Tenants and Landlords Agree on Frustration Over Evictions

Esther Walton and Shi-Chin Tung burn in isolated middle-aged frustration. Were they to meet, they might appreciate the other’s position, but politically this is daydreaming. Their lives have been too warped by experience.

Walton, 63, lives alone in a $241-a-month, one-bedroom apartment with a water-stained ceiling in Venice, three blocks from the ocean. Her rent is remarkably low because she has lived there 10 years; only small annual increases have been permitted by Los Angeles’ rent control law. The Westside real estate binge has barely touched her. Another one-bedroom unit in the complex, recently decontrolled when a tenant left, goes for $695.

Legal Technique

The manager of Walton’s building recently attempted to evict her by saying he wanted to use her unit for a resident manager. The technique is legal, and no relocation benefits are required under the city’s rent control law. (Relocation assistance of $2,000 to $5,000 is required when a landlord is evicting to provide housing for a relative, to demolish the building or to perform more than $10,000 worth of work.)

However, tenant advocates routinely complain that unscrupulous landlords bring in friends as rent-free resident managers to replace long-term tenants. Then, after a few months, the resident manager leaves, and the landlord rents the apartment at a far higher rate. That is illegal. First, evictions to make room for resident-managers must be made in “good faith,” and second, the unit would not be decontrolled if the resident manager left and the landlord decided to rent it out. However, such maneuvering is largely beyond the ability of the city Rent Stabilization Division to monitor.

Before Walton’s eviction was filed in court, her landlord offered to pay her $5,000 to move. Most tenants, fearing the inevitable, accept such buyouts, but Walton declined. Rents were so high that the money would evaporate within a few months and she would be homeless, she feared.

She found a legal-aid attorney, and eventually the landlord dropped the eviction suit with some bitterness, complaining that Walton was “an obstinate old lady” with a “ ‘Grapes of Wrath’ mentality.”

But while Walton had won, the Angst would not leave.

“You become obsessional, depressed, angry and somewhat out of control,” she said. I would have these continuous dialogues in my head between him and me. It’s been terrible for me. I’m still emotionally hung up.”

Two months after that interview, her outlook has not changed.

“I look at most things as sour,” she says. “It wears on you. You just get the feeling you’re really being used, and I’m not the only person this is happening to. It was like a trick played on me.”

Shi-Chin Tung, a 65-year-old retired cook, feels a trick has been played on him, too.

Tung owns two small apartment buildings in the Pico-Fairfax area of West Los Angeles. He has put them both up for sale. He talks bitterly in broken English about moving back to his native China. He has lived in America for 20 years, but he has grown to feel angrily betrayed.

“I very close to Americans. I can’t (feel) close any more. (Too many) liars,” he says at his dining room table, his daughter sitting by to interpret when necessary.

It was always Tung’s dream to own property, first a home for his family, then these investment properties. But nowadays he says he cannot find reliable tenants for the $750-a-month units he rents, and he believes that rent control--which places numerous procedural burdens on evictions--makes it impossible for him to keep order.

In the eight-unit building where Tung lives, three units are vacant. Two good tenants moved out because a third unit--now empty thanks to a messy eviction--was turned into an obnoxious keg of noise by a pair of young men who stopped paying rent after their parents’ support quit, according to Tung.

“So many people get away with lying because of the law . . . too many loopholes,” he says. In court, the young men signed a judgment promising to pay $3,181 in back rent. Tung says he has not seen a cent.

Why? he asks. Why do nine-tenths of the people who apply to rent his units have lousy credit records or past evictions? Why does he lose good tenants, like the one at his other building in Pasadena who left because the next-door neighbor fired a shotgun through her apartment? “You are a very good landlord and I hope you have better luck finding good tenants,” she wrote. It was a small condolence.

“I like Americans,” Tung says, pulling out a scrapbook with photographs of the many American families who employed him. “But I don’t want to stay anymore. Owner call police, no can do nothing. Owner call court, no can do nothing. I don’t like to (go to) jail. I don’t like kill people. But I do ! I so mad !”

It sounded like anguish of an old man. But Tung’s children are taking no chances. They have removed their father’s gun from his apartment.