Housing Laws No Cure for Slums’ Ills

The bathroom floors were rotting and most residents kept bottles of insecticide in a losing war against cockroach infestations. Outside, poisonous lead paint fell like snowflakes from the walls.

Complaints by the building’s tenants led to a visit last December by the county health department. Despite many uncorrected violations, the inspector gave the downtown building on Hope Street a passing grade.

Weeks later, 4-year-old resident Joshio Pavan became violently ill. “He was vomiting, there were marks all over his skin,” said his mother. Blood tests revealed that Joshio had lead poisoning.

Whether a more thorough inspection could have prevented the boy’s poisoning is unclear. What is certain, however, is that inspections of the Hope Street property by both the health department and the city Department of Building and Safety failed to detect or prevent a host of serious violations.

It is a problem repeated again and again in Los Angeles’ impoverished neighborhoods, where hundreds of apartment buildings become health hazards because the system designed to enforce housing codes is weak and ineffectively administered, according to public records and interviews with city officials, housing activists and the inspectors themselves.

Landlords can escape financial and criminal punishment even as their properties slowly become slums, in part because of policy decisions and budgeting priorities at City Hall, critics say.

The city Department of Building and Safety has concentrated its resources on serving builders and inspecting new construction at the expense of the city’s renters, according to a draft report by a committee of respected experts on slum housing, which is studying the problem for city and county officials.

“The prevention of slum housing--indeed, the enforcement of housing codes in existing housing of every kind--is a relatively low priority for the Department of Building and Safety,” the draft report says.

Mayor Richard Riordan’s administration has emphasized private-sector solutions to Los Angeles’ housing crisis, decreasing funding for the city Housing Department.

With prevention placed on a bureaucratic back burner, many inspectors concentrate only on their narrow responsibilities--plumbing or electrical inspections, for instance. Only infrequently do they tip off other inspectors and agencies about a related problem.

Asked what he would do if he encountered a vermin infestation, building inspector Roy Daniels answered: “I’m not interested in roaches. That’s not my job. It’s the health department.”

The results are housing conditions that belie Los Angeles’ status as a modern city. Surveys show that one in nine apartments, or about 150,000 units, are substandard, many in the city’s core immigrant neighborhoods. In the worst buildings, tenants put cotton in the ears of their children to keep roaches from crawling in while they sleep. In others, children play in hallways with fetid carpets and exposed nails, near fire escapes with broken windows.

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“If these things were caught soon enough, it wouldn’t become a chronic problem,” said Patrick Dunlevy, an attorney at the Inner-City Law Center. “Anyone can drive through certain sections of Los Angeles and see how widespread the problem is.”

Among the most dilapidated buildings are the brick eyesores that can be found between sewing factories in the downtown garment district and the old wooden boarding houses in the adjacent Pico-Union district.

At the Hope Street apartments, residents showed a reporter bathrooms where linoleum had peeled away to reveal damp, rotting wood. One woman said plaster had fallen from the ceiling while she was taking a shower.

Several residents said they had complained to the authorities. In fact, 98 code violations were listed in county health inspector Joe Salazar’s first report on the site, dated Sept. 30, 1996. When Salazar made a follow-up visit three months later, he noted that as many as 30 violations remained--yet he took no further action.

“I just left it for the next inspection,” he said.

When told that a child at the apartments had lead poisoning, Salazar declined to answer any more questions. Subsequent tests found lead levels in the paint 27 times greater than legal limits.

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When an inspector from the city Department of Building and Safety visited the building last September, he cited the landlord for only the smallest of infractions: missing smoke detectors.

“The people in this building have complained to everyone, including God,” said Enrique Velasquez, a tenant organizer with the group Inquilinos Unidos. “But no one has ever done anything.”

In theory, city and county authorities can take a number of actions against landlords who allow their buildings to slowly fall apart. Officials can order repairs. If the repairs are not completed in a timely fashion, fines can be imposed. If the problems still linger, criminal prosecution can be undertaken.

