Housing Crisis Hits Valley’s Poor Hardest
Her apartment is in such poor condition that Teresa Arroyo believes it is making her children ill.
The son and daughter, ages 2 and 3, must use inhalers to ease asthma, an affliction that they developed only after moving in, and that their mother attributes to moldy carpets and a cockroach infestation. A rash on their feet makes the skin peel away.
Arroyo points to mushrooms growing from the ceiling of her shower.
Next door, a defective water heater lacks a brace that would keep it steady during an earthquake.
“This place is a deathtrap,” said city housing inspector Ray Cobbett, who went to Arroyo’s apartment complex in Sun Valley armed with disinfectant and cuffless pants--two essentials to warding off pests while on the job in the northeast San Fernando Valley.
A wave of immigrants and working poor has swept into the communities of Pacoima, Sylmar, Arleta and Sun Valley, triggering a housing crisis that has left many families unable to find decent shelter. Vacancy rates have plummeted to 2% in some areas, and rents have increased dramatically.
The affordable housing crunch that has hit much of Los Angeles is particularly acute here, said tenant rights attorneys and homeless shelter operators. The wait on the list for Los Angeles’ main rent subsidy program is up to 12 years.
A recent city survey found that more than a third of residential properties are unsound, with many needing major work to be made legally habitable. Yet people live in them anyway.
Multiple families crowd into small houses, rundown trailers and garages. Many cannot find housing anywhere in the Valley, and are forced to move north to the High Desert, far from jobs.
The most desperate find one more alternative: In a time of unprecedented prosperity nationwide, the area is experiencing “an explosion in homelessness,” said shelter director Casey Horan.
“We’ve seen a 60% increase in the last 11 months in terms of people searching for housing,” said Horan, director of the Women’s Care Cottage, a northeast Valley homeless shelter.
Despite statistics showing that more than 30% of northeast Valley residents live in poverty, that the area has Los Angeles’ highest rate of building and safety code violations, and that overcrowding averages 37% more severe than the rest of the city, most of those who turn to government find little help, activists said.
Only 6% of the city’s 8,762 public housing units are in the Valley. The wait for an apartment can reach three years.
But that wait is relatively short, compared with the 12-year waiting list for those poor people who want to qualify for rental assistance from the city Housing Authority.
“It’s massively inadequate,” said Steve Renahan, director of the federal rent subsidy program for the Los Angeles Housing Authority. “We receive enough [federal] funding to only help one of every 10 eligible households.”
Those who endure the wait are often unable to find a landlord in the Valley willing to accept government rental subsidies. The booming real estate market has led some owners to opt out of government subsidy programs.
“People who have established ties to the community, either through church or school or friends, some of those families face having to move out,” said Chancela Al-Mansour, a staff attorney for San Fernando Valley Neighborhood Legal Services in Pacoima.
John Horn, program director for L.A. Family Housing, recently spent three years working with families in Pacoima.
“There is housing that is affordable, so poor people move there from other parts of the Valley,” he said. “But it’s not the kind of housing people want to be in and raise a family in.”
Tenants find better housing where landlords accept subsidy certificates--known as Section 8 assistance after the section of federal law that created the program--because those units must be inspected by the city before they may legally be rented.
$280 Million Is Not Enough, Critics Say
The budget for the federal subsidy program is $10.6 billion and provides housing subsidies for 3 million families nationwide. Because of an increase in federal funding, the number of families that benefit has increased in Los Angeles from 30,200 in 1995 to 37,965 this year. About $280 million was spent last year in Los Angeles. But critics say it is far from enough.
Kurken Alyanak is the landlord for a Pacoima apartment complex with 40 units available for those with federal rent subsidies, which require tenants to pay no more than 30% of their income toward rent. About 2,000 people wait for an apartment. It may take 20 years to go through the list, Alyanak said, longer than the projected life of the building.
Sharon Haworth and Rosa Rodriguez personify the impact of the crisis on the northeast Valley.
Haworth, 31, is poor, sick and on her own. She lives in limbo, praying that her rent subsidy will somehow come through.
Since her boyfriend left, she can no longer afford the monthly payments for her Arleta house. The former pastry chef is on disability because she suffers from a potentially terminal spinal disease.
She is so poor now that she cannot buy enough milk for her 8-month-old son, Ramsey. Haworth is one of 160,000 people on the waiting list for rental assistance.
“I have two children and I’m in danger of becoming homeless,” she said. “I can’t wait 12 years.”
If Haworth ever succeeds in qualifying for a subsidy, she won’t have Chris White to turn to. White’s company recently paid off the federally backed loan on its Casa Bien apartment complex in Pacoima, ending its 20-year obligation to rent to low-income residents. As current residents with subsidies move out, he will replace them with tenants who can pay the market rate.
