Panel Rejects Bid to Legalize Some Garage Dwellings

A Los Angeles City Council panel rejected a proposal Tuesday to legalize some of the city’s 50,000 to 100,000 bootleg garage dwellings, opting instead to crack down on landlords who rent out the illegally converted living spaces.

In response to eight deaths in three months from fires in converted garages, a joint council committee proposed making it a misdemeanor to rent out such accommodations. The penalty would be a $1,000 fine.

As part of a package of recommendations, the council panel also suggested forcing landlords to pay to relocate tenants from the illegal garages to legal apartments. It also proposed a $217,000 education program to teach tenants about the risks of living in garages.

But most significantly, the committee disregarded a controversial proposal by a task force of city officials to legalize converted garages that meet minimum safety regulations.

The legalization proposal was denounced by nearly a dozen homeowner groups--mostly from the San Fernando Valley--which argued that such an action would ruin the single-family atmosphere of many neighborhoods.

If the garages were legalized, said Adriana Noonan, a member of the Van Nuys Homeowners Assn., neighborhoods like hers would be plagued with traffic congestion, parking problems and diminished property values.

Most of the council members on the seven-member panel agreed with the homeowners and decided instead to take a hard-line approach to landlords who rent garages.

“Currently, nothing happens to the landlord when they get caught,” said Councilman Hal Bernson, who promised to introduce a motion on the council floor to make it a misdemeanor to rent illegally converted garages.

Bernson also said he will ask the council to support state legislation allowing prosecutors to file felony charges against landlords if a tenant living in such a garage is injured or killed in a fire.

As part of his recommendation, Bernson suggested a three-month amnesty period to give landlords and tenants time to either convert the garages into city-approved dwellings or find new housing for the tenants.

The testimony during the nearly three-hour hearing Tuesday demonstrated what a sticky problem occupied garages pose for city officials.

Council members conceded that if Building and Safety Department inspectors move too quickly to evict illegal garage dwellers, the city will not be able to provide shelter for them.

But council members also fear that if the city acts too slowly, it risks further deaths and injuries from fires.

“What is our purpose?” a frustrated Councilman Richard Alatorre asked the panel. “Is our purpose to create habitability or to kick people out?”

Hoping to get more answers, Mayor Richard Riordan and Councilman Richard Alarcon suggested in a letter that the city form a new task force of housing experts outside of City Hall to study the problem.

Alarcon and Riordan said the recommendations made by the existing task force--composed of city housing, planning and building and safety officials--left “many thorny questions unanswered.”

To address some of those, the two suggested a panel including representatives from banks, apartment owners associations and insurance agencies, among others.

But Bernson, who headed the council’s joint panel, shelved Riordan and Alarcon’s proposal, saying he wanted to concentrate on the recommendations already made.

The latest study of illegally converted garages was prompted by a March fire in such a Sun Valley residence that killed a woman and two of her grandchildren. Relatives said the three were sleeping in bedrooms with no windows and were unable to escape.

Shortly before that fire, five members of a South-Central Los Angeles family died in a garage blaze.

Among the package of recommendations supported by the panel was a proposal by Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas to have city staff conduct a thorough building survey to better determine the number of illegally converted garages in Los Angeles. The city has never researched the problem in depth and has for years relied on a Times study in 1987, which found that about 42,000 illegal garage units were housing nearly 200,000 residents.

City officials now believe that the number of illegal garage dwellings ranges from 50,000 to 100,000.

A housing official told the panel that when inspectors investigate complaints about illegally converted garages, they often find that the tenants pay enough rent to afford a small, legal apartment. But the officials said many tenants have never rented an apartment and don’t know how it is done.

The recommendations of the panel will return to the full council in the form of an ordinance sometime in the next month or so, officials said.