Patience Pays Off With a Big Raze

For nearly 30 years, Rose Hedgpeth watched the comings and goings of people living in a cluster of rental houses a few doors down from her tidy home on Carolside Avenue.

The residents who occupied the 810-square-foot, two-bedroom houses appeared down on their luck, she said, and showed little regard for the dwellings they rented from Dr. Milton Avol, a retired Beverly Hills neurosurgeon.

As the families moved out and no new tenants took their place, the houses slowly began to fall apart, Hedgpeth said.

In the last five years, the deteriorated dwellings north of Palmdale Boulevard between Division Street and 3rd Street East became a haven for transients, drug dealers, taggers, stray animals and rodents, city officials and residents said.

So, earlier this month when bulldozers plowed into 10 of the 57 houses targeted by the city for demolition in the coming weeks, Hedgpeth rejoiced.

“I was thrilled,” the 80-year-old widow said. “Now, it looks really nice over there. I’m glad those houses are gone.”

The ramshackle properties have been at the center of a long-running legal dispute between city officials and the doctor, who was prosecuted more than a decade ago for allowing an apartment complex in Los Angeles to fall into disrepair.

The bulldozing was Palmdale’s last resort after giving Avol almost four years to bring the properties up to building and safety standards, said Chuck McKaughan, a city code enforcement officer.

“The city is not being heavy-handed here,” McKaughan said. “We provide homeowners every opportunity to make their properties better.”

McKaughan said Avol was informed about a city-run neighborhood improvement program that provides financial assistance to homeowners for new sod, concrete driveways and paint.

With no response from Avol, the city held hearings on the matter between August and October last year and eventually voted to knock down the houses.

Avol filed a suit in Los Angeles Superior Court on Dec. 15, alleging he had been denied due process, officials said. The suit sought an injunction to prohibit the city from tearing down the dwellings.

Avol won a stay from the 2nd District Court of Appeals on Jan. 12.

However, the stay was lifted Jan. 27 by a three-judge appellate panel, allowing the city to move forward with the demolition, officials said.

The Palmdale case is not Avol’s first run-in with housing officials. In 1985, he was ordered by a judge to live in a rundown 127-unit apartment building he owned in Los Angeles. The World War I-era building, called the Rutland, had been cited for hundreds of health, fire, building and safety violations.

Avol’s attorney, Paul Estuar, did not return repeated telephone calls to his Los Angeles office.

Palmdale code enforcement officials said it is not unusual for a municipality to raze vacant and dilapidated properties, but they also acknowledged that the Avol case is rare because of the high number of houses in disrepair owned by one person.

“This case gets much more notoriety because so many houses are owned by the same person,” said Mike McNeil, a city code enforcement officer.

Avol owns 72 houses in Palmdale, McNeil said, including the 57 slated to be leveled and 15 that are occupied.

A downturn in the aerospace industry resulted in a glut of vacant homes in the Antelope Valley, including most of Avol’s properties, McKaughan said.

“People can rent a larger house for less money, so they don’t even look at smaller properties,” McKaughan said.

On Friday, McKaughan and McNeil watched as construction workers donned protective suits before removing asbestos from two houses scheduled to be knocked down today.

“It takes a lot to get to this point,” McKaughan said. “This is a last resort. [Avol] always promised to do something, but he never came through.”

The city hopes to attract businesses--such as a printing plant, dry cleaners or warehouse--to the property, now zoned light industrial, McNeil said.

Hedgpeth said she would welcome the new neighbors.

“I would like to see some type of light industry rather than the houses,” she said, “because they were really getting to be a mess.”