Fed-Up Tenants Organize--and Get City to Act

Every night, Deilmy Delgato worried that another roach would creep into her baby’s ear. And bite it.

Elisa Rivera was sick of being bitten by roaches in her sleep.

And Lorenza Cruz was fed up with landlords who threatened Spanish-speaking immigrant tenants like her with eviction for speaking out about conditions in the poorest neighborhoods in Los Angeles.

Those frustrated women and many others were at the forefront of a forceful tenants rights movement that was crucial in providing public support for Los Angeles’ most comprehensive housing reform ordinance.

As tenants stood and applauded Tuesday, the City Council approved a program of periodic apartment inspections that will be funded by a $1 monthly fee, which landlords can pay directly or pass on to the tenants.

The action followed a report in The Times and another by a citizens panel that said the city building department had failed to live up to its responsibility of housing inspection in Los Angeles’ poorest neighborhoods. Housing advocates say those areas include MacArthur Park, Pico-Union and some areas in Koreatown.

At a cost of $8 million, the program should allow the city to inspect all 700,000 rental units within three years.

The ordinance will transfer authority for apartment inspections from the Department of Building and Safety to the more tenant-friendly Housing Department, which will hire 64 more inspectors.

Property owners who routinely defeat housing advocates because they’re richer and better organized lost the battle. Still, they managed to delay the ordinance, criticizing it as an action that punishes good landlords with the bad.

“I don’t mind cooperation,” said Harold Greenberg, president of the Apartment Assn. of Greater Los Angeles, “but let’s go after folks who are irresponsible and not accountable.”

Rivera, who lives in a Pico-Union building where water from leaking pipes has rotted the floors, had no sympathy for the owners. “They wanted to take our voice,” she said. “But this shows that if we raise our voices and exercise our rights, we can achieve our goals.”

One housing advocate who taught organizing techniques to Cruz and Delgato described his efforts as the most satisfying work of his career.

“It makes me feel good. It satisfies me when I am able to get through to people,” said Enrique Velasquez, director of Inquilinos Unidas (United Tenants). “I love it when people can change their situations, can change injustice. That’s why it’s important to me to educate and empower people.”

Cruz said techniques taught by housing advocates helped, but so did landlords, by refusing to make repairs.

Some apartment conditions were disgusting, tenants and city officials said. Roach and even rat infestations were ignored, as were rusting pipes that leaked streams of water. Tenants struggled to catch drips with buckets, but they couldn’t stop floors from rotting beneath them.

“Tenants have changed because of the reality of conditions in their buildings,” said Cruz, who lives in an impoverished immigrant neighborhood on the eastern edge of Koreatown. “That fear is no longer true.”

Change started last August after the revelations about the failures of housing inspections in poor neighborhoods. Inspectors in the Department of Building and Safety were supposed to respond to formal complaints by residents. But conditions were too bad for on-the-spot fixes, the citizens panel found. There was a backlog of 13,000 unanswered complaints.

The panel’s harsh criticism of inspectors and landlords was a green light to housing advocates like Velasquez. They started searching for tenants who could lead a movement.

“We started educating tenants we worked with,” said Anne Crawford, a tenant organizer for the St. Francis Center. “We said, ‘Hey, look, all this stuff is happening. These are benefits to you.’ We talked about the $1 fee. We asked, ‘If you had to pay this, would you be willing to?’

“And these people who work in sweatshops and can barely make enough money to feed their family and put shoes on their kids’ feet--all of them said, ‘I will pay the dollar or even more for an inspector to come to my house.’ ”

Two weeks ago, a council committee met to discuss the proposal for the ordinance. Usually, only housing advocates and landlords show up. But before the meeting, nearly 200 tenants streamed in.

They were organized and well-trained. Even though most spoke only Spanish, they knew when to stand and applaud during the proceedings in English. They knew which council members were on their side.

“Just the vision it created, I was almost in tears,” Crawford said.