Quake ‘Ghost Towns’ Are Reviving Slowly : Recovery: Only a small percentage of repair work is completed on commercial buildings in areas hardest hit by the Northridge temblor, according to permits filed.

The block of earthquake-crippled apartment buildings and condominiums on Kingsbury Avenue in Granada Hills is a ghost town no more. But neither is it reborn.

Instead, 18 months after the Northridge quake, the cul-de-sac is like a movie back lot, bustling with the sounds of construction in a surrealistic scene juxtaposing finished handiwork with gaping wall-less facades. “Grand Opening” declares a sign on the Kingsbury Villas, a Cape Cod-style apartment complex that is now 40% rented after having its second and third floors raised on jacks while its first floor was rebuilt from scratch after the Jan. 17, 1994, quake.

Across the street, the exposed wood frame of a block-long 161-unit apartment complex hulks on wooden pilings, its repair on hold during a change of contractors. “The view is not really pretty from those windows” for new tenants, said Shirley Bode, property supervisor for the Kingsbury Villas. “We’ve just been honest with those people. ‘You’re going to be pioneers.’ ”

The Kingsbury Avenue score card-- five structures completely repaired, six under construction, two vacant and untouched since the earthquake, and one bulldozed into an empty lot--closely mirrors the mixed progress of rebuilding across Los Angeles.

“Despite the large amount of money available, the pace of reconstruction, except for freeway and bridge repair, has not been rapid,” UCLA economist Nancy Bolton concluded in a March report.

A Times computer analysis of the Los Angeles Building and Safety Department’s earthquake-related building permits shows that although about three-quarters of quake repairs are now under way, only a small percentage of the work was completed through the first six months of 1995.

Among the findings:

* Of 73,758 earthquake-related building permits issued since the quake, work continues on 56,742, or 77%.

* The owners of 1,294 red- and yellow-tagged quake-damaged buildings have yet to take out any permits, and only demolition or grading permits have been taken out on another 670 properties. Red-tagged buildings are those that must be vacated; yellow-tagged properties can be partly occupied but have structural damage requiring repairs.

* The value of repair projects that have been completed over the past four months has fallen sharply, while the valuation of new permits issued continues close to the peak of last July.

All this means that the quick and easy quake repair jobs are out of the way, said Bill King, chief building mechanical inspector in the Van Nuys office of the Department of Building and Safety. “It reflects that we’re getting into the bigger repairs now that take longer” to finish, he said.

The largest share of unfinished work is in the San Fernando Valley communities surrounding the epicenter--Northridge, Granada Hills, Chatsworth and Canoga Park--but the percentage of buildings without any repair work done is higher in badly hit Sherman Oaks and in Hollywood.

Building inspectors from the Van Nuys office are making 1,000 calls a day, 300 in Northridge alone, examining each step of the construction process from footings to insulation, King said.

As quake repairs continue, however, building owners and their contractors keep discovering more hidden damage that continues to push up the overall cost of the recovery.

Industry estimates of the total insured property damage from the Northridge quake are now around $12.5 billion, up 7% since a survey in May. In June a team of USC economists, calculating the lost employment and business output, added another $6 billion to the $20-billion estimate of the quake’s overall cost.

Meanwhile, the bill for repairs of hidden damage to steel-frame office buildings could easily rise to the hundreds of millions of dollars in the next two years.

Not surprisingly, quake repairs of commercial buildings have gone much faster than repairs of homes. Nearly 30% of retail, office and apartment repairs are complete, compared to 17% for single-family homes and 14% for condominiums in Los Angeles, according to city building records.

Financial incentives and experience help the business owner make repairs swiftly, said Jack Kyser, chief economist for the Economic Development Corp. of Los Angeles County. Businesses are “more sophisticated in dealing with issues like this,” he said. “They have done previous expansions. They sort of know how the system works.”

Conversely, any homeowner or small-scale apartment investor who has not done a major remodeling faces “what in the best of times is a prickly process and all of a sudden, you’re doing it under duress,” he said.

There has been much fanfare accompanying commercial success stories--such as Monday’s planned reopening of another part of the Northridge Fashion Square, after the rebuilding of two parking structures and seismic retrofitting of the main concourse. But the rebound of stores may mask the financial and bureaucratic obstacles besetting thousands of apartment owners and homeowners.

Dennis and Angie Carter have been out of step with city officials and their mortgage companies since the 11-unit Sherman Oaks apartment building they own was red-tagged shortly after the earthquake. The couple got a Small Business Administration loan commitment to rebuild, but with half of their $400,000 equity wiped out by recession and a second mortgage to settle, plus dealing with their first mortgage holder, Home Savings, they could not work out a deal.

“SBA agreed to buy out Home Savings,” Dennis Carter said, but, “Home Savings didn’t want the second [mortgage holder] to get anything.”

When the holder of the second mortgage demanded cash, Home Savings filed for foreclosure in August in Superior Court, going after the building and the Carters’ Westlake Village home, he said.

Eventually, Home Savings dropped the lawsuit, accepting a compromise in which “everybody ended up . . . not being totally happy,” Carter said.