“By opting out, and getting straight rent, the owner gets more return on his money,” White said.
Other landlords are less accommodating, simply evicting needy tenants. After Rosa Rodriguez spent nine years in her three-bedroom home in Sylmar, her landlord decided to drop out of the rental assistance program, and is kicking her out.
If Rodriguez does not find a new house soon, she, her seven children, her husband and her mother could become homeless.
Although Rodriguez’s six young sons, ages 3 to 10, must share one room, the dilapidated house is still better than the street, she said.
Rodriguez and her mother have made calls daily since May, and cannot find any landlord in the San Fernando Valley who will accept both federal rent subsidies and her family of 10. They recently received an eviction notice.
Shortage of Beds at Shelters
Many other northeast Valley families are already homeless, turning to shelters like L.A. Family Housing, where there are nearly twice as many people seeking help as there are beds available.
One such person is Dana Dell’Antonio, who was forced to move herself and her daughter into the L.A. Family Housing homeless shelter in the northeast Valley because she has been unable, since January, to find a landlord willing to accept a subsidized renter.
“It is absolutely frustrating,” Dell’Antonio said. “I feel like I’m banging my head against the wall.”
A task force of housing advocates recently concluded that existing programs will rehabilitate up to 1,000 units of affordable housing citywide, while population growth indicates that 3,800 affordable units are needed each year.
The Housing Crisis Task Force recently recommended that the city set up a trust fund to provide the $100 million needed annually to bridge the gap in housing needs. The council created the fund, and allocated start-up funds of $5 million.
The need also overwhelms private efforts to help.
Habitat for Humanity hopes to break ground next month on the first of 53 houses for low-income families in Pacoima, but 250 applicants have lined up and more apply daily, said Terri-Lei Robertson, the organization’s area executive director.
“We have decided to target the northeast Valley for the next 15 years,” Robertson said. “That is where we see the need being the greatest.”
Providing housing is just half the problem, activists said. Keeping apartments fit for habitation is the other half.
After citations are issued, the time-consuming process to gain compliance often means landlords can put off repairs for months. One recent study found that in a quarter of cases examined, it took an average of four months to gain compliance, with inspectors having to return to the property up to 12 times.
In one instance, the city first documented problems with a Case Avenue apartment building in Sun Valley in April 1999. When Cobbett returned in January, only 20% of the repairs had been completed.
Cobbett was back at the Sun Valley building last month, snapping photographs as evidence for court action.
“We have got to have something happen. It’s not happening fast enough,” the inspector said.
The dilapidated apartment building is on a rundown stretch of Case Avenue without lights or sidewalks.
Outside, holes gaped between roof tiles. In one spot a newspaper had been stuffed in the stucco wall.
Inside, Cobbett cited numerous health hazards, including improper wiring, exposed electrical outlets, blocked exits and apartments built without permits where there was originally a carport.
“This place has too many violations to document them all,” Cobbett said.
The city can pursue fines, criminal charges or a special program in which rents can be diverted from recalcitrant landlords to direct funding of repairs. There are 127 such properties in the northeast Valley’s 7th Council District.
Tenants interviewed at the Case Avenue property said they are content.
Owner Benjamin Colon said the city is harassing him. The tenants are poor and he does not want to raise the rent, he said, which leaves him unable to afford repairs.
“The tenants never complain,” said Colon, 70. “I’m making repairs little by little.”
Other landlords said they are doing the best they can to maintain properties, given unreasonable city regulations and tenants who do not take care of their apartments.
Betty Ju, who owns the Sun Valley apartment building where the Arroyo family lives, blamed problems on sloppy tenants and city rent control laws that severely limit the ability of landlords to raise rents to pay for repairs.
“Low-income people have poor housekeeping habits. If you do not wash dishes, and let plates of food sit out, the cockroaches will come,” she said.
Ju said she is making repairs as fast as she can.
“It’s insanity,” Ju added. “If I pump $10,000 into a unit and can’t increase the rent by one dime, where’s the incentive to spend the $10,000?”
City officials say that even under rent control, many landlords take substantial profits out of their buildings, never putting money into maintenance. In a tight housing market, tenants are reluctant to complain.
“Some owners can afford to ignore the problems, or wait it out, with hope that the tenant will get so frustrated they will move,” said Roberta Stovitz, a housing attorney for San Fernando Valley Neighborhood Legal Services. “Thus the nomadic journey of the tenants begins again. They move to the same kinds of slum buildings because that is what they can afford. It is like a vicious cycle.
“It puts the onus on the tenant. They are no longer the victim. They are the perpetrator. People say, ‘Why do you have your kids living in a place like that?’ ”
