There Goes the Enrollment

Larry Gross, director of the nonprofit Coalition for Economic Survival, which grew out of the movement for rent control in the 1970s, advocates a moratorium on conversions of rent-controlled apartments until the loss of affordable housing is addressed comprehensively. "If this is not curbed," he said, "we're looking at the face of Los Angeles changing forever. It's going to be a city of the wealthy."

For veteran Los Angeles teachers and administrators, the trend is a bracing departure from the norm. Lower enrollments bring the gift of more manageable playgrounds and even a spare room or two. But they also raise concerns for those being pushed out and for the long-term future of the schools.

"My whole career in the district, it's been grow, grow, grow," said Christopher Stehr, principal of Leo Politi Elementary in Pico-Union, which this year dipped below 1,000 students for the first time since 1997. The school is slated to go to a standard single-track calendar next year. "I never thought I'd be around to see this day," he said.

Tall, robust, with graying hair, Stehr donned a suit jacket to take a walk around his school's six-block enrollment area, a hodgepodge of boxy apartment buildings thrown up in the 1970s and '80s and grand Craftsman and Queen Anne homes built more than a century ago.

Multiple mailboxes and satellite antennas marked the houses converted to mini-apartment buildings. Work crews marked the ones being restored to single-family homes. Piles of abandoned furniture outside apartment buildings hinted at evictions.

Passing the large asphalt playground, where children in blue-and-white uniforms were at recess, Stehr said the population drop has made the campus more manageable. But it also means he will lose three teachers. And he worried about the families who were leaving. "Is it a good thing? That depends on why they're leaving and where they're ending up," he said.

The subject hit a nerve with mothers waiting outside Leo Politi's gates, all tenants protected by the city's rent-control law. Adopted in 1978, the law limits annual increases to 3% a year (up to 4% after this year) as long as the tenant stays in the unit. It also limits a landlord's ability to evict.