Apartments

Apartment rents are falling across most of Southern California as unemployed tenants double up with friends or family and the affordability of foreclosed homes makes some renters into buyers, a new survey has found. The average rent in Los Angeles County fell almost 4% in 2008 as apartment occupancy rates dropped and new units came online.

Activists and Los Angeles city officials questioned Thursday how it was possible that an apartment building that collapsed Sunday was deemed in compliance by the housing department within the last year. "It's mind-boggling to me how it could have been passed just a few months earlier and now it has collapsed," said Albert Lowe of the tenants' rights group Strategic Actions for a Just Economy.

The owner of an apartment building that collapsed Sunday in Los Angeles' Koreatown, injuring four people, was convicted last fall of numerous fire and health code violations and agreed to sell all of his roughly 150 rental properties as part of a plea agreement that allowed him to avoid jail time, records show. Frank McHugh, 82, of Marina del Rey was given three years to sell his apartment buildings in an agreement approved by Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Spurgeon Smith.

A father and son were treated for smoke inhalation from an early morning house fire in Covina on New Year's Day, according to Los Angeles County Fire Department officials. The fire occurred at a home on Cameron Avenue near Grand Avenue. The blaze, which was started by embers from the fireplace, began at 1:20 a.m. and was put out about 50 minutes later, fire officials said. The blaze caused about $30,000 damage to the $1.6-million house.

Sonny Astani walked into a Westwood movie theater in 1985 and saw the film that changed his life: "Blade Runner," the science-fiction tale that imagined a dystopian Los Angeles where jet-powered cars zoom past skyscrapers covered with enormous, cinematic advertisements. Decades later, the Iranian-born businessman is determined to bring some of those futuristic images to life. His plan? Attach an animated sign 14-stories tall on the 33-story condominium project he is building in downtown L.A.

Having toiled in machine shops during World War II and worked for decades in other manual jobs, 84-year-old Mary Kubancik felt entitled to live out her years in a pleasant mobile home park in Sylmar. Instead, the frail Kubancik is preparing to move out after 19 years. Her $919 monthly Social Security check won't cover her essentials and the $702 that her mobile home space will cost when the latest double-digit increase takes effect in April.

Former California State Treasurer Phil Angelides has joined forces with ex-basketball star Earvin "Magic" Johnson and a Beverly Hills investment firm to buy and improve more than $2 billion worth of urban apartment complexes across the country. Angelides said Monday that he was chairman of the newly created Canyon-Johnson Urban Communities Fund, which will focus on acquiring and upgrading apartments in inner-city neighborhoods to create more "workforce" housing.

There's no conniving Amanda Woodward -- Heather Locklear's "Melrose Place" character -- in the building. Not yet, anyway. But residents of the Rob Clark, a new condo conversion in West Hollywood, say life there often imitates the campy '90s TV show where the overwrought dramas of successful, wildly attractive twentysomethings played out inside an L.A. apartment complex.

It's the smell you notice first: not the usual scent for this part of downtown, more accustomed to overflowing trash cans, sour urine and the stench of people who have spent too long sleeping on L.A.'s streets. Instead, it's sweet and green, with a tinge of lavender -- and it comes from the vegetable garden that residents of the Rainbow Apartments planted last week in a most unlikely place: attached to a cinder-block wall of a parking lot off San Julian Street in the heart of skid row.

The owners and managers of a Stanton apartment complex that fined families $50 and threatened them with eviction notices when their children played outside agreed Friday to pay $618,000 to settle a housing discrimination lawsuit. In the class-action suit, nine families alleged that Plaza Patria Court Ltd., the owner of the Plaza Court Apartments, targeted families by fining them if their children were outside unsupervised, playing on the grass or taking out the trash.