Units Damaged in Fire Called Illegal

The South Los Angeles building where a fire killed one woman and injured four other people Friday was a dilapidated warehouse illegally converted into a boardinghouse where as many as 10 families crammed into tiny rooms and shared a central kitchen, city inspectors said Monday.

Authorities estimate that 40 people lived on the building’s second floor in an industrial area near Slauson and Normandie avenues, where office space had been divided into makeshift apartments. City officials said they have seen more illegal dwellings as rents rise and the supply of new housing dwindles.

“A lot of them are converted garages and are not visible from the street,” said Katie Buckland, a spokeswoman for the city attorney’s office. “How many are out there? Nobody in the city has any idea, but we know more are cropping up every day.”

Firefighters on the scene Friday morning found residents pressing their faces against the barred windows on the second floor as smoke billowed into the sky. One woman, Rachelle Denise Merriwether, 47, died later in the morning, reportedly from injuries suffered in the fire.

City fire investigators believe a cigarette started the blaze. The Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety has concluded the facility was unfit for occupancy because of hazardous electrical wiring and unreinforced walls, ceilings and floors. The building also lacked smoke detectors.

City prosecutors said they are awaiting a full report from fire investigators and building and safety officials before determining whether to bring criminal charges against the landlord. Records show the building is owned by Percy Polk Jr. of Los Angeles.

County records show the building last changed hands in 1997, when it was purchased for $145,001. The 6,600-square-foot building houses a locksmith shop as well as about eight to 10 living units on the second floor. The building is zoned for commercial use only.

According to notices posted on the building, the tenants will be relocated at the expense of the landlord -- at a cost of $2,000 per resident.

Carolyn Rose Cruqtcher’s 64-year-old sister, Quaintance, lived in the building and suffered critical lung burns in the fire. Quaintance remained in intensive care Monday. The warehouse was one of the few places where Quaintance, who was unemployed, could afford the rent, Cruqtcher said.

Despite her sister’s injuries, Cruqtcher expressed support for the building’s owner for providing housing for poor residents.

“He’s always been very kind to my sister,” Cruqtcher said of the landlord. “The conditions here were not great, but he has always been a decent person.”

Several calls to the landlord were not returned.

A shortage of affordable housing has long been a problem in Los Angeles.

From 1990 to 2000, the city added 200,000 residents, while just 37,000 new housing units were constructed, according to U.S. census data.

Los Angeles had more than 370,000 overcrowded housing units in 2000; nearly a quarter of those units were “severely overcrowded,” meaning that more than 1.5 people lived in every room except the kitchen and bathroom, the census report said.

As of late 2003, there were more than 20,000 families on the city Housing Authority’s waiting list for public housing, and another 70,000 had registered for Section 8 housing vouchers. The median apartment rent hovers around $1,376 a month.

“The housing market for low-income people is in a state of collapse,” said Gary Blaisi, a UCLA law professor. “People on the bottom end of the housing market are facing homelessness, or housing that’s really not housing. They’re ‘hot-bedding’ in a slum apartment in Pico-Union or sleeping in a building that wasn’t intended for housing. There’s a whole sort of gray market for so-called housing [that is] not really housing.”

Harold Greenberg, a former president of the Apartment Assn. of Greater Los Angeles County, a landlord organization, said the city was partly to blame for the amount of illegal housing.

Greenberg said the process of legally converting commercial buildings was too cumbersome and expensive and could take more than two years to win approval.

“And that’s if you are lucky, because you won’t get it approved the first time,” he said. “You need a lot of money and good contacts in City Hall. You need an engineer and an architect, then you have to go to Building and Safety, then you have to go to your local council member to take care of zoning.”

City Councilman Bernard C. Parks, who represents the area, agreed that more must be done to provide housing.

“I suspect that there are a large number of poor people, many of them residing in places that are old and not suited to have people in them,” he said.

The conversion of garages into apartments without permits is a widespread reality in his district, Parks said.

Instead of penalizing homeowners, city officials need a way to bring these spaces up to safety and building code, he said.

“I don’t think you are going to make them go away, because people are going to make due with what’s available,” he said.

But Parks doubts that commercial spaces like warehouses could easily be converted.

“Few, if any, are ever suitable [living] quarters,” he said.

Bob Steinbach, a spokesman for the city’s building and safety department, said his office receives more than 40,000 building code violation complaints a year, but has never done a study on illegal dwellings in the city.

Steinbach added that the department does not conduct routine inspections, but rather waits for complaints.