Anti-Slum Law a Fiasco, Frustrated Tenants Say

After the TV cameras flickered off at a sidewalk news conference on slum housing Tuesday, Mary Jane Morales stepped forward with her 5-year-old daughter, Zoe Cruz, to describe life in their Westlake apartment.

“We haven’t had hot water in a month,” Morales said. “The water heater is busted. I boil the water to make it easier. It takes two hours for us to bathe.”

Morales said none of the tenants in her building at 615 S. Virgil Ave. complained to City Hall. When she called, she learned why. She said she was passed from person to person, and at the end of a week, “I think I had been on the phone for 15 hours.”

In July, Mayor Richard Riordan signed an anti-slum bill that was supposed to put an end to the runaround endured by tenants like Morales. The city promised to hire more inspectors and provide a quick response.

But the problem instead has gotten worse, renters say, and tenants at the news conference Tuesday blamed Riordan and City Council members for not hiring enough housing inspectors.

Under the new law, tenants pay $1 a month to fund a program to randomly inspect the city’s 700,000 apartments. Previously inspections were done only after tenants called the city to complain.

Because the Department of Building and Safety had failed to carry out timely inspections, the law transferred 23 inspectors from that agency to a new code enforcement unit in the Housing Department.

That’s where the problem started. In what the mayor’s office called an oversight by the mayor’s and council’s staffs, most of the workers were assigned to handle the random citywide inspections, a move that left only 12 inspectors to handle about 65 tenant complaints per day.

No new inspectors were hired, and soon the city had a backlog of 4,000 to 6,000 complaints from tenants about building and safety hazards, officials said.

Mirta Ocana, a housing deputy for City Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg who played a major role in reforming the housing law, said the problem was not her fault.

“I went back and thought, ‘How could this happen? How could I miss such a thing?’ ” Ocana said. “I know the devil is in the details. What happened to the money?”

Ocana said she was not sure whether the problem was created by the Housing Department or the mayor’s financial staff.

Deputy Mayor Jennifer Roth, who handles the mayor’s fiscal affairs, was outraged by Ocana’s suggestion. “The mayor is extremely supportive of both the proactive inspection program and the complaint program,” she said.

Assignment of most of the inspectors to the random program “frankly was an oversight by all of us, the mayor’s staff and the council,” Roth said. “The mayor was furious. We were all angered by it.”

Roth said the mayor will ask the council for 27 new inspectors when his budget is submitted next month. Each will handle tenant complaints, she said.

“This is not a political game for us,” Roth said. “We’re dealing with people’s lives.”

Last summer Riordan said, “Every human being in the city has the right to live in quality housing.”

He promised that all apartments would be inspected over three years. But with the current number of inspectors, city officials say, it could take as long as 21 years to examine all 700,000 units.

Tenant Delmy Delgado said members of the tenants rights group Inquilinos Unidos praised Riordan last year for the new housing law but now plan a noon protest today at City Hall.

“Our children are suffering,” she said, standing behind a worn card table turned into a lectern for the news conference.

Tenants stood behind Delgado, and behind them were Polaroid photographs. There was a photo of a boy with crimson bumps from roach bites on his left thigh. Another showed four mice caught in indoor traps; one picture showed rotting ceiling wood that had fallen into a toilet.

Delgado said she and the other tenants hope the mayor will comply with his promises. “To this day,” she said, “there are no better conditions in our homes.”

City Councilman Nate Holden, the lone member to vote against the housing reform plan, said the $1 a month tenant fee was never enough to properly fund a citywide inspection program. “It was baloney,” he said.

Added Harold Greenberg, president of the Apartment Assn. of Greater Los Angeles, “We told them at the time the law was poorly conceived.”

He said the city should copy San Francisco, where tenants and landlords mediate complaints through tenant organizations and an apartment association.

“With this new law, instead of going after slumlords, they’re going after everybody,” he said. “They shouldn’t go against everybody in the city. It’s a waste of manpower, of taxpayers’ money and time.”

Meanwhile, as city leaders try to resolve the mess, Morales and her daughter will continue to deal with theirs. “I can see the tub of the person above me through the ceiling,” she said, “because there’s a big hole.”