In practice, however, even when city and county inspectors do move against landlords, tenants may have to wait for months or years before any repairs are made, records show.

Hardly anyone is ever prosecuted. The Department of Building and Safety receives about 50,000 complaints annually. Fewer than 20 misdemeanor criminal cases are filed as a result of those complaints each year.

A separate, multi-agency Housing Task Force has been created by the city to fight slum conditions. But only the very worst buildings come to the task force’s attention.

Richard Bobb, the deputy city attorney who runs the task force, said his inspectors often enter a dilapidated tenement and find “there has been no significant action by an inspection agency for many previous years.”

Given widespread official neglect, many apartment buildings fall into such a state of disrepair that they are slowly emptied of most of their tenants.

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One building, in a rough-and-tumble neighborhood just south of the Los Angeles Convention Center, offers a good case study of how a structure can deteriorate, even when inspectors are called to the property again and again.

The building at 1979 Estrella Ave. has been inspected at least a dozen times by the city and county since 1986. But on a recent summer day, the building offered a panorama of squalor as bad as can be found in Los Angeles.

Only a handful of apartments remained occupied in the 30-unit building. Boards covered the doorways of some empty apartments, but many others were open, revealing gaping holes in the walls and toilets filled with human waste. Residents said several abandoned apartments had become hangouts for drug users and gang members.

Burned-out lights had transformed the central hallway on the third floor into a darkened, ominous tunnel. The stairs to the basement washroom were pitch-black. “They say there’s a body hanging down there,” said one young resident.

Descending to the basement, a reporter found no body, but instead a couch that was said to be a favorite with the drug addicts.

“We’ve stayed in the hope that they fix things up,” said Raul Burgos, a father of three who pays $350 for a two-room apartment.

Records show Burgos once called the health department to complain of “rat and roach infestations.” The resulting inspection found the roach infestations “abated.” And yet, a year later, Burgos could still bare his arms to show roach bites. “I’ve got bites back here too,” he said, pointing to red marks on his neck.

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Four times since December 1994, the county health department has conducted inspections of the Estrella Avenue building, each time in response to tenant complaints. After each visit, inspectors ordered repairs in only a few of the 30 apartments.

One tenant had already moved out by the time the health department responded to her complaint of “rats, no hot water.” The inspector looked around the empty apartment and found “no significant health code violations.” Nevertheless, just two months later, the department received another complaint of “toilets clogged, roaches, holes in walls.”

This pattern of piecemeal inspections is common in both the health and building agencies, said Linda S. Ceballos, a housing attorney at the Inner-City Law Center.

“In a 20-unit building, if one person calls, they only make a report for that one unit,” Ceballos said. “There’s nothing that has a macro effect for the entire building.”

Making the inspection process even less effective, according to the upcoming blue-ribbon report on slum housing, is the specialization of inspectors and the apparent failure of different inspectors and agencies to cooperate with one another.

The building and safety inspector responsible for the 1st City Council District, Roy Daniels, said he has never referred a case to the health department. His area includes Pico-Union, one of the poorest and most densely populated communities in California.

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The parochial attitudes of some inspectors is a constant source of frustration to the many Central City activists and residents. They look to the inspectors as natural allies, but find that isn’t always the case.

“You really almost have to point out things to the inspectors so that they see things more clearly,” said Douglas Garcia, a community worker with the Temple Baptist Church in Pico-Union. “They look around and say, ‘It looks clean.’ It’s irritating.”

Inspections by the Department of Building and Safety generated an even thicker file. Public records of that agency show a dizzying variety of violations going back to 1987. Many of the complaints remain open, years after they were filed.

In September 1996, inspector Daniels duly noted violations in nearly every category: broken windows, damaged handrails, deteriorated floors and inoperable heating. Only the building’s roof merited a passing grade.

The building was in a sorry enough state that Daniels said he tried, without success, to refer the case to a special city task force. “They wouldn’t take it,” he said.

