Riordan Targets Abandoned Buildings

Admitting that too many buildings have been abandoned in the city, Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan has called for rehabilitating the worst 400 structures in the next two years or demolishing them.

Riordan said the Abandoned Building Task Force he has proposed should begin by focusing on the backlog of more than 1,800 buildings that have been identified as abandoned nuisances.

“They decrease the quality of life,” Riordan said. “There are many all over this city and quite honestly, we haven’t done the job that I’ve been demanding in removing them.”

Under his proposal, $798,000 would fund eight additional building inspectors and two city prosecutors to tackle the worst 400 properties.

“Most of them are in such bad condition that they probably will have to be demolished,” said Deputy Mayor Jennifer Roth.

Last year, the city ordered just 60 nuisance properties demolished, according to Dave Keim, a principal building inspector for the Building and Safety Department. About twice that number were rehabilitated.

About 1,000 of the city’s abandoned properties have been boarded up and fenced. Another 800 are open and accessible to vandals and other criminals and therefore are considered nuisances, Keim said.

About 90 of the 800 nuisance properties are in the San Fernando Valley. There are 199 in South Central’s 9th Council District, and 141 in the 8th District.

Keim has yet to identify the 400 worst, but one property that will likely make the list is an abandoned home in the 12000 block of Osborne Place in Pacoima. Boards have been ripped from doors and windows, trash including wine bottles has been strewn around the property and walls have been covered with gang graffiti.

“It’s dangerous,” said Rene Ovalle, who lives across the street. “The homeless go in there. Little boys play in there.”

Maria Garcia, who lives next door, said people who went to the property to drink alcohol set two fires there within a three-week period. Garcia’s husband recently went onto the property to clean up syringes used by drug dealers, so the needles would not be a danger to the couple’s 5-year-old son.

The property is a blight on a neighborhood already struggling with sagging property values, she said.

“It really needs to be condemned and torn down. It’s a hazard,” Garcia said. “Something like that just tears the property values down even more.”

Keim said the owner, who lives in Washington state, has been given notice to clean up and secure the property. The owner did not return calls for comment.

If owners do not respond to notices, the city can order the property boarded up and fenced.

But once an abandoned property is secured, the buildings often languish like that for a long time, Keim said.

“The problem we have had in the past is as long as it is clean and secure, it will sit there like that indefinitely,” Keim said. “And even when you do clean them up and board them, some of these get broken into again.”

The city can order demolition if there is evidence of fire damage or criminal activity after the building has been boarded up.

Two years ago, the city created a Citywide Nuisance Abatement Program, in which multiple agencies including the city attorney’s office work together to diminish nuisance properties. But progress has not been fast enough to satisfy Riordan.

“We’ve finally, over the last couple of months, restructured how this is going to be managed in the city and we are giving them extra resources,” Riordan said.

Supporting the program Tuesday was Councilman Mike Feuer.

“We have to eliminate these sources of danger and blight throughout the city,” Feuer said. “It poses a public safety problem because abandoned buildings can be magnets for criminal activity.”

Riordan and Feuer also said one abandoned, vandalized property on a block can lead to a spread of blight.

“An abandoned building can really bring a neighborhood down in so many ways.”