Angry Tenants Protest Lack of Enforcement on Slum Laws

One woman carried a plastic bag of asbestos she swept from the basement of her apartment building. Another carried an enlarged picture of four dead mice lying in traps. Others wore stickers that read, “No Broken Promises” and “No More Slums.”

The tenants marched into Wednesday’s meeting of the Los Angeles City Council’s ad hoc committee on substandard housing to make sure city leaders started making good on last year’s promise to inspect and clean up slum housing.

After two days of protests, the tenants were heard. The committee approved a proposal by Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg to immediately hire four new inspectors, require the Housing Department to submit quarterly reports and advertise to the public--in English and Spanish--how to file a housing complaint.

The motion will go to the full council, probably within a week, officials said.

Mayor Richard Riordan’s spokeswoman, Noelia Rodriguez, said the mayor supports the committee’s recommendation and will hire the inspectors with money in the current budget’s reserve fund.

Deputy Mayor Jennifer Roth said earlier that Riordan set aside funds in his upcoming budget to hire 22 new inspectors. The mayor’s budget is scheduled to be presented to the council in mid-April.

“This isn’t just about dollars,” said City Councilwoman Laura Chick, the committee’s vice chairwoman. “It’s about having the political will to see that these resources are used effectively.”

The mayor and council were embarrassed earlier when it was discovered that a well-intentioned housing ordinance passed in July to attack slum housing has done little.

The law was intended to identify landlords who allowed raw sewage to collect in apartments, as well as rodents, mildew and rot.

It called for creation of an office to orchestrate a systematic inspection of all the city’s 700,000 apartment units within three years. The housing law also called for more inspectors to answer the 65 or so telephone complaints the city gets each day from tenants.

But a bureaucratic snafu sent the bulk of the city’s inspectors to the systematic inspections office in the Department of Housing. The inspectors left to handle telephone complaints were soon overwhelmed. Now there is a backlog of more than 4,000 complaints.

“It’s unfortunate we had this bureaucratic slip-up,” said Rodriguez, the mayor’s spokeswoman. “We’re not excusing it. We’re not defending it. All we can do is correct it.”

Housing activists and tenants began their protests this week. So many piled into the committee meeting that Councilman Rudy Svorinich Jr., the chairman, moved the standing-room-only crowd of more than 200 into the larger council chambers.

Gary Blasi, a professor at UCLA’s School of Law, said that as an exercise he asked his students to find the Department of Housing at City Hall, where tenants are supposed to file complaints. Most failed.

“They said that of all the assignments I’d given them, this was the hardest,” Blasi said.

Tenant Mary Jane Morales tore a swath of protective health tape that carried an asbestos warning from her apartment’s basement. She wore it around her shoulders like a shawl.

She said the city left her with no one to complain to. “I personally called,” she said, and was told the Building and Safety Department “would send the health department. I called two days later and he said they would take care of it.”

“Did he give you any numbers to call the health department?” Svorinich asked.

“Oh yeah, I always get numbers,” Morales said. “One person gives me one number and another person gives me another number, and I find out that they’re all there in the same room, in cubicles.”