But the vacant building on Murietta Avenue still stands, unchanged from the day of the earthquake. Last year, the city volunteered to tear it down for Carter at Federal Emergency Management Agency expense. He declined, hoping to have the building repaired. Then in February, after concluding that building it from scratch would be just as economical, he asked the city to tear it down. Though a demolition order was issued March 15, the Department of Public Works has yet to get to the job.

Carter now expects it to be done this month, and hopes to start construction soon and reopen 10 months later. He also hopes that the Valley economy and real estate market will improve so that he can regain his pre-quake equity in 15 years.

All told, the city designated 17 areas such as Kingsbury as “ghost towns”--those sites with a high number of deserted quake-damaged buildings close together. Today, many other smaller ghost towns, scattered across the city, remain boarded up or fenced off with no sign of activity by owners who often guard their anonymity.

On Vista Del Monte Avenue in Sherman Oaks, a street full of condos and apartment complexes, apartment owner Mel Wank hopes to complete repairs in a month or two. But Wank is concerned about luring tenants because of the lack of any progress on a nearby building that has apparently been sold to an owner he has never spoken to.

“If they need help, I’ll be glad to help them,” Wank said. “But I have no way of locating them.”

Although dwellings make up by far the largest category of buildings that remain closed because of the Northridge earthquake, city building records show that the earthquake doldrums can strike anywhere: Hotels, restaurants, theaters, amusement parks, schools, public utilities and hospitals are among the red- and yellow-tagged buildings for which no building permits have been issued.

The city’s largest commercial project--on which no apparent progress has been made--is the $20-million replacement of a research laboratory and a nursing facility at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center on the Westside.

After shifting the research and nursing services temporarily to other buildings, Cedars-Sinai embarked on months of negotiations with FEMA before concluding that the buildings should be razed rather than repaired, said President Thomas Priselac.

Now, Priselac said, the hospital is studying how best to fit the new buildings into its long-range plans. “Once we finish our own internal process, we have to go through the permitting and approval with the regulating agencies,” he said. “It could be several years” before repairs start.

That may seem like a lightning reflex to the congregation of Emerson Unitarian Universalist Church in Canoga Park. Despite the pleas of the Canoga Park Historical Society, they have decided to tear down their 1919 neoclassical columned sanctuary, which is riddled with quake cracks.

“Just to get wheelchair access would cost as much as to build a new building,” said office administrator Karen Moore.

Based on its membership of 130, the church did not qualify for a large enough SBA loan to start the estimated half-million-dollar rebuilding. It has raised $200,000 in pledges, still not enough.

So the church carries on in two trailers, one an office and the other classrooms. On Sundays, the senior center next door becomes its sanctuary.

The repairs are “definitely going to happen,” Moore said.

She just doesn’t know when.

Times data analyst Sandra Poindexter contributed to this story.

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Permits by Construction Type

A breakdown by type of construction shows that residential housing accounts for the largest portion of quake-related damage, but lags behind in repairs. Progress in repairing offices and stores has jumped ahead of all other building categories.

In Millions:

NO PERMIT DEMOLITION/ BUILDING RED/ GRADING WORK WORK TYPE YELLOW TAGS PERMIT ONLY UNDER WAY COMPLETED TOTALS Single-Family $34.34 $0.51 $443.32 $97.70 $575.86 Apartment 51.88 0.21 133.86 54.77 240.72 Condominium 16.69 0.24 154.15 27.69 198.76 Retail 6.21 0 73.87 31.41 111.50 Office 5.91 0 41.93 17.59 65.43 Manufacturing 12.53 17.93 21.38 10.74 62.57 Other 30.57 44.78 97.24 24.52 197.10 Total $158.14 $63.66 $965.74 $264.41 $1,451.95

PERCENT BUILDING PERCENT TYPE COMPLETE Single-Family 17.0% Apartment 22.8 Condominium 13.9 Retail 28.2 Office 26.9 Manufacturing 17.2 Other 12.4 Total 18.2%

Source: Los Angeles City Department of Building and Safety

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The Pace of Rebuilding

A computer analysis of Los Angeles building permits and U.S. Small Business Administration loans shows that 18 months after the Northridge earthquake, the recovery effort is just getting into high gear. Construction permits have been taken out on most of the buildings that suffered major damage but only about 22% of those projects have been complete.

L.A. CITY BUILDING PERMIT VALUATIONS BY ZIP CODE

The size of the pie charts shows the estimated dollar value of earthquake damage in each ZIP code in the city of Los Angeles. The three slices in each pie represent the percentage of the estimated cost of repairs that have been completed, that are in progress and, for red- and yellow-tagged buildings that have not yet begun. The largest pie charts represent $128 million in damage.

SBA LOANS

These loans are considered a good indicator of construction starts. Payments have climbed steadily over the last six months, but a $1.57-billion gap remains.

(see newspaper for chart)

Source: U.S. Small Business Administration

BUILDING PERMITS

Building officials say the sharp drop-off this year in jobs completed represents a shift from smaller earthquake repairs to major projects.

Source: Los Angeles City Department of Building and Safety

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Source: Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety

Researched by DOUG SMITH and SANDRA POINDEXTER / Los Angeles Times