Rental Housing Los Angeles

The federal agency charged with putting low-income people into decent, affordable housing is itself trying to evict dozens of poor and elderly Los Angeles residents from homes they have rented for years but which are now in foreclosure.

The smell of smoke still hung in the hot Wednesday morning air when I reached the scene of a garage fire that had killed a grandmother and two small children just hours before. A man approached me. I could see him noticing my press tags and sizing me up. Something was bothering, even haunting, him. He told me he was Jose Vasquez, a gardener, and he wanted to make a confession. No, he didn't own the burned-out garage. But he used to rent out one like it, behind his house.

The resounding rebuff by the mayor and City Council last week of a proposal to make garage apartments safer, and in some cases legal, comes at a time when Los Angeles is on the brink of a major shift in housing policy.

The resounding rebuff by the mayor and City Council last week of a proposal to make bootleg garage apartments safer and in some cases, legal, comes at a time when Los Angeles is on the brink of a major shift in housing policy. The change is expected to be hastened by the departure of housing chief Gary Squier, an appointee of Mayor Tom Bradley, whose activist style riled a number of Mayor Richard Riordan's aides.

City housing officials will begin conducting background checks for participants in a federally funded rent assistance program after the City Council's adoption last month of an administrative plan for the program. Housing division administrator Steve Wagner said that if a background check by police turns up criminal or drug-related activity in the last five years, an applicant would not be eligible for assistance under the HUD-funded program, known as Section 8.

Pledging to provide safe, adequate housing for all of Los Angeles' renters, Mayor Richard Riordan on Monday signed a law that gives property owners just 48 hours to fix dangerous conditions before the city orders the work done and sends landlords the bill. "Slumlords take notice: You can pay now, or you can pay later," Riordan said at a noon news conference. "Every Angeleno has a right to a decent quality of life. Every Angeleno has a right to decent housing. Slumlords must clean up their act."

The Los Angeles city attorney's office filed misdemeanor criminal charges Tuesday against the landlords of a dilapidated downtown building that has become a symbol of urban decay for reformers trying to beef up city code enforcement. Raul Avila and Miriam Escobar, both of Whittier, are charged with 28 counts of violating building and health codes at their property at 1979 Estrella Avenue near the Convention Center.

A group of politicians and leading bankers will hold a Lenders Summit today designed to protect and preserve aging housing in Los Angeles. "There are at least 150,000 dilapidated housing units in Los Angeles and this is a crucial step in arresting the deterioration that can lead to the blocks of abandoned buildings and 'ghost towns' that you see in South Bronx or North Philadelphia," said Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg, an organizer of the event.

Allen Course, 35, knows all about the gap in affordable housing. He and his two children fell right through it last year, ending up homeless and on the street. The lowest point came when they were waiting for the doors to open at a shelter in Santa Monica, a worn red bag holding everything they owned. "A man drove by and a couple of minutes later he came back with a loaf of white bread and a package of sliced turkey.

Sitting casually on a desk in the nondescript offices of the city's Housing Department, Mayor Richard Riordan on Tuesday signed into law the most important anti-slum reform in Los Angeles history: the creation of a unit intended to ferret out blighted apartments across the city. "Every human being in the city has the right to live in quality housing," Riordan told a group of 14 inspectors who will form the core of the new city program. "And you're in the front lines of doing that."