Illegal Housing Persists

Los Angeles city officials have known for a decade that there are tens of thousands of garages illegally converted into living units like the one where five children died in a fire Thursday morning. But they still don’t know what to do about them.

The Building and Safety Department only responds to complaints. It’s the same for firefighters. And city prosecutors wait for building inspectors to bring them cases.

No one ever surveys neighborhoods in search of the potential hazards that low-income tenants are sometimes willing to risk in an overcrowded and costly housing market. For many garage residents the only alternative is the street.

The garage on East 105th Street where Thursday’s tragedy occurred was typical: Records show city inspectors haven’t visited the site since 1975, when the owners added a recreation room and bathroom to the garage. No one lived there illegally then.

“A citywide problem is the lack of a systematic process for identifying problem properties at an early stage,� a task force on nuisance abatement wrote in a report last year. “The implementation of routine inspections would allow the city to cite properties before life-threatening violations manifest themselves.�

But the recommendations for inspections at least every three years for all multifamily dwellings were rejected as too expensive. The city has about 400 building inspectors to handle 1 million properties citywide.

“What it comes down to is, which Paul do you rob to pay Peter?� said City Councilwoman Laura Chick, who chairs the council’s Public Safety Committee. “We’re getting down to just trying to deliver the most basic, essential, maintenance-of-life services. I’ve got to deal with dollars and cents. I’m really very skeptical that we’re going to be able to take strides on this.�

Even if there were enough inspectors to survey every structure, politicians and experts said the shadow market of illegal dwellings presents a more complicated challenge: If enforcement were stepped up, where would garage-dwellers already teetering on the brink of homelessness go?

Smaller cities in Southern California have had more success attacking the problem, said Joe Carreras, manager of the housing program at the Southern California Assn. of Governments. Santa Ana, for example, has aggressively prosecuted offending landlords, while Huntington Park has worked with owners of illegal conversions to try and bring them up to code.

South Gate City Manager Ron George said he has made garage conversions a priority, resulting in some 900 citations in the city of 92,000 residents over the past year. To ferret out the problems, George demands that all government employees be on the lookout for illegal garage-dwellers. To force compliance, the city has stepped up fines: Offenders pay $75 the first time, but $1,000 to $5,000 if they are caught again, he said.

“It goes beyond the inspectors. It’s code enforcement, it’s police officers, it’s the health department. . . . All those folks who are out on the street who have eyes report what they see,� George said. “It takes someone being proactive and moving on those things, as opposed to just receiving complaints.�

There’s a “tragic trade-off� between code enforcement and putting people out on the street, Carreras said. “It may not be so much problem-solving as problem-shifting. It’s a rather draconian choice on either end.�

“It’s a very difficult question,� agreed USC geography professor Jennifer Wolch. “It’s a real incentive to turn a blind eye because of the lack of resources to do anything about the people who would be turned out into the streets.�

A study recently published in the Journal of the American Planning Assn. ranked Los Angeles-Long Beach as the fourth-most crowded region in the country, with 27.5% of the population living in crowded conditions of more than one person per room (including living rooms, dining rooms and kitchens).

The unmet demand for affordable housing is enormous. About 41% of all rent-paying households in the city were spending at least 35% and often much more of their income on shelter, according to a 1993 Los Angeles city Housing Department report.

Another city Housing Department study found that severely overcrowded apartments--with more than 1.5 people living in each room--doubled to 20% between 1980 and 1990.

The severe shortage of affordable housing combines with Southern California’s mild climate to create a massive market for converting garages. Experts say tenants in these illegal dwellings are typically poor, new immigrants.

Jan Breidenbach, executive director of the Southern California Assn. of Non-Profit Housing, thinks garage conversions persist as much as ever even though the overall economy has improved somewhat and immigration has slowed a bit. “We just haven’t built enough housing stock to have the situation change drastically,� she said.

Wolch of USC agreed. “I think even though there has been a softening of housing prices in the region, there also have been an increase of poverty and a continuous flow of low-skilled labor into the region,� she said. “So there is little reason to think that the number of people who live in converted garages has declined. I would suspect, if anything, the problem has become significantly worse.�

Dowell Myers, a USC associate professor of urban planning and development who co-authored the American Planning Assn. study, said one solution would be to adopt less stringent building and safety codes that would allow garages to be used as legal housing units. But he acknowledged that that would mean some neighborhoods “may take on more of a ramshackle quality� while others would bitterly resist any garage conversions.

Another idea would be a campaign to educate owners and tenants about the dangers of improper electrical and heating systems, “and we just have to hope the people who converted the illegal units will pay attention,� he added.

Some in Los Angeles City Hall have suggested that meter readers from the Department of Water and Power, who visit virtually every city structure regularly, work with building inspectors on problems such as illegal garages. Others believe that some of the city’s public safety funds should be redirected from expanding the Police Department to adding building inspectors.

Mayor Richard Riordan did not respond to a request for an interview. His communications director, Steve Sugerman, acknowledged that the case “raises several important issues,� but said that “today it’s important to mourn the loss of these children and let the family grieve and mourn.