Los Angeles’ Houses of Trouble : City Council ponders measures to cope with the festering sore of abandoned housing

Abandoned homes, once a rarity in Los Angeles, are increasingly common because of the riots, the Northridge earthquake, the lingering recession and the plunge in real estate values. Owners are required to board up the vacant properties. If they don’t, the city will pay for the work and then place a lien on the property. But Times staff writer Larry Gordon found that mere plywood is not deterring gangs, drug addicts or homeless squatters, who can turn somebody else’s American dream into an urban nightmare.

To make the vacant property more secure and less available for criminal activity, City Councilman Marvin Braude, who chairs the Public Safety Committee, supports an ordinance that would require metal grating on windows and doors and tall fences around the structure.

At the committee’s direction, the city attorney’s office is drafting the measure, which would also give police greater authority to arrest squatters and set up a toll-free hot line to allow neighbors to report trouble. These steps should reduce the menace and slow this worrisome and, in some cases, deadly trend.

Building inspectors, firefighters, police officers and housing officials count more than 3,000 vacant properties in Hollywood, the Westlake area, Watts, South-Central Los Angeles and Pacoima and other sections of the San Fernando Valley. Unchecked, the blight spreads domino-fashion. Law-abiding neighbors flee neighborhoods afflicted by graffiti-covered crime pads, crack houses and squalid squatters’ lairs that become breeding grounds for rats. In Hollywood, squatters recently tortured and killed a man in an uninhabitable apartment building.

The vacant properties also become fire hazards. More than 300 fires have been set by vagrants in such structures this year, causing at least two deaths. In the Westlake area last month, homeless people were rescued from a blaze in a boarded-up residential hotel. The building had been sealed three times and had partially burned three times before the final blaze. The City Council will pay to tear it down.

Demolition is ordered after fire or vandalism destroys more than 60% of the building and it becomes a threat to public safety. Tearing down such nuisances is not cheap, but it must be done.

Until the rash of plagues--riots, recession and earthquake--Los Angeles had escaped the urban decay reflected by boarded-up neighborhoods in Detroit, Newark, St. Louis and other old cities. Before it’s too late, the City Council should impose stronger security, speed the process of taking over vacant properties and make it easier for nonprofit groups to acquire and salvage abandoned homes.