Riordan Targets Blighted Buildings

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

Riordan said the Abandoned Building Task Force he has proposed should begin its work 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 only 60 nuisance properties demolished, according to Dave Keim, a principle 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. An additional 800 are open and accessible to vandals and other criminals and are considered nuisances, Keim said.

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

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

“It really needs to be condemned and torn down. It’s a hazard,” Garcia said. The owner of the property did not return calls for comment.

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

Once an abandoned property is secured, the buildings often languish like that for a long time, 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 abate 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.”