Time to Escape From L.A.

My advice to Chris Villarreal is to go back to Moline, finish school, get a nice teaching job in rural Illinois and never again buy income property.

Invest in cotton futures, diet powders, miracle bras or tax-free municipal bonds, but stay away from anything that casts you in the role of renter.

I say that to him because he is just now emerging from a landlord hell that has plunged him into debt and forced him to live on the street, and it is time for the man to return to a less complicated way of life.

A preppy, good-natured person of 34, Villarreal represents the flip side of landlord-tenant relationships that often paint the landlord as a devil.

I’m not sure that he’s an angel--his tenants call him a “snake”--but I am sure that fate has him by the ankles and won’t let go until he’s out of the rental property business.

It’s this way: For the past seven months Villarreal has been trying to evict a couple from the modest stucco house he owns in Lennox across from a Sheriff’s Department office and under the ear-splitting flight path to LAX.

He finally had to sue to evict them, and just last week a Municipal Court judge ruled that the tenants, Norman Lubow and Mary Sheets, had to move by next Tuesday, but also relieved them of paying any back rent.

Villarreal says he’ll just be glad to have them out of there. Lubow says they’ll just be glad to be away from Villarreal.

Both sides claim victory.

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The episode represents how badly a landlord-tenant association can deteriorate and how twisted their disputes can become.

Like Adam and Eve in paradise, everything seemed lovely at first but unraveled over a technicality. Not an apple, but a lease.

Villarreal’s situation has elements of both comedy and tragedy. He came to L.A. from Moline in 1983 after three years of college, lured by all of the factors that have enticed people from everywhere for the past 200 years.

His plan was to finish school here but, lacking funds, he decided to work for a while and save money. He got a job with an aerospace company and opened a savings account.

Somewhere along the line, Villarreal concluded that paying rent was foolish, he ought to be buying a place of his own. Here again, however, he lacked the necessary funds, so he implemented Plan No. 3: He moved into his van for two years to accelerate his rate of saving.

It seemed to work OK. In 1989 he bought the house in Lennox for $113,500, using as a down payment $30,000 he had saved. He lived in the house for four years and began saving money again for college. Life was good . . . until the bottom fell out of the aerospace industry.

Suddenly, he was out of a job, unable to find new work, unable to make payments on his mortgage and, as it turned out, unable to sell the house. So he put the place up for rent and signed a two-year lease with Lubow and Sheets with an option to buy.

More trouble followed.

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In the lease, Villarreal charged them $650-a-month rent but stipulated that if they bought the house after two years, $100 of it would go toward the purchase price.

Initially pleased with his new role as landlord, Villarreal moved back to Moline and worked off and on in construction. But that collapsed too, so he returned to L.A.

Part of the reason he had to work was that his mortgage payments were $1,000 a month and the rent he was charging didn’t cover it. When I asked why he hadn’t charged more, he shrugged and said he wanted to give them a break. He was John D. Rockefeller distributing dimes.

Two years and two months passed and when Lubow and Sheets failed to exercise their option to buy, Villarreal told them to move. They said they would if Villarreal would give them the $100 a month he said he would let them apply to the purchase price of the home. They wanted $2,600 to move.

By their logic, the money was theirs. By Villarreal’s logic, they were crazier than hell. He called them bums. They called him a snake. The thing dragged on for seven months, during which time no rent was paid.

Villarreal was meanwhile back in his van, broke, unemployed and making payments on the house with a credit card. The card has since maxed out and now he may lose the house, the card and his sanity.

All he wants to do now is get out from under, and I wish him well in the effort. The poet Emerson said that if a man owns land, the land owns him, and it would be better if he just walked away. Good advice. They’re expecting Villarreal back in Moline.

Al Martinez can be reached through the Internet at al.martinez@latimes.com