Council OKs Apartment Inspection Reform Plan

The Los Angeles City Council on Tuesday approved the most comprehensive housing reform in Los Angeles history, creating a program of periodic apartment inspections that will be funded by a $1 monthly fee to be paid by renters.

The 11-1 vote came seven months after the council had approved in principle a wide-ranging anti-slum plan. The $8-million program should allow the city to inspect all 700,000 rental units in the city within three years.

“This is a historic moment,” said Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg. “Long after we leave office, this could be the most important thing we did for the city of Los Angeles.”

Up to now, officials have inspected apartments only after receiving complaints from tenants.

Housing advocates have said the old system allowed slum conditions to fester, especially in immigrant neighborhoods, where non-English speakers found it difficult to negotiate the complex bureaucracy at the Department of Building and Safety.

The ordinance approved Tuesday will transfer authority for apartment inspections to the more tenant-friendly Housing Department, which will hire 64 new inspectors. Enactment of the plan was delayed for months by protracted behind-the-scenes negotiations with apartment owners that led to several concessions to landlords.

About a dozen property owners opposed the council’s action at Tuesday’s meeting as an unnecessary infringement on their rights, saying that it was unfair to punish all landlords for the sins of the small minority who allow their buildings to become slums.

“We think that slumlords are despicable, but this reeks of big brotherism,” said Paul Shaffer, the owner of a four-unit apartment building on the Westside. “The idea of having inspectors coming by is nauseating to us. We feel terribly offended.”

Among the concessions made to landlords in the ordinance is a provision that will give apartment owners 30 days’ notice before the periodic inspections take place. The law also will allow housing inspectors to cite tenants if they are found to be responsible for the dilapidated condition of their apartments.

The City Council action came a year after a report in The Times and a study by a blue-ribbon citizens panel found that the building department had abdicated much of its responsibility for inspecting housing in the city’s poorest neighborhoods.

The Times found that even when the department’s officials uncovered dozens of violations, they often failed to carry out follow-up inspections.

“The Housing Code Enforcement Program is long overdue,” Larry Gross of the Coalition for Economic Survival told the council. “It will make Los Angeles a leader in the fight against slum housing.”

Under the new system, officials should take about three years to complete inspections of the city’s rental housing stock. Those properties with violations will receive inspections annually, while all other buildings will be inspected once every three years.

Inspectors will check for electrical, plumbing and structural problems but will only enter individual apartments with tenants’ permission, officials said.

Violators will be given a notice to repair the problem. A new mediation unit will bring tenants and landlords together to settle disputes. Those landlords who still fail to make repairs will face legal action. Supporters of the new law promise that the new housing inspection unit will have the time and resources for follow-up inspections.

About 100 tenants and their families packed the council chambers to show support for the measure, many sporting stickers that read “No More Slums,” and “$1 Is OK,” a reference to the fee that will be charged tenants.

“We are in favor of paying the dollar or even more dollars so that landlords obey the law,” Selene Havlicek, a 20-year resident of a downtown apartment, said in Spanish. “This is for our children to be allowed to live in decent and habitable apartments.”

Harold Greenberg, president of the Apartment Assn. of Greater Los Angeles, said he too opposes the measure in principle, although his organization had spent months working with city officials and members of the city’s Ad Hoc Committee on Slum Housing to obtain concessions.

The old, complaint-driven system of inspections would have functioned better, Greenberg argued, had the city administered it properly.

“You have a situation where the system hasn’t worked because the city didn’t allow it to work,” he said. “We believe you should prosecute both the slumlord and the tenant from hell.”

Still, it was clear that few on the council were in favor of keeping the status quo. Only Councilman Nate Holden voted against the new inspection program.

“You’re confiscating a lot of money from the good people under the guise that you’re going to clean up housing,” he said. “It’s a bunch of baloney.”

Jonathan Coupal, legal director of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn., said his group would review the new ordinance to see if its $1 monthly fee violated Proposition 218, which placed new restrictions on the fees that could be charged property owners.

Holden expressed concern that the city’s new housing inspectors would demand to enter apartments and thus violate tenants’ 4th Amendment protections against illegal searches.

Housing officials, however, dismissed such fears.

“We want to cooperate with tenants,” one Housing Department official said. “We don’t want to cause a huge uproar in people’s lives.”

The anti-slum plan next must be approved by Mayor Richard Riordan, who has said he will support it.

The ordinance will apply to all apartment buildings with two or more rental units. Los Angeles officials modeled the new program on that of San Francisco, which adopted periodic inspections in 1968.

“If you do an inspection on a periodic basis, any deterioration that occurs will be noticed and then corrected,” said Lesley Stansfield, chief housing inspector for San Francisco. “The object is to keep housing from getting rundown.”

Typically, San Francisco’s 19 field inspectors check everything from stairways (looking for dry rot and other signs of decay) to the roof and basement. During routine visits, inspectors will enter apartments only if they have received a complaint from the tenants, Stansfield said.