In October 1996, the owner responded to Daniel’s inspection by obtaining a building permit for “general repairs.” That step, Daniels said, effectively stalled any department action against the building for another two years.

“As long as he’s making progress [on repairs], we work with him,” Daniels said.

Nevertheless, when Daniels returned to the building nine months later--on June 25, in response to yet another complaint--all the earlier violations remained.

Weeks before that June inspection, the building was purchased by a new owner, who promised to make repairs.

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Many inspectors have become disillusioned with a system that seems to make it impossible to force improvements in housing conditions, said one high-ranking city official.

“When inspectors are told [by their superiors] to ‘work with landlords,’ they go back out and they give the landlord an extension,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “And then they go back out again and give them another extension. They become disheartened when nothing gets done. If the landlord knew that there would be consequences, they would keep their buildings up to code all the time.”

In all, Building and Safety has just 40 “front-line” inspectors to cover more than 600,000 residential units. The department conducts six inspections at new construction sites for every one inspection of existing housing.

The only agency that conducts routine housing inspections in the city of Los Angeles is the county Department of Health Services. But the same 175 inspectors who check all the county’s apartment buildings are also responsible for restaurants, markets, warehouses and schools.

Health inspections of apartments are supposed to take place at least once a year. But officials acknowledged that not all apartment buildings are inspected.

“If we were fully staffed at all times, we would probably be able to do it,” said Mike Spear, acting director of the health department’s District Environmental Services.

The staff shortage has only increased the workload for the inspectors who, like their counterparts in the building department, rarely see cases prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

“We don’t write a lot of court cases because by the time we get to court, the [tenant with the complaint] has been evicted, or they’ve been relocated,” said Richard Harris, supervisor at the health department office that covers most of South Los Angeles.

At Building and Safety, inspector Daniels said he could also refer dilapidated buildings to the department’s Investigations Division. Officials there could, in theory, press the city attorney’s office to launch a criminal investigation. But more often than not such a referral is a dead end, he said.

“If it’s not life-threatening, the city attorney isn’t going to do anything,” Daniels said.

The head of the Investigations Division, Mike Lee, counters that most landlords repair their properties when threatened with prosecution. “We get a high rate of compliance without the city attorney having to file a case,” he said.

Still, there are landlords who know that avoiding punishment is just a matter of waiting out the building department. A review of the investigations division’s closed cases found that most had taken at least two years to resolve. Some had been open a decade and one lingered for 20 years before a call from a City Council member forced action.

“Some of these [landlords] are sharp enough so that they play with the system,” said veteran building department investigator Larry Galstian.

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Some officials argue that a landlord’s property rights and the transient nature of the population in slum buildings makes code enforcement difficult. Still, most who work in the system agree reform is overdue. Deputy City Atty. Bobb, of the multi-agency Housing Task Force, said Los Angeles should adopt a system of routine apartment licensing so that landlords would have to qualify for something similar to the smog certificate for vehicle owners.

And Building and Safety official Lee said he would like to see a “Housing Court,” like those found in some Eastern cities, where judges handle only building and health code violations.

For the time being, however, the old system putters along.

Last month, new teams of inspectors were summoned to the Hope Street building yet again.

Building and Safety officials declared the apartments “substandard”--nine months after a department inspector had cited the building for only missing smoke detectors. In all, the new inspection found more than 50 violations, including no smoke detectors in most units.

The health department also reinspected the property July 1. The new inspection found many of the same violations that Salazar had noted in December and gave the owner until August to make repairs.

The landlord, Maria Elena Mondragon, did not return a reporter’s phone calls. Her brother, Roger Mondragon, the building manager, seemed nonplused by the repeated inspections and tenant complaints.

“For $250 a month they expect what? To live in Beverly Hills?” he said. “What you’re paying is what you’re getting.”

Earlier, he had ordered a reporter and photographer to leave the building. Then he apologized, saying he had mistaken them for inspectors.

“I kick inspectors out, believe me,” he said.