Posted Thursday, Oct. 11, 2007; 1:13 a.m.
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Condo conversions displace L.A. renters
As developers convert apartment complexes into condominium projects, many renters are forced out and have trouble finding another place to live.
By Laura Keller
L.A. Pilot
May 4, 2007
LOS ANGELES COUNTY – She looks confident in her eye-popping teal blue suit, the color daring anyone to gaze elsewhere. Her golden bracelets and matching earrings, hint at her somewhat gaudy tendencies and noisily compliment her commanding appearance.
But even the flashing pink nail polish can’t draw attention away from 48-year-old Lucia Bequera’s browned, gnarled nails.
Since Bequera was notified just before Christmas that the apartment complex at 637 Atlantic Ave. where she has lived for six years will be converted to condominiums, there has been a recurrence in the epileptic seizures from which she suffers. One episode left her convulsing in the middle of the street.
The frustrated, 20-year Long Beach resident has tried to contact the corporation that owns the apartment complex. Bequera has researched the company and found records of the company’s taxes and other documents, but without the contact information of an employee, she said legal aides have advised her not to send it a letter in which she explains why she doesn’t want to move from the place where she has lived for six years.
She doesn’t say she wants to stay put because she has attachments to the building – she hasn’t any: Bequera’s reported cockroach and mold infestations to the Health Department more than once. And she makes no mention of missing the 18 people she says had lived in a three-bedroom apartment two floors above her.
What she’s pensive about leaving is her apartment’s optimal location. This apartment is close to the hospital, where she has regular appointments, often more than twice a week.
Bequera is one of many in Los Angeles County, where condominium conversions – projects where the land owner refurbishes or demolishes existing apartment units – are common because of the limited amount of undeveloped land.
The conversions have become a buzz topic for council chambers across the county: housing activists are decrying the rates with which tenants were displaced from their apartments last year and developers contend condo projects are viable alternatives to expensive home prices. With condo conversion projects slated for all over the county, most city councils have had to breach the issue.
Volume speaks in the county’s two largest cities – Los Angeles and Long Beach – where legislation has resulted from residents’ and developers’ many complaints. More complicated than pitting blight against gentrification, the two cities have formed very different plans, both seeking to balance housing needs and private property owners’ rights.
Attempting to equalize these opposing forces, the plans have largely been comprised of awarding relocation fees to renters who have been supplanted from their apartments because of pending conversions. The benefit fees are meant to ensure ex-tenants with little savings aren’t left without a place to live.
But even in the face of rising apartment rental rates, Long Beach hasn’t increased its payment to relocated tenants for years. The city maintains a rate of $3,796 per unit, a figure adjusted for annual inflation, said Dale Hutchinson, who works in Long Beach’s Department of Community Development office to track developers’ condominium conversion applications. Only tenants like Bequera, who make 80 percent or less of the area’s median income level – $41,450 for one person or $59,200 for a family of four – can qualify.
Copyright 2007, The L.A. Pilot
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