Building Code Violations

A federal judge in Riverside said Monday that he was prepared to close a sprawling trailer park in Thermal within two weeks unless its owner presented a detailed plan to repair water, electricity and building code violations at the property that is home to 6,000 tenants. "If I get the feeling that this is not going to happen, I'm going to close the place down. I'll send out federal marshals, and that will be it," said U.S.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa issued an apology Monday to members of a private Jewish school who received a pair of surprise visitors during Yom Kippur services last week: city building inspectors trying to enforce a curfew for events at the Hancock Park school. While Yavneh Hebrew Academy was holding services for Yom Kippur -- which is the holiest of Jewish holidays -- in its chapel Friday night, two city building inspectors entered the lobby just after 8 p.m.

The president of a company accused of forcing hundreds of Los Angeles tenants to live in slum conditions will serve up to five months in jail, the city attorney's office said Wednesday. Darren Stern, president of Landmark Equity Management, pleaded no contest Tuesday to nearly three dozen code violations at three buildings near downtown.

NEAR the 18th hole of the Bighorn golf course in Palm Desert, publishing tycoon Duane Hagadone laid out his vision for a dream home to his architect. It would be set high on the bald mountain rising near the green yet be so inconspicuous that he'd have to point it out even to golf buddies.

Like most of their neighbors in the sprawling, ramshackle Oasis Mobile Home Park, the Aguilars have no heat, no hot water. On cold nights, the family of eight stays warm by bundling up in layers of sweaters and sleeps packed together in two tiny rooms. Bathing is a luxury that requires using valuable propane to boil gallons of water. So the farmworker clan spends a lot of time dirty. Jose Aguilar, a wiry 9-year-old, has found a way around the bath problem. He just waits until dinner.

In a ruling that some said could slow the pace of gentrification in the city, a Los Angeles Superior Court Judge on Friday ordered a major landlord to stop imposing unlawful rent increases on hundreds of tenants and barred the landlord from buying any more buildings in the city pending the outcome of a lawsuit. Judge Ralph W. Dau said Landmark Equity Management and its affiliated companies would also be prohibited from entering the premises of any of its properties until the suit is decided.

Turn down a side street in the Clinton Hill neighborhood and a strange structure rises above the skyline. It is wooden, and handmade, and -- depending on your angle of approach -- it can resemble a 15th century flying machine, or a warped Gothic cathedral, or a pile of sharecroppers' shacks poised deliriously over Brooklyn. The building is the work of Arthur Wood, a slight man of 75. For 27 years, Wood's neighbors have watched him climb to the top of his building to begin work on its next level.

Three months after declaring he was a victim of harassment by city inspectors, yoga magnate Bikram Choudhury agreed Tuesday to have his company plead guilty to three criminal counts of building and fire code violations. The plea deal allows Choudhury, whose signature brand of heated-room yoga is popular with many celebrities and has spread from Los Angeles to six continents, to avoid criminal charges personally. But, reached after the deal was announced, Choudhury did not sound penitent.

The Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety has been lax in enforcing building codes, allowing many violators to skate with minor fines or no penalty at all, according to a city audit released Monday. City Controller Laura Chick said there were 150,000 building permits that expired last year without the department's final approval, and more than 13,600 unresolved code violations.

Over the last 20 years, controversial Los Angeles yoga magnate Bikram Choudhury has turned his signature brand of "hot" yoga into a worldwide, multimillion-dollar industry. But it was Los Angeles City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo who turned up the heat Thursday, charging the popular yogi with 10 criminal safety violations at his La Cienega Boulevard studio.