Homing In on a Rental

Take two Los Angeles “For Rent” signs. One sits in front of a three-story house, freshly stuccoed pink, with views of water and hills in front and a landscaped garden in back. Price of admission: $3,000 a month.

The other sign advertises a studio with the same view of the hills; only here it’s from a screenless window that abuts a busy boulevard. This entrance fee is $525 a month.

The signs are two blocks and several worlds apart.

San Francisco and New York might have a lock on the financial and competitive aspects of renting, but no metropolitan market can touch Los Angeles when it comes to variety.

Here, would-be renters may survey a Burbank Craftsman with its own horse stables, a Franklin Avenue studio once occupied by Humphrey Bogart and an oceanfront duplex with more gas fireplaces than windows--all in the course of one traffic-permitting afternoon.

As the Southern California housing environment teeters, teases and threatens to laugh in the face of the weakening national economy, its rental market remains consistently inconsistent, as incongruous as its architecture.

Santa Monica is relaxing its rent control laws, while Glendale is studying ways to enforce them. Eagle Rock clings to its blue-collar roots as yuppies and corporate retailers circle, while Silver Lake embraces its new hipness and charges Malibu-level rates for a duplex.

A search for a home here may lead to the depths of dreariness or yield the same sweet surprise one gets peeling a pomegranate’s pocked skin and finding delicious ruby-red fruit hiding beneath. Newcomers sometimes discover that an otherwise unnoticed freeway exit, cluster of warehouses or other off-putting barrier gives way to a street straight out of Mayberry.

Sometimes the opposite holds true. In most cities, the dumpiest apartments can be found down shadowy corridors or at the bottom of crumbling stairwells. Los Angeles dives might be found across a tropical courtyard, three blocks from the beach or in a “Beverly Hills Adjacent” ad.

My husband and I witnessed all of these things after our Marina del Rey apartment complex raised our rent by 25% in September 2000 and we voluntarily flung ourselves into the Southern California rental maelstrom.

We trudged through dark halls, palm-shaded yards and one very long geography lesson before finding a place we both liked. It was tucked behind a freeway and around the corner from a deceptively ominous tunnel. A Domino’s Employee of the Month would have trouble finding it.

A pizza deliveryman might also have had difficulty renting the place, and not necessarily because of his pay scale. The person with the shiniest credit history doesn’t always get the dream home in our image-conscious town.

Our landlord, a trade worker in film and television, whipped out the lease not after we produced a year’s worth of pay stubs, but after he learned that we both worked in the entertainment industry. The street was thick with show-biz people, he explained, and he wanted to keep the house in the family.

Another local landlord goes a step further and demands a slice of his tenant’s soul along with the security deposit. Dave Goldstein of Art Deco Apartments makes potential renters write an essay before he’ll even consider them for tenancy in one of his splendid buildings.

His only criterion? No kissing up.

One tenant got a lease after likening herself to a princess in search of the perfect castle (which happened to be an English Tudor in Hancock Park). Another winner told Goldstein that, if rejected, he would be forced to live in a sterile apartment complex “that’s painted like an after-dinner mint.”

Moving tends to rank with root canal surgery or driving across the country with an ill toddler in terms of life experience. It is slightly less painful in Los Angeles, though, even if tenants are often expected to bring their own refrigerators.

Here, moving represents an opportunity to discover yet another completely new area that may be just underfoot--be it Carthay Circle or a North Hollywood cul-de-sac. It’s a chance to learn about places represented by the corner of a page in the Thomas Guide or glow-in-the-dark signs on the drive home from work. It is a chance to explore, even if the unknown merely turns out to be the shag carpeting and faux wood of a one-bedroom flat in Venice.

My husband and I were forced to start pounding the surface streets again in October. Our landlord, who managed to navigate the ebbs and flows of the entertainment industry for a quarter of a century, determined that the threat of strikes and a slowing economy produced too many ebbs and not enough (cash) flows this year. He’s packing it up and heading home to Florida, taking the proceeds from his lovely Hollywood bungalow with him.

In a moment of weakness, he suppressed his desire to keep his beloved street show biz and did what any unemotional investor seeking a maximum return would do.

He sold the house to the highest bidder: a general contractor.

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Laura Randall is a North Hollywood-based freelance writer.