Tackling an Ugly Problem

A sign on the wall of the building on South Figueroa Street reads: “No entry without permission.”

The interior, apartment units abandoned by an owner facing foreclosure, reveals the warning’s ineffectiveness.

Inside one apartment, a kitchen wall is spray-painted with names--G Bone, K Dog and 8 Ball--an abbreviated roll call for a gang that has claimed it as a hideaway. Fire has destroyed a neighboring apartment, and in the unit next door, pigeons are the only tenants, having gained entry through a ripped-out ceiling. Playing outside are three children of a family believed by police to be illegally occupying another unit.

Shortly before noon on a recent day, seven Southeast Division police officers entered the building to enforce the sign’s mandate. Walking on unsteady, creaking floors, the nuisance abatement unit was greeted by the stench of bathrooms overrun by human waste. Rags and garbage covered the floors like a carpet.

“No one should be living next to that, much less in it,” said Sgt. Ted Maillet, who headed the detail.

As Maillet and city officials can tell you, abandoned buildings are no small problem. They are a breeding ground for crime, a health, fire and safety hazard, and a drag on a neighborhood’s economic viability.

“They affect the economic survivability of the city,” said David R. Keim, the city’s chief building inspector. “This is one of the biggest problems we have.”

Hangouts for Gang Members, Vagrants

As of August, city officials said, inspectors were monitoring 1,858 properties. Of those, 799 were described as requiring immediate abatement. The rest were in the final stages of abatement, the bureaucracy’s term for a complex process of either repairing or demolishing troublesome vacant properties.

The abandoned properties include single-family houses, apartment buildings, commercial buildings and lots. The apartment buildings and houses are the biggest headaches for the city because they serve as hangouts for vandals, gang members and vagrants.

That’s when the Police Department steps in. Before the police began to participate in abatement several years ago, building inspectors would walk into the abandoned structures and could stand face to face with armed gang members and drug peddlers.

“If that building inspector is by himself, that could be a serious problem because he’s not armed,” said Officer Kevin Cotter, one of two abatement officers in the LAPD’s Southeast Division.

Most of the properties have been abandoned by owners who want to avoid the foreclosure process. Banks and mortgage companies hold liens on many of the properties, but are frequently slow to take over. Still others are under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The neglected properties usually are brought to the city’s attention by neighbors. Inspectors are responsible for assessing damage to the property and determining whether the city needs to take any action. Then, the Department of Building and Safety must locate the owners to hold them accountable. Meanwhile, police officers try to get trespassers out; often that requires the help of the city attorney’s office.

This system was formalized a little over a year ago with the creation of the Citywide Nuisance Abatement Program. City officials say it has quickened the pace of cleaning up troublesome properties through its emphasis on teamwork.

With neighbors becoming more insistent that the city do something about abandoned properties, some of them standing as eyesores for as long as a decade, the city has responded with programs such as Proactive Code Enforcement, or PACE. Started last year, it requires building inspectors to comb neighborhoods for code violations.

Despite the expanded efforts, Keim said only 11 building inspectors are charged with abatement duty and more are needed.

Some city officials acknowledge that need. “We’re looking at expanding because there is such a need in the city,” said Jennifer Roth, deputy mayor for finance and policy.

At a house on Colden Avenue near Hoover Street, building inspector Gary Ikeda says he has exhausted all efforts to find the owner. After 15 phone calls and 25 letters, he says he doesn’t know what else to do.

While inspectors search for the person responsible for dealing with dilapidated structures, the properties become both a law enforcement and an economic problem. The buildings and houses, with their graffiti-stained walls and garbage-strewn lawns, drive down property values and drive away potential business owners.

Most troubling to police officers is that they are magnets for gang activity, rapes, drug transactions, even murder. “There’s arrest and crime reports here a mile high,” Cotter said of the South Figueroa property.

Still more become fire hazards. Fires caused by carelessness and drug use have claimed many of the buildings, and such fires have the potential to spread to neighboring buildings.

Moreover, cleanup is costly for the city. When a lending institution is reluctant to take control and the city can’t find an owner, it incurs the cost of rehabilitating or demolishing a building, which averages $8,000.

Although the city tries to recover that money from the owner, building inspectors say it doesn’t always work out that way.

And the abandoned buildings are part of a larger problem, said Rockard J. Delgadillo, a deputy mayor who has been working on economic development in the city’s Southeast area. “Most developers just write off Southeast L.A., thinking that it’s not worth the time,” Delgadillo said. “It’s the overall perception which abandoned buildings and vacant lots contribute to.”

