Rigid Zoning Laws Compound Garage Apartment Problem
The needless deaths last month of two small Sun Valley girls and their grandmother point up how wide the divide has become in Los Angeles--and how tough it will be to narrow the gap. Sisters Joanne Lizette Paz, 7, and Janessa Naomi Paz, 2, died with grandmother Maria Gonzalez when the illegal garage apartment they called home caught fire and trapped them inside just out of reach of rescue workers. Late last year, five children died in a similar garage fire in Watts.
As many as 40,0000 families across Los Angeles live in illegal dwellings, most of them garage apartments. Some are nicely appointed with professionally installed plumbing and electrical fixtures. Many, though, are hastily constructed with power supplied by extension cords. Few meet city codes and almost all violate zoning laws that prohibit apartments in single-family neighborhoods. Yet they provide cheap quarters for poor families, many of them recent immigrants unable to afford the average citywide rent of more than $850 for a two-bedroom apartment. For homeowners, the few hundred dollars in rent the illegal apartments can bring in eases the squeeze of a mortgage.
Clearly, it is unacceptable for huge portions of Los Angeles to live in overcrowded, dangerous conditions. That’s just not how responsible societies treat their weakest members. In the wake of the Sun Valley fire, community leaders and affordable housing advocates demanded the city do more to accommodate low-income residents. Over the past four years, city subsidies for low-income housing have fallen by almost half. Mayor Richard Riordan proposed diverting $14 million in federal Housing and Urban Development funds to other improvement projects. Although the City Council restored some of that money to housing, the bulk went toward other projects. Adding to the problem are building and planning departments more focused on code enforcement than on creative solutions.
The big question is how to get people out of overcrowded garages and into homes or apartments of their own. But the more urgent and more manageable question is how to make sure those living in garages now are safe. To that end, Los Angeles City Councilman Richard Alarcon, whose district includes the site of the most recent fire, has proposed a special task force made up of various city departments to concentrate on garage apartments. We support the task force as a good first step. Among the issues it needs to tackle: How to bring some well-built apartments in line with zoning rules; how to get marginal units up to safety standards; and where to place residents of dangerous units. The effort requires flexibility and commitment.
The rigid zoning laws that segregate land uses are outdated. A city changing at the pace of Los Angeles needs zoning that reflects how residents live today, not how a much smaller city lived 50 years ago. That means acknowledging the need for the kind of flexibility that might permit “granny flats” or well-built garage conversions. Only with that kind of flexibility might owners be willing to take out permits and have the work done properly by licensed builders. Then Building and Safety inspectors should concentrate on ongoing inspection rather than after-the-fact, reactive enforcement.
Although the ultimate goal is to get people out of garage apartments altogether, that’s years away--even with recent programs such as a $7-billion Fannie Mae effort to put 75,000 low- and moderate-income Los Angeles residents in homes of their own. In the meantime, the plight of those living in garage apartments cannot be ignored. If it is, more sorrow will surely follow.
