The Hanging Rat

by Gary Phillips

Sitting at my computer tapping away last Wednesday, I heard Los Angeles City Council President Eric Garcetti come on the radio to happily announce the demolition of a notorious house on Drew Street in his councilmanic area. On his blog, Garcetti stated in part, “Today, we took yet another step toward making this neighborhood a cleaner, safer place for families.”

As a crime and mystery writer, I was fascinated with what Sam Quinones related in his L.A. Times piece that Thursday in the soon-to-be-departed California section. He wrote that after past raids on the abode, “... according to court documents, officers found guns and drugs as well as surveillance cameras, laser trip wires and a shrine to Jesus Malverde ...” Apparently the patron saint of drug traffickers, according to Quinones. That’s the kind of stuff you’d see on an episode of The Shield, particularly since the Drew Street neighborhood of Glassell Park, and in and around Echo Park, was where the show did a lot of shooting its practicals—real places. Adding to the lore, the abode was referred to as the Satellite House due to a large satellite dish that once commanded the driveway. From where, it seems, Maria Leon and her family, members of the Avenues gang, ran their criminal operations.

TV show? This is the stuff of miniseries.

But there’s a neverending storyline also playing out in L.A. over affordable housing. I wasn’t at the press conference when the bulldozer started tearing down Leon’s pad, but was at the press conference last Tuesday in front of a building owned by absentee landlord Frank McHugh at 1624 Westmoreland, not too far south of Venice Boulevard in Koreatown. Now, before Mr. McHugh’s lawyers sharpen their pens, I’m not alleging their client has knowledge of or is condoning any sort of illegal activity like what went on in the Drew Street house in one of his apartment buildings.

Rather Frank McHugh, according to research done by Strategic Actions for a Just Economy (and, full disclosure, my wife Gilda Haas is the executive director of this organization) owns over 170 residential buildings with an estimated 6,500 tenants. Add to that buildings where he is the mortgager, that’s 1,500 more tenants in his units. He has 50 buildings in Councilman Ed Reyes’ 1st District (where the place on Westmoreland is), 70 in Councilwoman Jan Perry’s 9th District, 24 in Bernard Parks’ 8th District, and 19 in the 13th, Eric Garcetti’s district.

The Westmoreland address has also been in the news since part of it fell down on Sunday night this past January 18, slightly injuring four people. The City’s Building and Safety Department promptly came out and condemned the now leaning large converted house, erecting a cyclone fence around it, as the building was “red tagged”—evacuated and unfit for occupancy. McHugh will be given a certain time limit to either make the repairs to shore up the structure for habitability or demolish the place. The irony is this residential building on Westmoreland passed a housing code inspection several months ago in May 2008. Actually, the Westmoreland address was sited for 80 infractions; McHugh did minor fix-ups, and then he passed.

Huh. Really?

One of the tenants, Maria Carmen Olvera, related at the press conference that the building was in such bad shape that you could look into other people’s apartments what with holes in the walls. She always had to make sure she had any food left out in plastic or covered due to the cockroaches, and flooding from the shoddy plumbing was not uncommon. Yet the city inspectors passed these conditions has habitable. I guess if you considered living in a drafty cave a luxury, then yeah, Westmoreland was the Taj Mahal in that kind of bizarre world view.

To underscore Ms. Olvera’s point, there was a dead ossifying rat hanging under the south eave of behind her.

What Kool-Aid are they drinking in the city’s housing office?

Betsy Handler, Director of Legal Services for the Inner City Law, an agency that already has a case pending against McHugh over not making code-cited repairs at his other properties, talked about touching a wall in one of these buildings. “My hand sunk in,” she said. This due to severe water damage. That McHugh building hasn’t been condemned either.

Councilman Reyes called the Westmoreland place the miracle building—a miracle that no one got killed. He called for more high tech equipment for housing inspectors to use, x-ray devices as an example, to better check for structural damages. But damn, various tenants had repeatedly made calls to this or that agency, lodging their complaints about neglected or insufficient repairs to no avail. Where were the cameras and press and councilman then? Yet when an inspection is done, seemingly a walk-through at best, the result is a rubber stamp approval in the end.

So at a time when the City of Los Angeles is facing a $200 million budget deficit, knocking down drug houses, talking about voluntary furloughs and hiring freezes, how to you do better, let alone uniform, code enforcement. Reyes stated department heads need to communicate better, but if your personnel are just looking and not really examining the structure as they should—though how anybody but Stevie Wonder misses holes in walls is interesting—then do you purge your staff of goldbrickers and shirkers? But if you don’t have any money, how do your hire competent replacements?

I don’t know the answer. I do know the tenants displaced at Westmoreland are in hotels or with relatives right now. Due to an agreement worked out with the tenants, McHugh is paying their hotel tab till the end of this month. Then where do those low-income folks go? Another McHugh building?

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