They’re Alone and Elderly With No Place to Call Home
It’s not just the memories she’s loath to leave, though there are 45 years’ worth crammed into Mildred Kaplan’s Westside apartment.
And it’s not just the money she’s worried about, although the $800 she gets each month from her late husband’s Social Security check won’t go very far in her neighborhood, where apartments like hers rent for $1,500 or more.
It’s the indignity of being forced out that riles her, the prospect of starting over that scares her, the reality that an 80-year-old woman who has “always paid her rent on time and never been any trouble” can suddenly find herself homeless.
Kaplan--along with the other residents of her five-unit building near Fairfax Avenue and Beverly Boulevard--are being evicted so that owner Ilona Kalt can renovate the building. They got the news three weeks ago, in a terse, five-line letter from Kalt: “Please be advised that you have to vacate the premises no later than January, 2001.”
One family, already in the market for a house, quickly moved. Others began scrambling for new accommodations, putting Christmas shopping and holiday celebrations on hold to scour the tightest, most expensive rental housing market this city has seen in years. Some consulted lawyers and tried to buy time.
And all of them worried about Kaplan.
“She’s 80 years old. She doesn’t drive. She’s got health problems. And she’s been there more than half her life,” one tenant told me. “And two weeks from now, she’ll be out in the cold.”
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It certainly seems hardhearted, forcing an old woman into this brutal housing market at the height of the holiday season. Kalt didn’t return four days’ of phone calls from me to explain the timing or the urgency. Tenants say she has, so far, refused their entreaties for an extension.
You can credit Los Angeles’ rent control law for allowing Kaplan to remain in her apartment so long, long after her children left, her husband died, her health failed and her building was sold and sold again. The law prevents landlords from hiking rent more than 3% annually until a tenant moves out. Her long tenure kept Kaplan’s rent below $400, while similar apartments in her building skyrocketed to nearly four times that much.
But you can also blame rent control for making Kaplan move. The law allows landlords to evict tenants in order to make repairs of $10,000 or more per unit. Tenants must be given 30 days’ notice and a relocation fee ranging from $2,500 to $5,000. When the repairs are finished, they can charge new tenants whatever the market will bear. Landlords say these wholesale evictions and rent increases are often the only way to recoup the costs of maintaining a building whose longtime tenants keep rental income artificially low.
In this climate, the elderly, longtime renters suffer the most. Their plight has become so dire that city and state officials recently passed new laws that can give seniors up to a year to find new housing, but only if their building is being demolished or permanently taken off the market.
That does nothing to help Kaplan and other seniors on fixed incomes, whose housing options are shrinking, in part because of changes in federally subsidized housing programs that make it easier for landlords to stop participating in them. That means that not only seniors like Kaplan but others who have relied for years on federal rent vouchers must now pony up the full amount or move out.
“We’re getting calls all the time from elderly people who can no longer afford their rent but have nowhere else to go,” said Rhonda Rangel, who staffs a hotline for the Area Agency on Aging. “Their options are really few. We try to see if they can go live with a family member, or go into a nursing home, which Medicare will help pay for. If not, we try to help them find a retirement home or get on a waiting list for subsidized housing.”
But those lists can be seven or eight years long, says Soo Lee, head of Los Angeles County’s Adult Protective Services division, which provides social workers to assist elderly people facing eviction.
Sometimes, the hardest part of their job is convincing people like Kaplan that they have to leave, Lee said. “Elderly people get very attached to that area, that building, that room. Many times they insist, ‘No, nobody can force me out.’ They don’t understand--the sheriff will come out if she doesn’t leave.”
Kaplan’s neighbors have rallied around to try to make her transition easier. They’ve driven her around to look at new places, brought her boxes and offered to help pack her belongings. But even a tiny room at a nearby “retirement hotel” goes for $1,100 a month. And even if she could afford it, how would she ever condense 45 years’ of memories into the few boxes that would fit inside that one small room?
“No,” she says, shaking her head resolutely, her pink earrings dangling. “I can’t go, not now, anyway. I’ve got two doctor appointments next month, and I need to be near the bus line.”
She sounds as tough as you might expect for a woman who has been living on her own for 25 years. “Dammit, let the sheriff come get me.” But her hands tremble and her eyes are misty as they wander across the room.
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Sandy Banks’ column runs on Sundays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.
