Loan Program to Aid Housing Repairs Unveiled
Reacting to harsh criticism of Los Angeles’ abundance of slum housing, a group of bankers and political leaders Wednesday announced a new, $150-million loan program designed to fix up substandard units across the city.
“This will help bring them up to a quality of life that human beings deserve,” Mayor Richard Riordan said in announcing the program.
About 150,000 apartments and other residences fail to meet city housing code requirements, meaning that hundreds of thousands of people live in buildings that are in some sort of disrepair; many lack such basic amenities as heat, electricity or working plumbing.
Starting with this year’s budget, the city is embarking on a program to inspect every unit in Los Angeles once every three years, and the loan program is geared to help landlords make the necessary improvements in buildings that are found wanting.
At the news conference called to unveil the program and to sign a symbolic memorandum of understanding with the cooperating lending institutions, Riordan was joined by several members of the City Council and more than a dozen representatives of local banks that are contributing to the effort, believed to be the first of its kind in the country. The program is scheduled to run for five years and will be administered by the lenders and the city Housing Department.
It grows out of a report last year in which the Blue Ribbon Citizens Committee on Slum Housing concluded that such dwellings are a large and growing civic problem. It was that group that estimated more than 150,000 housing units in the city were below legal standards. Of those, about 30,000 were considered “severely distressed.”
In fact, the site of Wednesday’s news conference was a building badly in need of work. Located in Westlake within sight of the downtown banks that are helping bankroll the loan fund, the tattered apartment building has wires running down the outside walls from makeshift television antennas. The courtyard is littered with beer cans, a beat-up car seat and an old bicycle.
“This is not just a building in need of repair,” Riordan said as he stood in front of the structure. “It’s a home to many people.”
Indeed, despite its disrepair, the building houses dozens of families, most of them Latino. One--a man and woman and four children--watched the politicians and bankers as they announced the loan program and promised to continue hammering away at the problem of slum housing in Los Angeles.
As the children giggled through the news conference, Councilman Rudy Svorinich Jr., a candidate for Congress in the South Bay, gestured at the family and said it was evidence of why an all-out city campaign to combat slum housing was needed.
“I cannot see a better reason than right over our heads,” he said.
According to City Atty. James Hahn, the previous owner of the building was cited for code violations, and ultimately paid a fine and was put on probation. It was his first offense, Hahn said.
Since then, the owner has declared bankruptcy. The building is in foreclosure, but city officials hope a new owner will soon take it over and begin making the repairs required for it to conform with housing codes.
Under the new program, apartment building owners will be able to apply for loans ranging from $1,000 for minor repairs to much larger construction loans. In general, the smaller loans are hard for lending institutions to administer and not worth the effort, which discourages many of them from offering such loans.
They agreed, however, to pool their resources and offer these loans after becoming convinced that the city’s housing stock was in such poor shape that it was driving down the value and safety of many neighborhoods.
In fact, the issue of safety was often cited Wednesday as a key reason for reinvesting in Los Angeles housing. Alluding to the work of scholar James Q. Wilson, whose “Broken Windows” theory has profoundly influenced Riordan and a number of other city leaders, several speakers predicted Wednesday that efforts to clean up apartment buildings and neighborhoods would have the additional effect of driving down crime rates.
“We are going to make our city safe from crime,” said Councilwoman Laura Chick. “This is a happy day.”
In addition to the loan program, the city is stepping up its inspections, starting in the coming fiscal year, which begins July 1. Under the budget proposed by Mayor Riordan and supported by the City Council, apartment owners will be charged $1 per month per unit in additional fees next year.
That money will be used to hire 60 more inspectors. Their goal is to inspect each of the city’s 750,000 units every three years, as well as responding to complaints.
