Tough Stance on Garage Conversions

Like many overcrowded blue-collar suburbs, South Gate is painfully familiar with the kind of tragedy that struck Watts on Thursday, when five children died in a garage that had been turned into an apartment.

But in this city, officials have taken an unusually aggressive tack to uncover hundreds of illegal, hidden homes.

Besides inspections by its team of code enforcement officers, the city this fall imposed a $1,000 fine on homeowners who allow their garages to be turned into apartments. And there’s a hotline for residents to report neighbors who may be harboring tenants illegally.

The city has issued about 900 citations this year. And since officials imposed the homeowner fine, the City Hall switchboard has been lighted up with citizens reporting on their neighbors.

One woman called to report her entire block. Inspectors found six families huddled in converted garages. Law enforcement officials credit residents with discovering more than 80% of their cases.

“They’re tired of people using our infrastructure, sewers, water and not paying for it,” said Chon Cervantes, director of the city’s building and safety department.

More than one resident has gone to the authorities because he became jealous of a neighbor whose pocket was being lined with rent payments from an illegal tenant. Other homeowners turned themselves in before the fine took effect. Under the old system, they faced only a $75 fine and often reconverted the garages after inspectors left.

The City Council raised the fine to $1,000 after residents became fed up with congested streets and demanded that officials put a stop to the influx of shadow tenants.

The city of 92,000 has only four code enforcement officers, but they work with the Police Department and building inspectors to follow up on tips.

“The city has zero tolerance,” said one enforcement officer, Roberto Trejo. “There are lives involved here.”

Under sunny skies Friday, Trejo hopped into his yellow pickup and headed to the first stop on his list of suspect residences. The first clues that a homeowner has converted the garage are subtle: a few too many cars in the driveway, or a wardrobe’s worth of jeans and shirts on one clothesline. On closer inspection, Trejo often finds electrical wires running from the main house to the garage, or a cement seal around the garage door.

“They don’t see it as a danger,” he said.

Trejo’s first stop was a tan house on a tree-lined street of single-family homes. He had received a complaint from a neighbor that there was an illegally converted garage on the property. But at the end of a long driveway, the garage sat open--and empty.

When he took a closer look at the house, he found a side entrance built from white, wooden planks, and a wooden section that led from the house to another structure behind it, with a chimney attached.

It wasn’t an illegal garage--there was a house that had been subdivided by at least two families, a frequent and often illegal practice in overcrowded housing markets.

(Elsewhere, county inspectors once found people living in the drained swimming pool of an apartment complex.)

Inside the house, there was a wall probably built to separate the back of the house from the front, Trejo said. He left without issuing a citation, but said he would return today to speak with the homeowner.

Later, Trejo paid a call to another illegally converted garage across town, where the homeowner had yet to pay the $1,000 fine. The garage had unusually large windows, but they were covered with bars on the outside, and with sheets and wood panels inside. The garage door was padlocked and the residents had left their only door open for ventilation.

At the center of the 20-by-20-foot room was a propane-powered grill--a major fire hazard.

City planners are hoping to open a center to help garage dwellers ousted from their homes, said Councilman Albert Robles, who said he lived in a $75-a-month garage in Alhambra for more than a year after he graduated from high school.

“If I found out a child ended up on the street, homeless, because of our ordinance, I couldn’t stand it,” he said. “But the law is the law.”