None of the Comforts of Home
Their apartment is in such poor condition that Teresa Arroyo believes it is making her children ill.
Her son and daughter, ages 2 and 3, must use inhalers to ease asthma, a condition they developed after moving in and which their mother attributes to moldy carpets and a cockroach infestation. A rash on their feet causes the skin to peel away.
Arroyo points out mushrooms growing from the ceiling of her shower. Next door, a defective water heater lacks a brace to hold it firm 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 more in the last six months than in the previous five years combined, real estate experts said.
The affordable housing crunch that has hit much of Los Angeles is particularly acute here, said tenants rights attorneys and homeless shelter operators. The waiting 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 in the northeast Valley are unsound, with many needing major work to be legally habitable. Yet people live in them anyway.
Multiple families crowd into small houses, run-down 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 another alternative: In a time of unprecedented prosperity nationwide, the area is experiencing “an explosion in homelessness,” said Casey Horan, director of the Women’s Care Cottage, a northeast Valley homeless shelter.
“We’ve seen a 60% increase in the last 11 months in terms of people searching for housing,” Horan said.
‘Massively Inadequate’
Despite statistics showing that more than 30% of northeast Valley residents live in poverty, that the area’s apartments have Los Angeles’ highest rate of building and safety code violations, and that overcrowding is 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 apartments can reach three years.
But that wait is relatively short compared with the 12-year waiting list for those 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 such 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 canlegally be rented.
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 the city of Los Angeles. But it is far from enough.
Kurken Alyanak is the landlord at 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 applicants are waiting for apartments. It may take 20 years to go through the list, Alyanak said--longer than the projected life of the building.
‘In Danger of Becoming Homeless’
Sharon Haworth and Rosa Rodriguez personify the effect 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 come through.
Since her boyfriend left, she can no longer afford the monthly rental 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, White 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 nine years in a three-bedroom house in Sylmar, Rodriguez’s family is being kicked out because the landlord decided to drop out of the rental assistance program.
If they do not find a new house soon, Rodriguez, her seven children, husband and mother could become homeless.
Although the six boys, ages 3 to 10, must share one room there, the dilapidated house is still better than the street, Rodriguez said.
Rodriguez and her mother have made calls daily since May and cannot find any landlord in the Valley who will accept federal rent subsidies and a family of 10. They recently received an eviction notice.
“I am not well now,” said grandmother Maria Balladares, 75. “And I am so nervous. We have these children, and we may not have a house. We could be out on the street with our babies.”
Many other northeast Valley families are already homeless, turning to shelters such as L.A. Family Housing, where nearly twice as many people are seeking help as there are beds available.
One such person is Dana Dell’Antonio, who was forced to move with her daughter into the L.A. Family Housing homeless shelter 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.”
Clevin Hill and his six children, ages 4 to 11, have been living in the shelter since their eviction by a landlord who decided to opt out of the federal program.
“My kids wanted to stay here,” Hill said. “Their schools are out here. And it’s not only me. There are a whole lot of other people too. They can’t find nothing here.”
A task force of housing advocates recently concluded that existing city programs will rehabilitate and build up to 1,000 units of affordable housing annually 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.
‘It’s a Struggle’
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 signed up and more are applying 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.”
Bishop Gerald Wilkerson of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles said the northeast Valley is where he directed a church-affiliated housing group when it recently asked for advice on where to concentrate efforts.
“There has been a huge wave of immigration there,” he said. “It’s a struggle.”
The issue has been further complicated on a national scale by welfare reform. Families are facing deadlines for finding work, but some people fear families will end up in low-paying jobs with fewer benefits, so nothing will be done to help them improve their housing situation, said Karen Klabin, a policy analyst with Human Services Network, a Los Angeles social advocacy group.
Providing housing is just part of the problem, activists said. Keeping apartments fit for habitation is another.
After citations are issued, the time-consuming process of gaining compliance often means landlords can put off repairs for months. One recent study found that in a quarter of the 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 repairs had been completed.
Cobbett was back at the Sun Valley building last month, photographing evidence for future 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 run-down stretch of Case Avenue without lights or sidewalks.
Outside, holes gape between roof tiles. In one spot, a newspaper is 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 under 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.”
‘It Is a Vicious Cycle’
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 said. “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,” Stovitz said. “They are no longer the victim. They are the perpetrator. People say, ‘Why do you have your kids living in a place like that?’ ”
Tuesday: The health-care crisis.
