Deteriorating Relations

For some time now, the building at 1910 S. Los Angeles St. near the downtown garment district has been the site of a simmering war between the owner and his tenants. Like any battlefield, the building shows the scars of the struggle.

The walls are filled with holes. Fleas dance on the wooden floors, which have been stripped of carpets. County health inspectors have discovered roach and rodent infestations inside the walls.

Such disputes are not uncommon in the city’s poor neighborhoods. But this one is noteworthy for the bitterness between Latino immigrant tenants and the Egyptian immigrant landlord, and for the slum-like squalor of the building.

The landlord holds the dimmest view of his tenants--they are capable of eating roaches, he says--while some tenants say they fear he will resort to physical violence against them. The Los Angeles city attorney’s office is reviewing evidence in the case to see if criminal charges are appropriate.

Tenants in the 31-unit building, some of whom pay as much as $400 a month for tiny one-room apartments, say landlord Zaki Mansour is trying to drive them out of the building by allowing it to fall apart underneath their feet. They say that when they’ve complained to the health and fire departments, the landlord has responded with threats.

Mansour views things differently. “I was basically a victim of the tenants,” he said. “These people live on welfare and they don’t work. They vandalized the building. If they want to live like animals, I can’t change their lifestyle.”

Several tenants say their landlord may be responsible for the epidemic of broken car windows they’ve suffered. One tenant believes that the recent firebombing of his car is linked to the dispute.

“We live in fear,” said the tenant, a garment worker who asked that his name not be printed.

Mansour denies trying to intimidate the tenants. “I wouldn’t lower myself,” he said in a telephone interview. “I’m not going to break anyone’s windows. If I want to fight someone, I take them to court.”

Indeed, the landlord has filed eviction orders against all but a handful of the building’s residents, many of whom have since left.

At the same time, the building has been inspected by officials of the city’s multi-agency Housing Task Force, which targets dilapidated residential buildings. In November, fire, building and health inspectors cited Mansour for dozens of violations.

The Department of Building and Safety found “general dilapidated conditions,” including broken windows, hazardous wiring and plumbing, lack of adequate heating and a nonworking elevator.

Health Department inspectors found “trash, debris and/or excrement” on all four floors and the roof. Fire inspectors found 18 violations, including defective fire-escape drop ladders.

Inspectors found the building in bad enough shape that they referred it to the task force, which targets 100 of the most deteriorated residential structures in the city.

Tenant Maria Salgado said conditions in the building got so bad last fall that she stopped paying rent.

“We didn’t pay because he wouldn’t fix the apartment,” she said. Salgado said she has asked the landlord to fix the stopped-up bathtub that she has to drain with a bucket.

To such complaints, Mansour responds with insults, Salgado said. “He said we were trash. He’s been very mean to us.”

When a Times reporter visited the building last month, bathtubs and toilets stood incongruously in the hallways. (They have since been removed.) The hallways reeked with a sour, stale smell.

Half the apartments were occupied, with crews busy at work inside those that were vacant. Those tenants still in the building complained of constant harassment by the landlord.

“If the door is unlocked, he’ll walk in,” one tenant said. “You can be asleep, lying down, he’ll come in. He says, ‘I’m the owner,’ as if you were doing something wrong by being a tenant.”

Several tenants said Mansour took photographs of them in their apartments, without asking permission, apparently to document overcrowding.

One former tenant who asked not to be named said that for a time last year, the landlord locked the door to the area where the trash bins are stored, preventing trash pickup.

Then came the firebombing of one tenant’s car, which was parked near the front steps. For a few moments, tenants said, the flames seemed on the verge of igniting the building itself.

“We were afraid that the gas tank would explode and the fire would spread to here,” one elderly woman said, fighting back tears.

By early this month, after several days of rain during which, tenants said, the roof leaked badly, all but a handful of families had moved out of the building.

“This is a severely substandard building,” said Lauren Saunders, an attorney with Bet Tzedek Legal Services, a nonprofit organization that is representing several of the tenants and former tenants in the eviction proceedings. “The tenants are simply trying to exert their basic right to safe and decent housing.”

Saunders said she is planning to file a lawsuit on the tenants’ behalf, charging the landlord with “maintaining a substandard building and harassing and retaliating against the tenants.”

For his part, Mansour said gang members have assaulted two of his managers since he bought the building about two years ago. He said he has called the Los Angeles Police Department’s anti-gang unit, but that the police have been unable to help him.

His attempts to repair the building have met with resistance from the tenants, Mansour said.

“I would love to give you a key,” Mansour told a reporter. “Go with a hammer and say ‘I would love to fix your apartment,’ and they don’t let you. Look at the amount of money I am putting into the building and look at the money they are giving me [in rent]--zero.”

Mansour, who owns other apartment buildings, expresses little respect for his tenants at 1910 S. Los Angeles St. “My contractor told me these people eat roaches. They keep it in a container and that’s a source of protein for them.”

Salgado said that in 1995, not long after bringing her newborn son Sergio home from the hospital, she asked the landlord to fix the leaking roof. A doctor said Sergio needed a clean environment to recover from a complicated birth.

“I told him, ‘Don’t fix it for me, fix it for my son,’ ” Salgado recalled. “But he refused.”