Getting Out of a Fix

A sign on Esther O’Donovan’s door bears this greeting: Come on in. Everything else has gone wrong.

It’s funny, but it’s not.

With a recent legal settlement, participants in a troubled county-run housing rehabilitation program may finally be nearing the end of years of struggle. But for people like O’Donovan, 75, the well-intentioned home-improvement grants that once seemed so promising continue to exact a draining human toll.

As O’Donovan sees it, the program cost her the very home it was supposed to improve, a mobile home at a park in Los Alamitos where she had lived for 27 years.

“This has really ruined my life,” O’Donovan said, crying. “I had to fight and fight and fight. I was so exhausted I got suicidal.”

The housing program, which provides about $1 million a year in federal grants and low-interest loans through the county’s housing and community development department, is supposed to enable low-income residents to make the kinds of home improvements that keep a neighborhood safe and free from blight.

But many of the projects were done without building licenses and do not meet building codes, records show. More than half of the work was done by just four contractors.

In a 1998 federal lawsuit, 32 recipients--including O’Donovan--alleged the county-approved contractors had performed substandard or even dangerous work. Many were left with malfunctioning electrical and plumbing installations, badly leaking roofs and structurally unstable mobile homes, the suit said. It also alleged that the county’s housing and community development officials had pressured homeowners into signing pay vouchers for contractors even though the work was often left incomplete or performed incorrectly.

The county denied the allegations and last month quietly agreed to a settlement that means the plaintiffs--and as many as 200 other people who participated in the program over the last six years--will be eligible to have the damage reversed at county expense.

Under the settlement, independent estimators will evaluate the homes and determine the amount of money homeowners will receive. This time, the homeowners will pick their own contractors.

County spokeswoman Diane Thomas said county officials would not comment on the recent settlement, citing aspects of the case that are still under seal in federal court.

O’Donovan’s problems began after she received a $6,000 grant to fix her roof, which she said continued to leak despite the repair work. She applied for another grant and to her surprise, she received $15,000.

“They came in and said you need a new sink, and you need a new toilet and a stove,” O’Donovan recalled of her meeting with county representatives and her contractor.

“I said, ‘I don’t need it, and it wouldn’t match,’ but they just came in and did what they want.”

When the work was done, she said, her roof still leaked and the contractor wasn’t coming back.

“There were no gutters on there. Then when the El Nino rains hit, the water came in my bedroom and the mold started.”

First the walls turned brown, and then they turned black.

O’Donovan, a World War II veteran who lost her daughter to a drunk driver in 1969 and her two sons in a 1972 airplane crash, began to suffer serious respiratory problems that she and her lawyer attribute to the mold. She has had several prolonged hospital stays.

Because her doctor said she had to leave the mobile home, she borrowed money to repair it so she could sell it. But during a 51-day hospital stay, she missed her rent payments and was evicted from the mobile home park.

“I had to borrow $10,000 to fix it up myself. I’m still paying on that, and the coach is gone.”

Two suicide attempts later, O’Donovan now lives at the American Gold Star Manor in Long Beach, a retirement community for people whose children have died during military service. She is grateful not to be homeless, but says that living there is a painful constant reminder of her lost sons.

“If I get anything out of this settlement, I’ll get another mobile home,” O’Donovan says.

Costa Mesa lawyer Theodor C. Albert, who represented O’Donovan and the others in their settlement with the county, says he intends to file “a large claim” on O’Donovan’s behalf.

“She is an example of how this kind of treatment of people has real human costs,” Albert said.

Besides seeking repairs to their homes, participants in the program will have the opportunity to seek ancillary damages through an arbitrator for costs such as loss of use, pain and suffering, lost time, lost wages, medical and legal expenses, emotional distress and the loss of value to their homes.

“Imagine that you are an old lady,” Albert said. “You’re poor. You can just barely cling to the middle class by owning something. You go to the county to participate in something you think will help you because you can’t afford basic repairs, and you end up getting bullied by county people. You are introduced to contractors [who] proceed to tear your place up.”

That sounds familiar to Tustin resident Bonnie Billingsley, 70, who is also a plaintiff in the lawsuit.

Billingsley has a binder two inches thick to document the $28,265 the county paid to Sun Land Construction of Orange for a slate of repairs that she said has left her cheerful mobile home rotting beneath her feet.

The contractor could not be reached for comment.

Billingsley applied for the program in 1994 after a neighbor used it to have her home renovated. Like O’Donovan, Billingsley said she only requested minor repairs but instead was offered everything from new carpet to a new front porch at $1,900.

Shortly after the work was completed, things went dramatically wrong.

Today the steps leading to her front porch are near collapse. The exterior paint dissolves when it rains, leaving gray streaks down her windows. Water pours into her bedroom. The floor on the porch and in her bedroom have such severe water damage that they crunch ominously underfoot. The new carpet is gaping and wrinkled, and her shower serves as a storage closet because its heavy sliding glass doors have fallen off. “It doesn’t work anyways,” Billingsley said with exasperation.

Even though the county paid $2,350 to replace nine of her windows with new ones large enough to meet safety codes, they are actually the same size as the old ones--not large enough to climb through if there were a fire.

Although Billingsley finds some comfort in the settlement, she frets that taxpayers will have to pay for the mess.

“The people that are responsible are not going to have to straighten this up,” she said.