain are cumbersome rules that seemingly protect property rights more than community safety.

*

If owners cannot be found or refuse to cooperate, as often happens, the city hires a contractor to board up windows and doors and erect eight-foot-high chain-link fencing. That can cost $7,000 at a single-family house and much more at an apartment building or shopping center. Liens are then placed on the property pending its sale. The city is owed about $3 million in unpaid liens for boarding and demolition costs.

Security measures often do not keep invaders out. Then the work has to be repeated after the homeless and gangsters shovel, ax, saw, tunnel or climb in.

“If these people are bound and determined to get in, they are going to get in,” said Richard Sanchez, a chief inspector.

One day, De La Bretoniere went back to a fire-scarred duplex on 114th Street that the owner had tried to board up. He found four dilapidated cars on the lawn and two young men living on the ground floor behind a barricaded door that they refused to open, claiming they paid rent.

Defusing a nasty confrontation, the inspector and a Los Angeles police officer warned the apparent squatters about the building’s dangers and informed them that the property soon would be boarded up again and fenced. Demolition may be the next step.

If vandalism or fire destroys more than 60% of a building and it is a threat to public safety, city inspectors usually will push for demolition. Another lengthy search for owners must be launched in a bureaucratic process that at least seven council members contend is too time-consuming.

Demolitions are expensive and can quickly eat up the $250,000 the city sets aside each year for them. So officials must postpone tearing down some structures and ask the City Council for extra money for bigger, urgent jobs. Neighbors often demand such action, preferring an empty lot to a crack house.

Residents on otherwise well-maintained streets had complained for years about a vacant and partly burned factory at 62nd Street and Van Ness Avenue. They petitioned for bulldozers and recently won a demolition that cost the city $21,167.

*

“Sure I’m happy,” said block club President Mary Lydia. “Now when I look out the door I don’t see all those tires, all that graffiti, all that trash. We’re trying to keep it nice here and when you’ve got these abandoned buildings here, it’s really bad.” Still, she is worried that the lot may become a trash heap if not properly fenced soon.

De La Bretoniere calls it a success. “When you clean up a neighborhood, people feel like they are not neglected. It’s very gratifying to hear a neighbor say thanks for a good job,” he said.

The City Council this week appropriated $160,000 for ripping down the troubled Californian Hotel in the Westlake district. The five-story, 200-room structure had been boarded up three times since July and suffered three fires before the devastating one Nov. 21, officials said. Fire Chief Donald O. Manning called it a potentially “killer building” for firefighters and the squatters.

A tangled, and possibly fraudulent, string of ownership slowed action at the hotel. Some officials suspect that the owners are pleased about the demolition, which probably makes the property more salable.

“The vast majority of property owners run safe, habitable housing,” said Richard M. Bobb, the deputy city attorney who coordinates the city’s Slum Housing Task Force and has filed numerous housing violations against the hotel owners. “But some very greedy people saw a way to make some money, they made it and now they are walking away. And they are expecting taxpayers to take care of the problem.” One major problem is that some mortgage holders do not want liability and refuse to foreclose on very troublesome abandoned property. The federal Resolution Trust Corp., which has taken over failed thrifts, is notoriously slow to foreclose, housing officials complain. That made it difficult to improve a dilapidated apartment building at 1805 Wilcox Ave. in Hollywood. Two weeks ago, a band of homeless youths allegedly tortured and burned a man to death inside.

Now, the RTC is on the verge of giving the mortgage to the nonprofit Hollywood Community Housing Corp., which hopes to foreclose and use tax credits, government loans and grants to renovate it for affordable housing, said the group’s executive director, Jack Gardner.

Similar arrangements would be repeated under a proposal by Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas. His idea, modeled after a Chicago program, would have the city more aggressively take over properties and quickly appoint nonprofit organizations as receivers and owners.

Unlike New York, Los Angeles “is not interested in becoming the largest slumlord in the city,” said city Housing Department General Manager Gary W. Squier. The best answer would be to prevent abandonment--the goal of a new program using federal funds for low-interest loans to 11 troubled, still occupied apartment buildings. But funds are limited.

One beneficiary is the Luisa Apartments in Boyle Heights, a 63-unit complex that opened seven years ago and quickly decayed because of mismanagement and crime. While the complex was partly occupied, the nonprofit Pico Union Housing Corp. bought it from the RTC and is about to start repairs. “Now we are going to have a very nice building for people who really deserve to live there,” said project manager Genny Alberts.

In contrast, the demolition of a building a few blocks away was applauded Monday by neighbors and city officials. The Pennsylvania Avenue house had been occupied by the notorious Primera Flats gang even after it was badly damaged in fires.

City officials were not only happy that the gang headquarters was gone, they were celebrating the rare case in which the owners of the abandoned property, a Westside-based family corporation, paid for the work.

There is often a debate over whether to save a building or tear it down. Even when an owner is willing to repair a crumbling structure, the outcome may not be certain.

De La Bretoniere and Richard Monfils, an LAPD narcotics officer in the Southeast division, recently revisited a previously vacant and filthy property on Croesus Avenue, a few blocks from the Watts Towers. To their surprise, the knee-high debris had been removed from the little storefront and rear house. One of the owners, Paul Aguilera, was directing a cleaning crew and said he hoped to renovate the buildings if he could get financing. The inspector encouraged him to keep trying and to take out proper permits.

*

But then, Monfils discovered what he thought could be signs of crack smoking inside. One of Aguilera’s friends admitted living in the house, whose front door and window glass were missing.

“If someone dies in there, they’re going to hang you from the phone poles,” De La Bretoniere warned the owner, urging him to put up boards and fences soon.

Even as he hoped for the best, the inspector was sure he would have to return.