Northridge Quake Housing Repairs Close to Complete

Three years after the Northridge earthquake, Los Angeles has nearly won the battle to restore the city’s damaged housing stock, with recovery complete for three of every four damaged dwellings, a Times analysis shows.

At the same time, the analysis of computerized quake repair records shows that the owners of a small percentage of now vacant or demolished housing units have made no progress at all, suggesting that complete recovery remains years in the future.

But, with the repair of 13,800 housing units done, Los Angeles has moved much more swiftly than Bay Area cities, which are still struggling to restore housing lost in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.

“That’s a remarkable achievement in an incredibly difficult economy when it was hard to get owners even to come forward and do the work,” said Mary C. Comerio, a UC Berkeley researcher who studied the aftermath of both disasters.

Comerio, vice chairwoman of the UC Berkeley Architecture Department, reported in a 1994 study that influenced the Los Angeles recovery effort that 50% of the housing in several Bay Area cities damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake was still not repaired four years later. Oakland is just now completing its housing repair, and San Francisco is still only 60% done, Comerio said.

Saying the analysis by The Times confirmed her earlier observations about progress in the city of Los Angeles, Comerio credits city officials for skillfully piecing together federal funds for the housing recovery after the state’s voters rejected an earthquake bond issue six months after the quake. The Times study did not include other areas of the county, such as Santa Monica and West Hollywood, where there was earthquake damage but on a smaller scale than in the city of Los Angeles.

Los Angeles housing officials said they expect to complete their job within a year by adding $40 million in federal reconstruction loans to the $300 million already disbursed.

“With those funds we’re going to be able to complete 98% of the recovery,” said Gary Squier, general manager of the Los Angeles Housing Department.

Still, he acknowledged that the city program will ultimately miss a percentage of the damaged housing.

Those will remain as boarded-up buildings or empty lots, Squier said, until market forces bring them back into use, an unlikely event in the current climate of depressed real estate values.

The Times analysis shows three distinct clusters of still-vacant buildings: one south of the Ventura Freeway in Sherman Oaks, a second along the Hollywood Freeway in Hollywood and a third straddling the Santa Monica Freeway in the Mid-City area.

The remaining buildings are scattered from the north San Fernando Valley near the epicenter to South-Central Los Angeles.

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Although the owners of some of them have recently taken out permits, indicating that construction is underway or imminent, no progress has been made toward restoring 526 single-family homes, 115 apartment buildings and 72 duplexes.

Economically, those units may have a minuscule impact on Los Angeles, but they can still spell trouble socially, said Dowell Myers, professor of urban planning at USC.

“Even just one boarded up unit in a neighborhood can become a magnet for illicit activity,” Myers said “I don’t think they’re being missed as housing, but they’re potentially creating a social problem.”

In seeking lessons from the Northridge earthquake, housing officials are not optimistic that the methods employed by Los Angeles could be replicated as successfully in a future disaster.

Squier credits the city’s success more to a sympathetic administration in Washington than to a standing government program. Particularly important, he said, was the ability of former U.S. Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros, who visited Los Angeles frequently after the quake, to carry his message to President Clinton.

“The president brought those funds to Los Angeles,” Squier said.

In future urban disasters the response from another administration could be less sympathetic, he said.

A HUD official saw a more positive note in the quick work of building officials in documenting the extent of the damage.

“When we went to Congress and the White House to indicate this multifamily. . . . issue was going to be looming, we had data,” Wendy Greuel, a spokeswoman for HUD. “They didn’t have a lot of that data following Loma Prieta.” Comerio, who believes the knowledge gained from the Loma Prieta quake contributed to the recovery in Los Angeles, praises government disaster officials for alertness and ingenuity.

“I think for all the beating up we do on federal agencies, we have to give them credit that they’ve learned a few things over the last six or seven years,” she said.

Still, she is not confident that the lessons have been heeded.

“I don’t think we are prepared yet to face up to what we would do if we had a very large earthquake in an urban setting, if we suddenly have 100,000 households out of housing and we have no place to put them.”

In the Northridge recovery, 13,818 units had been repaired--74.3% of the 18,596 originally damaged--by Jan. 17, the quake’s third anniversary. Still without permits were 1,742 units, or 9.4%.

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Most rewarding for city housing officials has been the strong recovery of apartments, which accounted for 80% of the housing loss.

On the third anniversary, nearly eight in 10 damaged apartment units were repaired, a rate outpacing the recovery for houses and duplexes, the city records show.

Only condominium repairs have seriously lagged. Sixty-five percent of the city’s 1,843 damaged condos are still vacant, owing to the legal complication of multiple ownership, Squier said.

Immediately after the Northridge earthquake, housing officials had every reason to fear that Los Angeles would repeat the Bay Area experience, on a much larger scale, because of limitations in the Small Business Administration loan program, the major source of long-term disaster recovery funds.

With a loan cap of $1.5 million per property owner and stringent qualifications, SBA loans are out of reach for many apartment owners.

“Our policies are really from the ‘50s and ‘60s when we thought everybody lived in a single-family house,” said Comerio, whose study helped alert Los Angeles officials to a potential housing crisis. “We have not rethought the policy in a world where lots and lots of people live in multifamily housing.”

The city’s first plan to stimulate apartment repair suffered a setback when California voters rejected an earthquake recovery bond in June 1994. As a result of that election, Gov. Wilson canceled the $575-million California Natural Disaster Assistance Program, which had been crafted in response to the shortcomings of Bay Area recovery.

In place of the state money, the city housing department cobbled together several sources of U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development funds, Squier said.

The city’s initial $300 million has now all been loaned, but applications totaling $63 million still await funding, Squier said.

To fill the gap, HUD this year loaned the city $40 million more to be repaid from proceeds of earlier loans, Squier said.

He said the money will fund about 300 more apartment buildings, mostly from four to 16 units, in the next 60 days. Construction should take nine months.

“By the fourth anniversary, I think we will be done,” Squier said.

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Quake Repairs

Three years after the Northridge quake, three of every four damaged housing units in the San Fernando Valley and Los Angeles as a whole have been repaired.

Source: L.A. Dept. of Building and Safety