Fire Peril Has Roots in Poverty
Los Angeles city officials have been chasing the shadow housing market -- illegally converted garages, laundry rooms, attics and commercial buildings -- for 20 years with what officials acknowledge are lackluster results.
An extensive survey by The Times in 1987 found that 200,000 people were living in 42,000 illegally converted garages and other structures -- a finding that prompted officials to increase inspections.
A decade later, after six people died in fires at illegal dwellings in one month, city officials again promised a crackdown.
But a fatal fire last week at a dilapidated South Los Angeles warehouse converted into tiny apartments underscores a point both city officials and housing advocates agree on: Illegal dwellings have become even more common in recent years as rents and real estate prices have risen.
Part of the problem is that regulators don’t have a comprehensive system for discovering illegal units.
The Fire Department is supposed to perform annual inspections of most commercial buildings but does not inspect single-family properties, where most of the conversions occur.
The Building and Safety Department inspects buildings only after receiving complaints from the public, and officials said they were unlikely to receive them from residents living in illegal apartments.
The city’s Housing Department is required to inspect all the city’s residential rental buildings with two or more units. But since 2002, the department has discovered virtually no illegally converted garages.
And Katie Buckland, a spokeswoman for the city attorney’s office, reported few prosecutions of property owners who have illegally converted their dwellings.
“There have been a couple cases -- a random few here-and-there prosecutions --but there have not been a lot of them,” she said.
But better enforcement of city regulations alone would not change a key factor in the proliferation of illegal conversions: a lack of housing in Los Angeles that poor people can afford.
Over the last decade, construction of new housing units has lagged far behind the increase in the population.
As of late 2003, there were more than 20,000 families on the city Housing Authority’s waiting list for public housing, and 70,000 more had registered for Section 8 housing vouchers.
“If you enforced all the building codes on the books, there would be at least 500,000 people on the street tomorrow,” said Gary Blasi, a law professor at UCLA who specializes in housing issues. “That’s never going to happen, of course, but I don’t think we should use that as an excuse to allow dangerous situations.”
One woman was killed last Friday when a fire broke out in a warehouse on Slauson and Normandie avenues.
The building’s second floor had been converted illegally into tiny apartments, with the dozens of residents sharing a common kitchen. Neighbors said that the makeshift boardinghouse had been operating for as long as two years and that many of the residents appeared to be disabled.
Fire Department inspectors had visited the building three times in the last three years. However, they got inside the building only once, on May 21. The other two times the building was apparently locked.
The May inspection revealed no violations, and fire officials said it was unclear whether the inspector somehow missed the second-story dwellings.
After the fire, the Building and Safety Department declared the upstairs apartments illegal because of such hazards as faulty wiring, missing smoke detectors, unsafe window grates and un-reinforced walls, ceilings and floors.
Fire Department Battalion Chief Ralph Terrazas said firefighters are charged with inspecting commercial buildings like the South Los Angeles warehouse at least once a year.
Other structures -- large multi-unit apartment buildings, condominiums and hotels -- must undergo fire inspection at least once every three years to check for adequate exits, fire extinguishers, smoke detectors and other safety devices.
Terrazas said the department manages to visit each of the 56,197 buildings on its list but cannot always gain access if the building owner is away.
If a building is locked, Terrazas said, “you do the best you can, looking from the exterior without breaking into the place.”
Terrazas said that firefighters try to revisit locked buildings but are not always able to because of other demands on their time, including training and emergency calls.
Fire Station 66, which inspected the warehouse that burned last week, has the fifth highest number of emergency responses in the city, Terrazas said.
“Emergency activity has a direct effect on our ability to complete all inspections,” he said.
The Building and Safety Department receives about 40,000 complaints of residential code violations each year, and inspectors respond to nearly all of those within 72 hours. About 90% of complaints come from private citizens; the rest are referred to the department by fire and law enforcement agencies.
But officials said they didn’t have the resources to do regular spot inspections.
“We couldn’t just drive down the street looking for a problem,” said Bob Steinbach, a spokesman for the city’s Building and Safety Department. “We can barely handle the work we have now. Our workload is up 80% in the last six years, and our staffing is down 20%.”
The costs would go beyond hiring more inspectors. If the department found an illegal apartment, it would order that the building be shut within several days, he said. In some cases, that would require having a “fire watch,” a 24-hour-a-day guard, until residents move out.
Steinbach said his department has struggled with how exactly to approach the issue, mindful that simply shutting down illegal units does not solve the problem.
“We don’t want to kick people out into the street with no place to stay,” he said. “[We] need to be creative and not to come in like storm troopers and just kick everyone out.”
Blasi, the UCLA professor, suggested that the city could, as a stopgap, step up inspections with the idea that it would shut down only illegal dwellings that were dangerous.
“One can distinguish between a garage or add-on that doesn’t have enough windows or something like that and one that has a dangerous heater or bad wiring,” Blasi said.
City Councilman Bernard C. Parks, who is running for mayor, suggested a compromise under which the city would work with property owners to bring some converted dwellings in private homes up to code.
Such flats can “provide a form of relief for the city’s limited housing resources, but resident safety is most important,” Parks said in a statement.
Times staff writer Hector Becerra contributed to this report.