Dealing with those perceptions and the realities that create them is a full-time job for the two Southeast Division nuisance abatement officers. That’s because about 500 of the city’s 1,858 troublesome properties are in the Southeast area, according to the Department of Building and Safety. The LAPD’s Southeast Division handles part of South-Central Los Angeles, including Watts.

Although several police divisions have officers who handle abandoned and vacant properties, the Southeast Division’s abatement effort is regarded by building inspectors as among the most aggressive in the city.

“They definitely see the problem and they want to make the neighborhood better,” said Charles Messina, a building mechanical inspector. “They’re definitely into it.”

Every weekday, Maillet’s officers walk into the abandoned structures of Southeast Los Angeles to rid them of their illegal residents. “You go in there and these people look like ghosts,” Maillet said.

Confronting those ghosts is what Cotter and his partner, Officer Mike Kim, do every day, often with building inspectors in tow. As a testament to the fact that their duties differ from those of their colleagues, they wear cotton uniforms instead of the traditional wool. A uniform requiring dry cleaning would be too much trouble.

The two have been the core of Southeast’s abatement unit since January. In that time, they have cleaned up 101 houses and accumulated more than 200 cases.

Dealing with building inspectors and building codes is nothing new to either officer. Before joining the police, Cotter spent 19 years in the construction industry and Kim worked for a mortgage firm. Now they are combining those skills with police training.

Abatement can be risky work. That is why they enter the properties with guns in hand.

“You go into these houses and you never know what you’ll find,” Cotter said. Among their discoveries: booby traps, murder suspects, a man ripping out a house’s plumbing, teenagers smoking dope.

They say their goal is to have the properties cleaned up, rehabilitated and reoccupied--either by families or businesses.

But in most cases, that’s still many months away. Kim shakes his head at the sight of missing floorboards in the house on Colden Avenue, abandoned by its owner five months ago. Behind the house is a shed that has become a makeshift home for a woman and her dog.

“Believe it or not, once in a while, you’ll find an entire family” in an abandoned property, Kim said.

Cotter and Kim, with several other officers and mortgage company representatives, then head over to a property on West 157th Street for a follow-up visit.

The day before, they had arrested a man who had illegally rented out six dilapidated housing units for at least $350 a month each.

Now they’re back to inform the residents that they have to move out. “I would like to talk to someone,” a woman named Karen said to the officers as they got out of their cars. In her hand was a rental agreement that her “landlord” drew up for her.

“I’m sorry to bring you bad news,” replied Eric Ratliff, a representative of Countrywide Mortgage, which holds the lien on the property. Then he explained that all the residents had until 8:30 a.m. the next day to move out because the property was unsafe.

‘Not Unsympathetic’ to the Homeless

Police and building inspectors acknowledge that their work often involves displacing people who have few housing options, but stress that their first priority is to rid the neighborhoods of the health and safety problems the properties cause. “The Police Department is not unsympathetic to homeless people,” Cotter said. Police officials say they help to relocate them when possible.

The 157th Street property had the characteristics of a slum. Police discovered that drugs such as crystal meth were being sold in some of the units. Children’s toys lay on the lawn alongside rusted cars with missing parts. In back was a car shop that the self-proclaimed landlord was running illegally. A garage next to the car shop was also rented out as an apartment. Above the property, spliced wires intersected to create what police said was a fire hazard for the occupants.

Carmen Binder and her 3-month-old baby had moved into one apartment just the week before.

“It was either this or a homeless shelter,” Binder said. “Even though this isn’t a palace, it was going to be ours.” Her one-bedroom unit came with a stained brown carpet, writing on the walls and broken windows.

A factory worker earning the minimum wage, Binder said she had no reason to believe that the man who rented the apartment to her was running an illegal operation.

One week later, former occupants were still collecting their appliances, toys, shoes and food at the 157th Street property, and the man who claimed to be their landlord was back on the streets.

Meanwhile, a construction crew was boarding up the apartment building on South Figueroa.

For their part, the abatement officers keep a vigilant eye over the properties until they are restored or demolished. Every day, they make the rounds to make sure that the properties have not been reinhabited.

“It’s a never-ending job,” Cotter said.

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Abandoned Properties Around the City

A total of 1,858 abandoned properties are being monitored by the city of Los Angeles for nuisance abatement. Here are the figures by council district as of August.

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Properties being cleaned, rehabilitated Council Abatement or Total per district needed demolished district 1 73 55 128 2 24 40 64 3 26 25 51 4 17 45 62 5 11 42 53 6 11 25 36 7 25 30 55 8 141 162 303 9 199 316 515 10 41 53 94 11 21 21 42 12 13 16 29 13 46 58 104 14 35 65 100 15 116 106 222 799 1,059 1,858

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Source: Los Angeles Department of Buildings and Safety