City Fails to Heed Problem of Low Pay and Costly Housing

The smell of smoke still hung in the hot Wednesday morning air when I reached the scene of a garage fire that had killed a grandmother and two small children just hours before.

A man approached me. I could see him noticing my press tags and sizing me up. Something was bothering, even haunting, him.

He told me he was Jose Vasquez, a gardener, and he wanted to make a confession. No, he didn’t own the burned-out garage. But he used to rent out one like it, behind his house. It was an illegally remodeled, dangerous place and the sight of Wednesday’s early morning fire brought back the guilt he felt when he had tenants in the garage.

It had been a matter of money. He needed the rent to make his $1,200-a-month house payments. The tenants paid $200 or $300 a month. But news stories of fatal garage fires worried him. Then “someone fingered me” and he was out of the rental business.

“Tell the people don’t rent out garages any more,” Vasquez said. “Accidents happen.”

His experience is common. Illegal residence-garages are scattered throughout the working-class Sun Valley neighborhood, in the northeast San Fernando Valley, where 44-year-old Maria Magdalena Gonzalez, 7-year-old Joanne Lizette Paz and Janessa Naomi Paz, almost 3, died. In fact, the potential deathtraps are found in many parts of the city, ready to burn. In December, five children died in a garage fire in Watts.

That’s what comes from a city government indifferent to the need for low-cost housing and building inspectors who react instead of act. That deadly combination allows L.A.-style slums--converted garages and overcrowded apartments--to exist for a growing number of impoverished working people in an economy that is increasingly divided between rich and poor.

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The house on Ilex Avenue is the property of an absentee landlord, city officials said. It is a modest but well-kept place, painted pink and with a nicely manicured lawn in front. That’s true of many of the other homes in a subdivision built almost half a century ago in the Valley’s great post-World War II residential boom.

The damaged garage is in back. It had been divided into two bedrooms, a living room, a bathroom and a kitchen--all the work done without a building permit or an inspection, according to the city Building and Safety Department.

A couple of patches of black on the front wall and a hole in the roof were the only outward evidence of a blaze that began sometime after midnight and burned so fast and furious that the grandmother and the two children had no way of escaping from a windowless back bedroom.

Rick Martinez, who lives in the house with his parents, tried to put out the fire with a garden hose before the firefighters arrived, but said “it was pretty intense.”

The father and mother, who were in the house with the grandmother and babies, carried another child, a 14-month-old daughter, to safety. The father tried to return for the others. “He went into the smoke two times,” said his nephew, Gerardo Suarez, a security guard at KABC-TV Channel 7.

Suarez said his uncle had told him he had electrical troubles in the past. “He said the lights would go off on occasion, and there were sparks,” Suarez said. “I’m not an electrician but if the lights go off, that’s a problem.”

The neighborhood is perfect for illegal conversions. Houses are in front and garages in back of the big old Valley lots, subdivided when land was cheap, and the post-World War II generation never thought slums would invade their San Fernando Valley paradise.

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The city never thought so, either.

We still have 1950s-style enforcement. The Building and Safety Department concentrates on issuing permits and doing inspections for new constructions. Inspectors attack housing violations only when there’s a complaint.

“We get 30,000 complaints a year, including several hundred illegal garage conversions,” said principal city building inspector David Keim. But the Building and Safety Department has only 400 inspectors to police a 476-square-mile city.

With inexpensive housing subdivisions a relic of an easier past, working-class men and women in low-paid jobs can’t afford decent housing. And federal, state and city governments are doing less and less to assist developers to build for this growing segment of the market.

In the last four years, city funds to help subsidize low-income housing have been reduced by 45%, city officials said.

A dramatic example is Mayor Richard Riordan’s current budget, which shifts almost $10 million in housing subsidies to politically popular pork barrel projects such as swimming pools, senior citizens centers, restoration of an old theater in Watts, a parking lot for the Capitol Records building in Hollywood and others. Many are worthy, but they’re not housing.

And on Ilex Avenue on Wednesday, we were reminded again that low-paying jobs and high-cost housing are a dangerous mix.