Gary Squier

Gary Squier came to City Hall a decade ago from a career as an advocate of affordable housing to shape government’s response. Reporting directly to Mayor Tom Bradley, he spearheaded the restructuring of the city’s housing policy and, with a blue-ribbon commission, launched 20 new programs to address the dearth of stock for low-income residents. In 1990, he took the helm of the newly created Housing Department. Since then, he has overseen the city’s aggressive response to the 1992 riots and 1994 earthquake.

But when he resigned earlier this month, the 45-year-old Squier left a department in disarray. A recent audit by the City Controller criticized the handling of $300 million in earthquake-recovery loans from the federal government, saying the city failed to ensure that carpenters were paid prevailing wages. The audit also questioned Squier’s overall management of the 375-employee department and its $100-million budget.

In Squier’s wake, taxpayers face a multimillion-dollar lawsuit by bondholders involved in Hayward Manor, a Skid Row hotel turned into single-room occupancy apartments. The developer is in jail for fraud on another project, and the bondholders claim the city was in collusion with the developer to inflate the building’s price. Meanwhile, City Hall is under increasing pressure to enforce building codes and crack down on slumlords after two deadly fires in garages illegally converted to housing.

Squier denies that these controversies contributed to his decision to leave. Rather, he says he views his career in 10-year chunks, and that he wants to try attacking housing problems from the private sector, working as a consultant and developer to increase investment in distressed neighborhoods.

But as he sat on the back patio of his Santa Monica home, a laptop computer perched on an adjacent picnic table and a Fisher Price basketball hoop in the background, Squier acknowledged that Mayor Richard Riordan’s administration has not adequately focused on housing and that political leaders throughout Los Angeles have turned their attention to other issues. “The components [for saving neighborhoods] exist under current budget funding levels,” he told Riordan in his resignation letter. “All that is needed is commitment to the task.”

The son of a rehabber and grandson of an electrician, Squier virtually grew up in a construction site. Now the father of a 6-year-old and 4-year-old twins, Squier says his passion for creating livable homes has only become deeper. Every time he confronts a complex question, he puts on his parent hat and asks: Would I raise my children here?

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Question: What triggered your resignation?

Answer: We’ve gone through some periods of high, high activity, high excitement in the Housing Department with post-riots, post-earthquake. There’s a combination of last summer not having one of those--I mean, real tangible challenges like that--plus the city has lost some of its drive to deal with housing and community-development issues, as it politically has gotten more interested in what is referred to as economic development, [which] isn’t very well-defined.

Q: Why has the city lost its drive?

A: Well, politicians are people. Bureaucrats are people. And people, you know, human nature is that you need to try something new as you get bored with the old. There was housing and homelessness, and then transportation was a big deal and captured the imagination of City Hall. . . . And now the interest is . . . economic development: How do we create more job opportunities? How do we retain the businesses that we have? How do we pull ourselves out of this recession?

Los Angeles, unfortunately, because it’s such a diffuse place, it’s much easier for people to simplify things in terms of one critical priority for the city . . . . It’s difficult for the bureaucracies and the political structure to deal with the complexities of the urban scene all at once.

Q: Housing may have passed out of vogue, but are we at a better place than we were a decade ago?

A: We’re in a different place. When I started pulling together housing-policy papers and trying to recraft an orientation for the city in 1988, the issue was affordability. Today, I think our issues are that significant percentages of housing stock are falling into severe decline. And neighborhood issues: Even if the housing were habitable, some of our neighborhoods have been allowed to reach such desperate conditions with gangs, drugs and violence that they are impossible places to live.

Q: There have been several high-profile examples recently of dangerous housing conditions, including deadly fires in garages that were illegally converted into apartments. How can the city crack down?

A: On an ongoing basis, there should be zero tolerance for substandard housing. I’m not talking about whether or not there’s a torn screen; I’m talking about slum housing. And if you adopt that mentality, and then you factor that into all your budget decision-making and program decision-making, then you start to pull Los Angeles out of the tailspin and the neighborhoods out of the tailspin that they’re in, this spiral of decline. Where it gets difficult is, how do you get from where we are today--where you have a substantial number of units that are occupied by humans, and buildings and garages that are owned by people--and get them to transition to this zero-tolerance point?

Some members of council . . . would argue that you should close the door right now, and you would force [slumlords] out of business. Others would argue that both the owners and the residents need a gentler program to ease them out of the apartments or garages or make it financially more feasible for the owners [to upgrade]. I am a believer in an easier transition, which in the case of garages means that you have an immediate requirement that the garages are made safe, that you get rid of the water heater with the open flame, that you have a second means of egress in the event of fire, that the electrical-fire hazards are eliminated and that you get rid of bars that are bolted permanently to windows--then . . . it can be dealt with as a zoning issue on a case-by-case basis.

With regard to the apartment buildings that are severely deteriorated, it’s a complex cycle that has brought them to this stage. It began with, for whatever reasons, the Building and Safety Department not focusing on code enforcement, focusing on other priorities such as expediting the issuance of new permits and that sort of thing.

