Slum Gives Way to New Apartments
Los Angeles’ most notorious slum apartment house--a place so foul that infamous convicted slumlord Dr. Milton Avol was once sentenced to live there for 30 days--has been replaced with sparkling new rental units that have low-income families waiting in line to move in.
The $11-million Carlton Court Apartments were unveiled Thursday by local officials and a private partnership at the site of the former La Paula Apartments near Hollywood Boulevard and Western Avenue.
Construction of the airy, 61-unit complex is part of a city-backed Hollywood revitalization program. In ceremonies marking completion of the units, leaders pledged Thursday that steps will be taken to make certain the replacement apartments never become as run-down as the last ones there.
“This project will not be allowed to become a slum,” said Mirta E. Ocana, an aide to Hollywood-area City Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg.
About 2,300 families applied to rent the apartment units, a sign of the crunch for affordable housing in Los Angeles. Officials said families, picked through a lottery to live in apartments that range up to four bedrooms, will start moving in next month.
A private investment firm and a bank have put up more than $6 million of the construction cost, and the city has financed the rest. A professional management firm will be responsible for keeping the apartment complex clean and properly maintained.
Such was not the case at the old 93-unit La Paula Apartments, which were owned by Avol until officials seized them through condemnation proceedings in the late 1990s.
Avol, a retired Beverly Hills neurosurgeon and former chief of staff at the Robert F. Kennedy Medical Center in Hawthorne, died in 1999 at the age of 76. As a landlord, he was prosecuted for slum violations at several investment rentals he owned in Los Angeles and Palmdale over a 20-year period.
Avol had the dubious distinction in 1980 of motivating Los Angeles to create its pioneering slumlord task force. Later, he was the first landlord in the nation to be sentenced to live in one of his own blighted buildings after being convicted for health and safety violations.
While serving the 30-day sentence under house arrest in one of the La Paula apartments in 1987, Avol became the first prisoner in Los Angeles County to wear an electronic bracelet that notified authorities if he strayed more than 150 feet from his apartment unit.
Stubborn to the end, he held out for $2 million for the decrepit La Paula property during condemnation proceedings (a jury awarded him $750,000). Avol steadfastly blamed unruly and slovenly tenants for damaging his apartments and rental houses.
But investigators and tenant rights experts fingered Avol for ignoring such things as plugged sewage systems, electrical wiring problems and vermin infestations. They complained that repairs, when done at all, where shoddy and slapdash.
“He did what all slumlords do--no maintenance, no upkeep, just suck all the money out,” Goldberg told a small crowd gathered Thursday in the courtyard of the Carlton Court Apartments.
Christina Duncan, executive director of Hollywood Community Housing Corp, a nonprofit group involved in developing affordable housing, said $300 per month from each apartment’s rent will go into a maintenance and upkeep fund. Operation of the apartments will be handled by the McCormack Baron & Associates management company.
Diana Frelly, a regional supervisor for the firm, said the list of 2,300 applicants for apartments was whittled down to 250 by a lottery, and those are being screened to confirm eligibility. Those chosen will move into units equipped with washers, dryers and kitchen appliances that will rent for as little as $565 a month for a two-bedroom apartment.
One prospective tenant, 28-year-old pizza deliveryman Artak Maghakyan, sneaked into Thursday’s ceremony to size up Carlton Court. He said he is ready to pack up his wife, child and his mother if he is picked.
“We live up the street in a place that’s 50 years old. There are problems with heating and the pipelines,” Maghakyan said.
“This is a nice new building. It would be a new future for us.”
