Tenants’ ‘Win’ Means Eviction

Year after year, the apartment building on Cerritos Place sat in need of repairs. So when the Los Angeles city attorney filed 11 criminal charges against the corporation that owns it, tenants who had lived with roaches, no hot water, and deteriorating walls and ceilings hoped things would get better.

The corporation even pleaded guilty to one count -- but then sent tenants eviction notices that were mandated, the owner’s attorney said, in a court order crafted by the city attorney’s office.

In Los Angeles, prosecution of scofflaw landlords is a tool to preserve housing and protect tenants. But in this case, the prosecutors won a conviction -- and the tenants lost a home.

“It’s unbearable what I’ve been through,” said one tenant of the eight-unit building who declined to be named.

The heart of the eviction case is found in a few lines of a court document that has been interpreted in starkly different ways. One side views it as a judge’s order for the owners to empty the building of tenants. The other side views it as a benign rendering of previous conversations.

One court, the Appellate Division of the Superior Court, had refused to postpone the eviction while the case is appealed.

The two remaining tenants were scheduled to be forced out today, but on Monday afternoon, the same Los Angeles Superior Court commissioner who granted the eviction offered tenants a temporary reprieve.

The tenants’ attorney, Christian Abasto of the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, asked the commissioner to stop the eviction, because according to the office of the secretary of state, the Deva Corp. has been suspended.

Once a corporation has been “suspended or terminated, they can’t do business,” Abasto said. “The practical result is the delay in the lockout is effective until the suspension is lifted.”

The city’s role in the long and contentious case has generated plenty of surprise and discussion.

“The agency that is supposed to prosecute slumlords gives them a sweetheart deal that punishes the tenants,” Abasto said.

Luis Li, chief of the criminal division in the city attorney’s office, said the office was not involved in the eviction case and was not responsible for the court’s interpretation of the order in the criminal case.

“Ultimately, what we’re trying to do is come up with the fairest solution for all the parties involved and at the same time ensure people are safe,” Li said. “The intent is not to evict people. It’s to make sure people are safe.”

The building’s story is a convoluted tale of how code violations persisted for years, despite the agencies and programs put in place to prevent such conditions.

The Cerritos Place property has a long history of violations documented by the city Department of Building and Safety and city Housing Department, dating to 1985.

Located in Whitley Heights, a historic Hollywood neighborhood, the building was placed in the city’s Rent Escrow Account Program, or REAP, in 1995.

REAP attempts to encourage owners of problem properties to make repairs and keep tenants safe by depriving owners of rents, said Kyle Susswain of REAP.

Tenants can opt to pay their rent to a city-maintained escrow account instead of the owners, and the Cerritos Place tenants decided to do just that.

Even so, the problems remain, and the building is still in the program.

Over the years, tenants said, they had pressed the city attorney’s office to take action against the owners in hopes that the building would be repaired, but violations remained.

On May 19, 1999, a business called 6500 Cerritos LP deeded the property as a gift to Deva Peace Mission Inc., which, according to articles of incorporation filed with the state on May 17, 1999, is a nonprofit religious corporation. Robert Scholnick, an attorney representing Deva, said he did not know what religion Deva members follow, nor did he know the purpose of the organization or its membership numbers. Deva’s president, Kamel Sidhom Shehata, declined to be interviewed.

The IRS does not have a listing for the Deva Peace Mission as a tax-exempt organization, a spokesman said. The state Franchise Tax Board said it has never received a tax return.

“They incorporated in 1999, but they’ve never bothered to file,” said Denise Azimi, spokeswoman for the tax board. She said the corporation never filed with the state for tax-exempt status as a religious organization.

Scholnick blamed tenants for the continuing problems in the building. “They would interfere with any attempts to remediate the problems in the structure,” he said. “They tried to intimidate the contractors.”

Tenants said that the owners’ goal was to empty the building of low-rent-paying tenants and that they used harassment, intimidation and neglect to do so.

In November 1999, the Housing Department filed a notice with the county recorder that the building was classified as “either hazardous, substandard or a nuisance property.”

While code violations continued at the property -- including, according to a 2001 inspection, infestations of insects and rodents, decaying exterior walls, missing smoke detectors and leaking faucets -- taxes and utility bills sometimes went unpaid. From 1996 to 2000, the owners racked up more than $40,000 in unpaid property taxes, which were only recently paid.

By July 2002, only two of the eight units were occupied. About that time, the owners filed a statement with the Housing Department stating their intentions to remove the property from the rental market, which is allowed under the law, and to use the site for religious purposes.

“Property owners have the right to use their property, and ... we can’t make them choose to use the land one way or another,” Li said.

But because the building was occupied, the city was required to make sure the building was up to code, Li said.

In February, the city attorney filed the 11 charges against Deva Peace Mission; its president, Shehata; and its administrator, Alvaro Lozada. In April, the organization pleaded guilty to one count: failing to maintain walls and ceilings. The other 10 charges were dismissed.

The sentencing order places the Deva Peace Mission on a 12-month probation, requires it to pay about $2,300 in fees and fines, and says the defendant shall return to court “to confirm that all tenants have been vacated from the building.”

That clause quickly became the center of a new eviction case.

Under the city’s rent control ordinance, evictions are allowed only for a short list of reasons, including compliance with “a governmental agency order.”

Scholnick said the sentencing order was clearly “a governmental agency order” that required his client to empty the building -- or be in violation of probation.

“The city had cited the building and prosecuted Deva for maintaining substandard housing,” he said. “As part of the arrangement, since Deva’s position was they couldn’t remediate with the tenants there, the court ordered that as part of the sentencing.”

Further, no one in the city attorney’s office filed a motion to amend the order, he said.

Deputy City Atty. Aya Matsumoto, who handled the case, testified in court but declined to be interviewed. Li, chief of the office’s criminal division, did not describe the sentencing order as a mistake but said eviction was not the goal.

“We were not issuing a government agency order to vacate,” Li said. The court order, he said, ended up noting Deva’s plans to eventually vacate the building.

Abasto, the Legal Aid attorney, said that if Deva had followed through with plans to take the building off the market, and thus evict the tenants, the process could have taken longer than a year and could have been contested by tenants in court.

Abasto added that an eviction should not have been allowed because a court is not a “governmental agency,” as indicated in the rent control law that Deva uses for eviction.

Abasto also said Deva had no standing to evict tenants because it had failed to comply with a city ordinance concerning how the owners of substandard buildings are identified. The ordinance says owners cited for substandard conditions must place on a county registry the name and contact information of a person in California responsible for the building.

Failure to register is a misdemeanor punishable by six months in jail or a fine, said Rod Field, an attorney with the L.A. Housing Law Project, an advocacy group. Tenants can use failure to comply as a defense in court against eviction.

On Nov. 3, the state Franchise Tax Board suspended the rights and powers of Deva Peace Mission Inc. for failure to file years of tax returns.

Eric Moses, a spokesman for the city attorney’s office, said the office has offered to assist tenants with relocation.