Crackdown Urged on Illegal Garage Homes

A Los Angeles City Council panel rejected a proposal Tuesday to legalize some of the city’s 50,000 to 100,000 garage dwellings, opting instead to crack down on landlords who rent out the illegally converted living spaces.

In response to eight deaths in three months due to fires in converted garages, a joint council committee proposed making it a misdemeanor violation to rent out such garages. The penalty would be a $1,000 fine.

As part of a package of recommendations, the panel also suggested forcing landlords to pay to relocate tenants from illegal garages to legal apartments. It also proposed a $217,000 education program to teach tenants about the risks of living in garages.

But most significantly, the committee disregarded a controversial proposal by a task force of city officials to legalize converted garages that meet minimum safety regulations.

The proposal to legalize converted garages was also blasted by nearly a dozen homeowner groups--mostly from the San Fernando Valley--who argued that legalizing such dwellings would ruin the single-family atmosphere of many city neighborhoods.

If the garages are legalized, said Adriana Noonan, a member of the Van Nuys Homeowners Assn., neighborhoods like hers will be plagued with traffic congestion, parking problems and diminished property values.

Most of the council members on the seven-person panel agreed with the homeowners and decided instead to take a hard-line approach to landlords who rent out garages.

“Currently, nothing happens to the landlord when they get caught,” said Councilman Hal Bernson, who promised to introduce the motion to make it a misdemeanor to rent illegally converted garages.

Bernson also said he will ask the council to support state legislation that would allow prosecutors to file felony charges against landlords if a tenant living in an illegal garage apartment is injured or killed adue to a fire.

As part of his recommendation, Bernson suggested a three-month amnesty period to give landlords and tenants time to either convert garages to city-approved dwellings or find garage tenants new housing.

The testimony during the nearly three-hour hearing Tuesday demonstrated what a sticky problem occupied garages pose for city officials.

Council members conceded that if Building and Safety Department inspectors move too quickly to evict garage dwellers, the city won’t be able to provide shelter for the displaced tenants.

But council members also fear that if the city moves too slowly to remove tenants from the illegal units, it risks further deaths and injuries in fires.

“What is our purpose?” a frustrated Councilman Richard Alatorre asked the panel. “Is our purpose to create habitability or to kick people out?”

Hoping to get more answers, Mayor Richard Riordan and Councilman Richard Alarcon suggested in a letter that the city form a new task force of housing experts outside of City Hall to study the problem.

Alarcon and Riordan said the recommendations that were made by the existing task force--made up of housing, planning and building and safety officials--left “many thorny questions unanswered.”

To answer some of those questions, Alarcon and Riordan suggested the new panel be headed by Barbara Zeidman, former assistant general manager of the city’s housing department, and include representatives from banks, apartment owners associations and insurance agencies, among others.

But Bernson, who headed the council’s joint panel, shelved Riordan and Alarcon’s proposal, saying he wanted to concentrate on the recommendations already before the panel.

The latest study was prompted by a March fire in an illegally converted garage in Sun Valley that killed a woman and two of her grandchildren. Relatives said the three were sleeping in bedrooms with no windows, which hampered their escape.

Shortly before that fire, five members of a South-Central Los Angeles family died in a garage blaze.

Among the package of recommendations supported by the panel was a proposal by Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas to have city staff conduct a thorough building survey to better determine the number of illegally converted garages in the city.

The city has never conducted an in-depth study of the problem and has for years relied on a study by The Times in 1987 that said that about 42,000 illegal garage units house nearly 200,000 people.

City officials now believe that the number ranges from 50,000 to 100,000.

A housing official told the panel that when inspectors investigate complaints about illegally converted garages they often find that the tenants pay enough in rent to afford a small, legal apartment unit. But the officials said many tenants have never rented an apartment and don’t know how it is done.

The recommendations of the panel will return to the full council in the form of ordinance sometime in the next month or so, officials said.