That has filtered into the real-estate economy, and the message in the economy, implicitly, is you can rent an apartment for the same amount of money that’s not up to code as you can an apartment that is up to code . . . . That property owner then will maybe refinance their apartment building, and the loan they get is not really based on the condition of the apartment, it’s based on the cash flow that’s coming off the building. Or the apartment buildings are sold and the value of the sale is based on how much rent you get, not the condition of the apartments. So this public policy becomes a real-estate economic factor as it’s rolled into larger mortgages for substandard apartments.

So now you’ve built in this sort of structural problem: It’s a rational thing to undermaintain your apartment building. If the Building and Safety Department now comes in and starts enforcing those [codes], the owners are going to go upside-down, they’re going to go belly-up. And the banks are going to feel it. But I think it’s absolutely necessary to shake out the market, to say we’re back to a zero-tolerance situation.

Q: Which cities can L.A. turn to as models for creative solutions on housing?

A: The cities that are doing the best with housing tend to be the smaller towns where the stuff doesn’t slip through the cracks . . . If you have 10 neighborhoods in a city, and one starts to slip, or you have a property owner who’s a real problem in a neighborhood, you’re going to hear about it.

Q: But in a vast city like Los Angeles, fewer people are directly affected?

A: Yes, and I think that’s the way neighborhoods or property owners were able to get away with it. Because slumlords know--the good ones, the ones who are good at being slumlords--know exactly how they can get around the city. They know they can run circles around the bureaucracy, that they can just not respond to notices. They know that the worst thing that happens is they’ll be charged with a misdemeanor. It’s the rare slumlord that ends up manacled to his apartment, or goes to jail.

Q: Is the problem, then, that we need more vigorous prosecutions?

A: I’m very encouraged with what the city attorney has been doing with the gang injunctions. They said, “Listen, this is a problem that’s out of control; we’re going to seek new remedies that maybe are pushing the envelope” . . . . The same [should] happen with slum housing.

Q: There’s talk at City Hall of reorganizing all the housing, economic development and community redevelopment efforts into a new mega-department. Is that smart?

A: I always believe in reorganization, it just creates opportunities . . . . If there is a reorganization, you have to start with genetic material that is oriented to the small picture, the small neighborhoods, the small differences. What’s effective in the Housing Department is effective because we would kill for housing. We would get out there and champion housing against all odds and we would push it as hard as we could through and over whatever barriers we can. And if we had seven missions instead of one, and we hit a wall with one of them, we’d say, ‘Oh, we’ll do this other one, because we just can’t do it all.’ I don’t have the answer, but somehow to make Los Angeles work you have to have that laser-beam focus [and] drive to accomplish specific things, but at the same time, you have to have a very simple, easily accessible means of coordinating activities.

Q: A recent audit criticized your handling of the earthquake-loan program, and questioned your overall management of the department. What is your response?

A: The audit found one thing: that the Housing Department was not enforcing the union-wage requirements [of] the federal government, and that finding was absolutely true. In the heat of the battlefield, in attempting to put together a massive recovery program, this union wage-monitoring question just slipped through the cracks and shouldn’t have. And it’s being remedied, and the audit recognized that.

The audit had absolutely no findings, zero findings, on the quality of management of the Housing Department. That finding was made orally by someone . . . and, in my view, it was irresponsible . . . . It is unfortunate that a political function such as the controller’s has to operate in a way that I think is destructive to people [who] are working hard to do a good job.

Q: Another controversy regarding your administration is Hayward Manor--the bondholders are now suing the city for millions of dollars. What went wrong?

A: Everything that could go wrong went wrong with the Hayward Manor . . . What happened is the city got involved with a developer who did not perform. The city believed [he] was operating fraudulently, and so we performed two audits and were not able to find a smoking gun . . . . The management of the project, the management entity that he chose, was inadequate . . . . But where it really blew apart is that the bondholders chose to sue . . . . They made a terrible mistake. I mean, real-estate deals go bad from time to time . . . . But they get worked out . . . . Right now, I think everybody’s going to take a loss. Hopefully, the housing will do fine.

Q: Are we still in a housing crisis?

A: Housing is absolutely no problem at all in 70% of the city. But for the 30% of the city for which it is a problem, it’s a fundamental problem. The rest of the city may not realize it, but it’s a problem for the rest of us . . . because as the housing and the neighborhood issues become increasingly intractable, they start to spread and the resources required to resolve them start to grow.

Q: How has Mayor Richard Riordan been on housing?

A: Tom Bradley and Richard Riordan have about the same interest in housing--it’s not their passion . . . . But the difference between the two administrations is that in the Bradley administration, he assigned experts to drive the issue and [with] Mayor Riordan that hasn’t happened.

Q: Why are you so passionate about it?

A: I came to L.A. as a VISTA volunteer doing advocacy work on Skid Row in a soup kitchen. I am the grandson of an electrician who did housing remodeling, and my mother was a rehabber--we’d always be living on construction projects . . . so all of that came to thrust me into this housing arena.

Increasingly, I see the world through the eyes of parents with kids: Is this a decent place to raise kids? Would I raise my children in this neighborhood? And that is the lens that really changes the way I look at the world, and housing.