Turning Up Heat on Slumlords

For years, housing advocates have complained that the Los Angeles city attorney’s office was being too soft on slumlords, too hesitant to prosecute property owners who ignored warnings about cockroach infestations, bad plumbing, faulty wiring and leaky roofs.

Now, it seems, slumlords have reason to be wary.

Last month alone, the office charged the owners of 11 buildings in the MacArthur Park area with violating fire, building and safety and health codes.

Also in July, a judge sentenced a landlord to 90 days of house arrest in her Pico-Union building. Another owner was sentenced to 45 days in jail this month for his failure to correct deficiencies at a building on King Boulevard in South Los Angeles.

“I’m really hopeful that this time around we are going to see some results from the city attorney,” said Clemente Franco of the nonprofit Inner City Law Center. “It seems to be a higher priority for this administration than it was for the previous one. The advocate community is looking at this with cautious optimism.”

The case against landlords in the MacArthur Park area is part of an effort to improve housing conditions all over the city, said Los Angeles City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo.

This week Delgadillo is expected to name Victor Sofelkanik the director of the office’s Slum Housing Task Force. It had been headed by Bill Cullen.

“We need to ensure that slumlords face stiff penalties, including jail time, if they fail to comply with orders to repair life-threatening and unsanitary conditions,” Delgadillo said.

Critics argue that the prosecutions are still just a fraction of what the city attorney’s office could do. Their hope, though, is nearly universal.

“I’m hoping we can ride this momentum into a whole new era,” said Tai Glenn, an attorney with the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles.

Not everyone views the increased prosecutions as a positive step. The approach can unjustly penalize some property owners who are victims themselves, said Harold Greenberg, a lawyer who represents about 25 owners facing criminal prosecution.

“It is easy to target a landlord,” Greenberg said. “When is the last time they have targeted a tenant from hell who makes life miserable not only for the landlords but for the other tenants?”

The city attorney and housing advocates share an interest in addressing the slumlord problem, but they approach it with different tools. The city attorney can prosecute landlords who fail to maintain property, who raise rents illegally or carry out illegal evictions. Advocacy groups can sue. But such cases tax the resources of the nonprofit organizations and often lack the impact of criminal prosecution.

“Often, with really bad landlords, they tend to not curtail their abusive practices just by a civil attorney filing a civil lawsuit,” said Chancela Al-Mansour Matthews of Neighborhood Legal Services of Los Angeles County.

For that reason, advocates push for criminal charges against scofflaw landlords, saying they help to preserve the housing stock and keep the most vulnerable tenants housed.

“The city attorney’s role in enforcing housing law is crucial,” said Elissa Barrett, director of the Sydney Irmas Housing Conditions Project at Bet Tzedek Legal Services. “The housing market is so tight and the incentive for abuse is so high that the city really has to be serious about enforcing its laws.”

A year ago, Coalition L.A. took matters into its own hands after its review of the 1st and 10th council districts revealed a large number of buildings that city Housing Department inspectors had cited for code violations -- in some cases years before -- but whose owners had never made repairs and had never faced penalties, said Darla Fjeld, executive director of Coalition L.A.

Members of the advocacy group visited buildings, educated tenants and called on landlords to make repairs. They also asked inspectors to reinspect and document whether work was done. Now, nearly all of the buildings have been repaired or are undergoing the work, she said.

“Our strategy is to shine the light on these bad zones to show the city attorney and the Housing Department that this can be done and that the problem isn’t with the laws, but the number of inspections and the number of prosecutions,” Fjeld said.

Gary Blasi, a UCLA law professor and expert on housing issues, said the Slum Housing Task Force under then-City Atty. James K. Hahn had been “reasonably effective, especially in comparison to other cities.” But the task force was created to go after the worst and the biggest buildings, letting other offenders fall off the radar.

“In a city with a million apartments, there’s still a lot of apartments that don’t qualify for the task force,” he said.

Blasi conducted a survey of cases when the city attorney’s office was headed by Hahn, now the mayor. At that time, the office averaged about 60 prosecutions each year, with about 100 open cases at any given time.

In fiscal year 1999-2000, for example, 70 new cases were filed. The following year the number fell to 58.

Glenn, of Legal Aid, said many advocates “were not satisfied with what was happening under Hahn’s watch.”

After Delgadillo assumed office in 2001, the number of cases started to climb. In 2001-02, the office filed 132 new cases. In the 2002-03 fiscal year, which ended in June, the number of cases filed rose to 336.

Sarah Dusseault, assistant deputy mayor for economic development, defended the mayor’s record, arguing that such cases require the cooperation of other city departments.

When Hahn took office as city attorney, a small number of the city’s then 750,000 apartment units had been inspected by housing officials. “A city attorney can’t prosecute a case unless they have the data,” she said. “When the mayor was city attorney, there just wasn’t enough.”

Even so, Hahn was the first city attorney to win a conviction that forced a landlord to live in his own slum property. And during his tenure as mayor, the number of annual inspections has increased, Dusseault said, resulting in more prosecutions.

“Jim Hahn as city attorney laid the foundation to make that happen,” she said. “We’ve also worked closely with the city attorney to make sure they have the resources to prosecute these cases.”

Some housing advocates question the recent stepped-up enforcement, wondering if Delgadillo hopes to polish his record for a reelection campaign in 2005, said Abdullah Muhammad, a leader with Acorn.

Whatever the reason, some landlord attorneys say the prosecution approach oversimplifies the problem of dilapidated buildings. It does not consider the dilemma landlords face, such as gangs that terrorize buildings, bad tenants who destroy them and police and other officials who offer landlords little help.

Greenberg, the landlords’ lawyer, said one of his clients sought help from police and the city attorney’s office in dealing with gang members who had taken over her building in San Pedro. She received no help, he said, but she eventually was prosecuted as a slumlord.

“If you have a slumlord, prosecute,” Greenberg said. “But when you have mom and pop ... and they’re trying, help them. Don’t prosecute them.”

A Delgadillo spokesman said the city can help, but only if landlords do their part.

“We have recommended the installation of security cameras, hiring security guards and better screening processes from tenants,” said Eric Moses, the spokesman. “It’s incumbent upon landlords and law-abiding tenants to make sure they alert the authorities to get the criminals out of the building; if they don’t, the building gets into disrepair.”

Another attorney, Richard Kaplan, said his client shows how some well-intentioned landlords can be unjustly labeled slumlords.

Sondra O’Neale, who holds a PhD in American literature and was dean of the college of Liberal Arts at Wayne State University in Detroit, has invested much time and money into fulfilling a goal of providing housing for low-income residents.

“She’s not a slumlord and it’s not a slum. It’s not deplorable She’s done a huge amount for the community.”

O’Neale bought a building in Pico-Union in 2001 after it already had been in violation of building and safety codes for more than two years, Kaplan said. Repairs were made, but “the improvements were not made fast enough to satisfy the city,” he said. “Even when the improvements were made, they’d come in and complain about new things.”

In January 2002, O’Neale and Union Building LLC were convicted and sentenced to 36 months’ probation for problems such as damaged and deteriorated walls, ceilings and floors, and defective fire-protective signaling systems. Last month, she was found in violation of her probation, and she is now under house arrest at her building.

“She’s very frustrated,” Kaplan said. “She’s doing everything she can.”

Advocates say increased prosecution sends a message to landlords -- good and bad -- and to tenants: Owning a building that is not up to code is “actually going to be treated like the crime that it is,” Glenn said.