Answering for Years of Neglect
In a cramped one-bedroom bungalow marked by peeling paint, cracked floors and crumbling walls live Kimberly Perez, her husband and five children.
And hundreds of cockroaches. The pests pour in from a gaping hole in the rear of the family’s rented home.
“You can hear them,” said Perez, 27, cocking her ear for the clickety-click sound the bugs make against the tiles.
The sights rarely have been seen by Evette Awadalla, who owns the bungalow. In the last six years, she has done so little about the deteriorating house, and four similar adjacent ones, that she will soon become the first landlord in city history to be sent to jail for building-code violations.
“I’m glad that woman is going to jail,” Perez said of Awadalla, who has been ordered to begin a 120-day jail term Feb. 23. “That should teach her a lesson.”
Awadalla contended the city has “unfairly picked on me.” She said she made repairs, but overcrowding caused new problems.
“When you rent to someone with five children, problems develop,” Awadalla said. “The tenants are a problem. Always they are looking for an excuse not to pay the rent.”
Awadalla’s South Glendale property on South Pacific Avenue was cited for 98 building-code violations in February 1992. After Awadalla allegedly ignored orders to fix cracked siding, exposed wiring and broken plumbing, her case was referred to the city attorney’s office.
“She would fix a little here and there, but never enough, and the problems would just keep coming back,” said Gillian van Muyden, the deputy city attorney who has been handling the Awadalla case since last year. “She made minimal efforts, and those efforts did not last.”
Over the next six years, during which Awadalla went through divorce and bankruptcy proceedings, the city continued trying to force the landlord to clean up her rental units. Los Angeles officials said it would take them roughly a year, on average, from first finding a landlord in violation to seeking a jail term, but it took Glendale far longer.
Glendale officials said the delay was due in part to a confusing shuffle of the property ownership by Awadalla, and to staff changes within City Hall.
She was fined nearly $2,000 and given deadline after deadline to bring her units up to habitable standards, said van Muyden.
Awadalla “played a shell game with the properties,” van Muyden said, by shifting title among relatives and others. This delayed the city’s ability to seek jail time, she said. “The point with code compliance is not necessarily to put landlords in jail,” van Muyden said. “If she was in jail, she couldn’t fix the problems. So we tried to give her time and incentive to comply. Putting her in jail, we thought, wouldn’t give the renters better housing.”
According to the most recent U.S. Census Bureau survey, there are roughly 156,400 substandard apartments in Los Angeles. Though the number in the San Fernando Valley is a fraction of the number in metropolitan Los Angeles, there are areas in Northridge, Pacoima and the East Valley that are considered “places of concentration of substandard housing,” said Mark Adams, Los Angeles-area director of the nonprofit Southern California Housing Development Corp.
Long considered a suburban oasis within easy driving distance of Los Angeles, Glendale has had only a handful of substandard housing units in the last 10 years, according to city officials. Awadalla’s rental units, officials say, are not unique, just uncommon, in that they’ve been cited repeatedly without remediation.
Los Angeles, by contrast, has been regularly prosecuting landlords, sending 108 to jail and 32 others to live in their own dilapidated housing, in the hope that would speed remediation.
“To my knowledge, it’s the worst housing in Glendale currently,” said Sam Engel, Glendale director of Neighborhood Services, which enforces city housing codes. “Awadalla has flagrantly disregarded every notice we’ve sent her. She has a thick file.”
The bungalows may not be perfect, but they are not illegal, insisted Awadalla, who repeatedly expressed shock and outrage that so many charges have been leveled at her. She pleaded guilty in 1996 to two misdemeanor violations of the city’s building code; the city dropped the remaining charges.
“Since 1996, I’ve had no life,” she said, tears beginning to stream down her face. “I had to borrow money from my parents. I tried to sell the properties, but no one would buy them.”
She said she may have gotten in over her head when she took on the role of landlord. “There were problems, but they were fixed,” she said. “I don’t know what’s left for me to do. I try very hard.”
Mayor Larry Zarian, who toured the properties in 1994 with code enforcement officials, called the conditions in the bungalow “inhumane.” Four years after his visit, little has changed, except the tenants.
“Landlords like that, that charge these poor people rent and force them to live in these conditions, it is immoral, inhuman, it is so wrong,” Zarian said.
Going to jail, after years of probation and fines, “is the price she’s going to pay,” he said of Awadalla. “And I hope it sends a signal that other landlords can’t let apartments deteriorate. We’re talking about human beings in these conditions there. I hope [Awadalla] is the last landlord to go to jail, as well as the first.”
