City Faulted Over Rundown Housing
Ten months after city inspectors cracked down on a shantytown in the heart of this affluent city, they are investigating the same landlords for numerous maintenance and building violations at four other properties in the Old Town neighborhood.
Officials say two code-compliance officers inspected three of the cramped, rundown properties Thursday and found what appear to be violations of city building, maintenance and health and safety rules--apparent overcrowding, faulty wiring and a head-high pile of garbage.
City workers say none of the homes--owned by Joy and Al Silver of Westlake Village--appear to have violations as severe as those that plagued the crowded ghetto found last year on a nearby lot owned by the couple.
But the recent discovery underscores the city’s lack of progress addressing the nagging problem of rundown and unsafe housing.
In fact, city officials have yet to fulfill two promises made after the ramshackle village less than a mile from City Hall was cleaned up: A summit on “distressed” housing has never been scheduled, and a tough law that would slap slumlords with stiff fines, endorsed by council members last May, has not been drafted.
The proposed local ordinance would probably not apply to the violations found at the four Old Town properties, said Councilman Andy Fox, who proposed the slumlord ordinance. But perhaps its deterrent effect could have prevented the violations.
“It should have been a top priority, in my opinion,” Fox said of the ordinance, which is not scheduled to be written for another month or so. “The reason I proposed a slumlord ordinance was out of serious concern for people’s health and safety, for people being forced to live in squalor. To address irresponsible property owners who allow this to occur and who exploit other human beings . . . .
“We need to make the law happen immediately,” he added. “Since it hasn’t happened, we need to fix it.”
Also, housing advocates are pushing the city to take a more proactive stance on code enforcement, rather than wait for complaints from residents.
And advocates are seeking more affordable housing, so that low-income residents don’t have to put up with rundown conditions or face eviction.
“We need to get back to our commitment to decent housing and do something about it,” housing activist Otto Stoll said. “Now would be a good time.”
The properties that prompted a second look at housing conditions are small bungalows with white picket fences and tidy lawns out front, but the residents say they are infested with mice and plagued by faulty plumbing and electricity, cracking walls and broken windows.
The son of the property owners said his family is not aware of any code infractions at the houses. Nor have they received complaints from residents, neighbors or the city. As for possible overcrowding, real estate broker Todd Silver added, tenants sign leases that allow three or fewer adults per house to comply with a Thousand Oaks ordinance.
“My parents own eight houses and net out, maybe, $1,500 a month,” Todd Silver said Friday. “It’s not like they’re some rich folks sitting fat in some guard-gated community. They’re a couple of old folks who bought some rental properties to help them through retirement.”
The 1950s-era homes were built to different codes than are observed today. If problems exist, Silver added, they were probably caused by their current residents.
Tenants, not landlords, jury-rig extension cords, he said. Tenants, not landlords, pour grease down sinks that damages plumbing, and tenants, not landlords, pile debris in back yards, he said.
City officials, however, said it is up to the landlord to ensure that his or her property is well-maintained and habitable.
“If he executed a lease, shouldn’t he make sure it’s being followed? If he doesn’t, who will?” asked Thousand Oaks Housing Services Manager Olav E. Hassel. “If he has reason to suspect people are breaking the lease, he has the ability to evict them. There’s no guarantee that being a landlord is going to be an easy job, you know.”
Although officials confirmed they had found some violations at the Silvers’ properties inspected last week, they declined to specify the number or nature of the problems until the fourth house is visited and the investigation concludes this week, code-compliance supervisor Geoff Ware said.
None of the problems make the houses uninhabitable, which would cause the city to force out residents, officials added.
“We are very concerned, and we are investigating and pursuing action,” Hassel said. “We are setting up a meeting now where the housing and building code issues will be presented to [the landlords]. . . . We’ll be asking them to make the appropriate repairs.”
The Silvers also own a parcel of less than one acre on Royal Oaks Drive, where code enforcers last April found about 50 people crammed into four small houses, two shacks and several tool sheds, huts and garages.
Todd Silver said those conditions were created by residents and an unscrupulous attendant to his father, who, Silver said, took advantage of his father’s memory loss and illness by arranging illegal subleasing agreements, even renting hard patches of dirt for a few dollars a night to people with sleeping bags.
Since then, the city has made the Silvers repair all of the most serious problems--from jury-rigged wiring to inadequate plumbing. A few aesthetic problems, such as painting and landscaping, remain.
The lean-tos and inadequate dwellings have been razed, and the small houses now have lawns, gardens and even pansies growing. Meeting the city’s repair demands has cost about $50,000, Todd Silver said.
News of more problem properties disgusted housing activists, who criticized the city’s policies, which only allow inspectors to check for code violations based on residents’ complaints.
The housing problems also reminded housing activists and city leaders that promises made after the shantytown cleanup have not been kept nearly a year later.
In the wake of the April crackdown, social service agencies and Latino activists banded together with city officials. They created plans to serve displaced residents better in case of other such mass code-enforcement actions.
