Riordan Proposes Anti-Slum Plan

Mayor Richard Riordan called Monday for tripling the size of a small inspection unit that ferrets out slum conditions and moving the unit to another department widely regarded as more sympathetic to tenants.

“Slum housing can no longer be tolerated in the City of the Angels,” Riordan said as he stood before a downtown tenement cited for dozens of violations and profiled last week in The Times. “The change begins today.”

The mayor’s proposal came in response to a report issued Monday by a respected panel of corporate executives, developers and activists that sharply criticized the Department of Building and Safety. Among the recommendations of the Blue Ribbon Committee on Slum Housing was the creation of a city entity responsible for housing inspections.

The panel, which grew out of efforts by citizens and government officials to attack the problem, said slum conditions have spread throughout the city, including to parts of the east San Fernando Valley and the Westside.

It lambasted Building and Safety as a landlord-friendly bureaucracy more concerned with issuing permits for new construction than with responding to the tenant complaints.

“It’s a matter of justice: People deserve to live in clean, safe housing,” said panel member Donald A. Mullane, executive vice president at Bank of America. “These conditions are intolerable in a world-class city. This is not Calcutta.”

According to the most recent survey by the U.S. Census Bureau, there are about 156,400 apartments in Los Angeles that are substandard and in need of repair. About 108,000 units are infested with rats.

No city agency now conducts routine inspections of such apartments. Building and Safety sends inspectors to dilapidated buildings only when they receive complaints.

The panel urged “routine, periodic inspections of all rental housing, with the frequency and intensity of inspection determined by the conditions of the building and . . . the risk of deterioration.”

Riordan’s action, which City Council sources said would probably be approved by the council, would add 14 inspectors to the fledgling Proactive Code Enforcement Program, a pilot project in which officials go out and look for dilapidated housing, making unannounced inspections.

By moving the unit to the Housing Department, the mayor would place the inspectors within an agency known as more open to tenant concerns.

“What is clear to us from the Slum Housing Task Force report is that what you need, in order for this [effort] to be effective, is a clear mission and you need to be passionate about housing issues,” Deputy Mayor Kelly Martin said.

The mayor’s proposal would cost about $1 million, Martin said.

Housing activists said Riordan’s proposal could be the beginning of comprehensive reform.

“It’s an important first step,” said the Rev. Donald P. Merrifield, head of the citizen’s panel and chancellor at Loyola Marymount University. “The blue ribbon committee has been invited [by the mayor] to keep the pressure on the city. It is an invitation we plan to accept.”

In a study directed by UCLA law professor Gary Blasi, the panel found that code enforcement in existing residential units is a low priority at the Department of Building and Safety.

Efforts to enforce housing conditions are “inefficient and ineffective,” the report said. They are hampered by a lack of cooperation between inspectors and the other agencies responsible for housing reviews, including the County Department of Health Services.

Tim Taylor, general manager at Building and Safety, acknowledged the department has been ill-equipped to handle the deluge of tenant complaints in recent years. Nor has it done much, he said, to educate the public on how to navigate its bureaucracy and file a complaint.

“We don’t have enough people to deal with complaints as we get them,” he said. “Why would an organization advertise for work when they can’t even keep their head above water?”

Taylor said the department had funded its housing inspections through fees generated by new construction. But when construction slowed as the result of the recession of the early 1990s, the department found itself in a funding crunch that slowed its response to complaints.

The blue ribbon panel recommended a host of reforms in inspection and enforcement procedures, including limits on how long a landlord can wait after being cited before beginning repairs.

Until a system of routine inspections is established, the report concluded, slum conditions will continue to worsen, especially in the immigrant neighborhoods near downtown.

Last week, a Times report echoed many of the report’s findings, outlining cases in which the city building department and county health department cited scores of violations, but did little to ensure landlords made repairs.

On Monday, Riordan and City Council members Mike Hernandez and Jackie Goldberg toured one building mentioned in that report, at 1979 Estrella Ave., just south of the Convention Center.

The Times found city and county inspectors had visited the property at least a dozen times, citing the owners for a variety of violations to little effect. By June, the building had become a roach-infested magnet for transients and drug dealers, with few paying tenants left.

“The key issue here is code enforcement,” Goldberg said. “There has to be enforcement after people are cited.”

Those concerns were shared by Ted Smith III, the deputy city attorney currently assigned to the six-man Proactive Code Enforcement Program. Smith said he was dismayed to learn that Riordan’s plan to hire more inspectors included only $200,000 for additional deputy city attorneys to prosecute violators.

Unless prosecutors keep pace with inspectors, “there will be a bottleneck in the system,” he said.

Still, Smith added, he was delighted to have the additional inspectors for what is a more intensive and thorough approach to the problem of neighborhood blight.

“We go neighborhood by neighborhood, door by door, block to block,” Smith said. “We look at the totality of a neighborhood instead of just dealing with a particular complaint.”