Seeking a Clean Sweep : Skid Row Lawyer Makes a Career Out of Taking on Slumlord Cases

Walking through the Union Avenue apartment was like taking a tour of hell.

The rat and roach traps overflowed with vermin. A broken pipe spewed raw sewage into the basement. Drug dealers and gang members roamed the dark, dingy halls.

It was the mid-1980s and Nancy Mintie, who had just moved her legal practice out of a garage and into a storefront office, figured this would be the most dismal slumlord case she would ever handle.

How wrong she was.

“I’m just continually amazed that I have yet to see the worst of it,” said Mintie, the only private attorney with an office on skid row. “One has to wonder where it all ends.”

A soft-spoken woman with a steely discipline, the UCLA Law School graduate has dedicated her practice to serving the poor--all for $29,500 a year.

She is among a handful of lawyers in Los Angeles who make it their sole business to force slumlords to fix their buildings and then pay for the pain and suffering that living in squalid conditions has caused tenants.

“She represents people who society has cast aside,” said Los Angeles City Councilman Mike Feuer. “Nancy is prepared to say: ‘They still matter.’ ”

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While many civil attorneys spend afternoons in the plush confines of their offices, Mintie visits her clients in some of the worst slums in Los Angeles County, handing out roach traps and photographing rats.

“During my college years, I became exposed to the poverty in the city,” said Mintie, 42, who in the 1970s helped her brother serve food to the poor at the Catholic Worker’s soup kitchen on skid row. “I was very moved and I wanted to do more. During law school, it dawned on me that this kind of work was something I could do.”

Mintie has found an increasing need for her work. Although the Legal Aid Foundation has long provided similar services, recent cuts in federal funding have prompted it to scale back its caseload. And although the Los Angeles city attorney’s office has a unit devoted to prosecuting slumlords, it does not have the authority to request restitution and damages for the tenants.

“All I can do is put them in jail,” said Richard Bobb, the supervisor of the housing unit in the city attorney’s office. “But Nancy has been able to obtain actual money damages.”

Over the last 15 years, Mintie and her small staff at her firm--the Inner City Law Center--have represented hundreds of clients and won millions of dollars in restitution and damages, often going against the landlord’s high-paid attorney.

Take the Union Avenue case, for example. The suit led to a $1.3-million settlement for 81 tenants, enabling many of the residents to move out and buy homes. Mintie said she could not disclose the name of the landlord or the exact location of the building because of a confidentiality clause in the 1990 settlement.

But former tenants are allowed to talk at will about the conditions they once endured.

“I used to stand guard over my children at night with a broom, to make sure the rats didn’t bite them,” said Maria Duenas, who lived with her family in the dilapidated building for eight years.

Once, Duenas said, the roof in the bedroom collapsed on her 11-year-old son, injuring his leg.

“We had a very hard life in that apartment,” she said.

The Duenas family decided to use the $48,000 they received in the settlement for a down payment on a two-bedroom bungalow near La Brea Avenue and Olympic Boulevard.

“I feel like I’m in a mansion now,” Duenas said. “I sleep peacefully and my children sleep peacefully. . . . We are very proud of what we have, and we are very thankful to Nancy.”

Hoping to give several dozen other families a fresh start, Mintie recently filed suit against landlords who own three apartments in Maywood and South Los Angeles.

The suit against Salomon Valencia, Dora Valencia and Yvonne Valencia allege that residents have been “subjected to severe fire hazards, severe infestation by rodents, roaches and other vermin and pests, and generally unsafe and dilapidated living conditions.”

The owners did not return repeated calls for comment and have not yet filed a response to the suit.

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According to Mintie, residents catch half a dozen rats a day. Mariana Rivas, 30, of Maywood said the roach infestation is so bad in her unit that she stuffs cotton in her 4-year-old daughter’s ears at night.

Resident Evelia Garcia, who shares a small apartment with her husband and three children, says she sets and baits the rat traps before she goes to sleep. Then she lies in bed listening to the rodents rustling in the walls and cabinets.

In the morning, she dumps the dead rats into paper shopping bags and saves them until Mintie can come out to photograph the carcasses as evidence.

According to the suit, which was filed Oct. 21, the landlords did not fix the problems even after they were notified in writing to do so.

“There is no excuse for milking these buildings at the expense of the health and safety of these tenants,” Mintie said.

Mintie started her legal crusade in 1980, after graduating from UCLA Law School. At first, she set up her firm in the garage at the Catholic Worker’s soup kitchen. Eventually she got enough money to move into a storefront on skid row.

She employs about 10 people at her firm, with attorneys earning $30,000 to $40,000 a year. The center’s annual budget is about $420,000--most of it raised through donations and grants.

“We want to communicate to the poor that they are not alone,” Mintie said. “Someone who has a little bit of power and access to the corridors of justice cares about them.”