They tried to clear up community misconceptions about city dollars being spent to help illegal immigrants (by law, public funds cannot be spent on such a use). And they renewed their commitment to create more low-cost housing opportunities for the working-class residents who labor in restaurants, carwashes and secretarial pools but cannot afford to live in the wealthy city where they work.
But somewhere along the way, Stoll said, all parties dropped the ball. Housing activists, social service workers and church groups forgot to keep pressure on the city, he said.
“There was a sense of urgency about this when it was a media event,” said Stoll, chairman emeritus of the affordable housing group Many Mansions. “The sense of urgency for us has gone down in the face of other, ongoing responsibilities.”
The slumlord ordinance, for instance, has gotten misplaced in the bureaucratic shuffle. It awaits a new deputy city attorney, who in all likelihood will not be hired for at least another month.
“I think there was a mix-up,” Councilman Fox said. “My understanding was that we would get this on board right away, in 60 days, like any other ordinance. I’m going to have to talk to the city attorney and the city manager to see what the status is and whether we should start this before we hire the new attorney.”
The distressed housing summit and slumlord ordinance may arrive too late to be of any use to families in the four rundown houses, who said they had not complained previously because they feared eviction.
“I don’t feel it’s safe for my children, but what can we do?” asked resident Alicia Avalos, who shares a two-bedroom rental house with her husband and four children plus her brother, his wife and their three children.
“We are struggling,” said her husband, Raul Avalos, who has rented from the Silvers for six years. “It is very difficult to get a place when you have children. . . . [The landlord] doesn’t care. He knows that we’re stuck and can’t go anywhere else.”
In their home, the Avaloses suffer through erratic plumbing and wooden window frames so rotted that they occasionally drop out panes of glass. Mice have gnawed a hole through one bedroom wall. Feral cats scurry over a mound of mangled bicycles, discarded chairs and a bushel of tree limbs in the backyard.
But at $950 a month plus utilities in this wealthy community, the Avalos family never felt entitled to complain. The price was too good and affordable housing too scarce in this city.
It shouldn’t be this way, said lifelong Thousand Oaks resident Clint Harper, who lives near the Avaloses.
“Just because I have long hair and tattoos doesn’t mean I’m an illiterate,” said Harper, sitting on his porch with his 19-month-old daughter cradled on his lap. “I’m not an idiot, and I pay my rent on time.”
Harper’s home is the best of the batch--in part because the father of three works in construction. When he moved in about six months ago, Harper drywalled the bathroom. And he blocked off the kitchen for two months to protect his children from scurrying roaches that brought exterminators to the house twice.
Since then, his wife, Bernadette, has scrubbed and scoured every inch of the kitchen, even sponge-painting the cabinets a cheery teal. The stove still does not work, she said.
But what troubles them most is a water heater against a wooden wall in a sun room that abuts sleeping quarters, Clint Harper said.
“I’d like some consideration, a real door and the trees trimmed,” he said. “I’d like a water heater that isn’t going to catch my house on fire. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.”
Todd Silver, who helps handle many of his parents’ properties, said his family was unaware of the complaints, which he vowed to check on.
Many of the residents, who are poor immigrants from Mexico, have little faith their complaints will be heard, said Yvette Renner, director of St. Paschal Baylon’s Hispanic ministry.
“They feel they have no rights and no one would listen to them and nothing would get done,” said Renner, who knows several of the tenants in the Old Town properties. “If they ask for paint to make it look better, the rent will be raised $50, and they’ll have to move.”
She added: “These are decent human beings. They work very hard. They deserve better. . . . I’ve heard of places in L.A. where they make landlords live in those conditions for a few weeks. We should do that.”
Confronted with such problems, some housing activists argue a sweeping, philosophical change is required to address this city’s substandard housing.
The time has come, said affordable housing advocate Stoll, for the city to actively seek out problems that could be a danger to residents’ health and safety.
“They have five inspectors and they essentially react to complaints,” he said. “When they react to citizen complaints, they are responsive and they do a fine job, but they don’t have the mandate or the manpower to be proactive.”
Stoll said Many Mansions is also still interested in finding a way to buy the Silvers’ properties--or partnering with them--to convert the worn-out bungalows into the affordable housing Thousand Oaks so badly needs.
Todd Silver said his family might be interested in such a proposal if it does not bleed red ink and generates adequate income.
‘If I had my way, I’d just scrap the things and build new,” he said. “The city is getting in trouble with the state and feds for not building enough low-cost housing. Why doesn’t the city make it realistic and feasible to redevelop that land into low-cost housing?”
Too often, however, talk of redevelopment--and even talk of shoring up inadequate housing--punishes the victims, said Barbara Macri-Ortiz, an attorney with Channel Counties Legal Services in Oxnard. The paradox is that when the properties are improved, the residents are either kicked out, or priced out of their homes.
“You have some landlords, not all, that just want to get as much money as they can out of a property, so they defer maintenance,” she said. “So the property gets real bad, and they go in and get a loan to fix the property. Then they turn around and evict everyone from the property or else they raise the rents--an effective eviction. It isn’t fair.”
Photographer Carlos Chavez contributed to this report.