Whittier Seeks Task Force to Crack Down on Illegal Conversions to Apartments

The City Council is attempting to crack down on the illegal conversion of garages, guest houses and homes to apartments.

On Tuesday the council asked for a task force of city officials, realtors, business owners and homeowners to prepare an inspection program for enforcement of building codes on a regular basis, according to City Manager Tom Mauk.

In recent years, property owners have been making their garages into living quarters, putting a burden on parking, schools, water, sewers and other city resources. Property owners have also bootlegged kitchen facilities to transform guest houses to permanent dwellings and have installed “zipper walls” to divide homes into several units.

The changes violate the building and zoning laws and health and safety standards. “They are dangerous,” Councilman Bob Henderson said Tuesday.

Poor families and elderly people live in some units. Other tenants include some immigrant families who are crowded into single rooms. Slipshod electrical wiring and improperly installed gas stoves may have gone undetected because the units have never been inspected by code enforcement officers. “The tenants will be the victims if the places burn down,” Robert Froehlich, senior code enforcement officer, said during an interview.

Many of the conversions lack windows or plumbing. Froehlich said residents have complained that they see tenants in the illegal dwellings urinating in back yards. “Who wants to live next to that?” he said.

Some of the conversions were done by families who wanted to make a place for aging parents, or by young families unaware that their plan to earn extra money to meet mortgage payments was illegal, officials said.

But many of the units are owned by people who want to make more money squeezing in more tenants, Councilwoman Helen McKenna-Rahder said Tuesday. “What bugs me is that the rest of the neighborhood suffers . . . with that many people crammed into a small space. It’s greedy, is what it is,” she said.

City officials estimated that there are a few hundred illegal conversions in Whittier. The city’s three code enforcement officers are unable to keep track of the total number or condition of them. “Part of the problem is not knowing where they exist,” McKenna-Rahder said. “It’s difficult to get a handle on this problem.”

Nearby cities have been wrestling with illegal conversions for a decade. Santa Fe Springs has an inspection program similar to the one Whittier hopes to create. In Bell Gardens, where there are hundreds of conversions, some landlords are hauled into court.

But in Whittier, an older and comparatively affluent community, little attention was paid to what seemed to be merely a regional trend until after the October, 1987, earthquake.

Then, McKenna-Rahder said, the pace of such conversions was speeded up. Many of them escaped the notice of city officials, Henderson said after the meeting, because enforcement officers have been overwhelmed by work that resulted from all the rebuilding.

This week, members of the Whittier Conservancy sent council members a list of 14 alleged violations of building codes, including illegal conversions. “This has been an ongoing problem that accelerated since the earthquake,” said John Smith, president of the Whittier Conservancy, after Tuesday’s meeting. “But code enforcement has been given short shrift.”

City officials concede that enforcement needs to be stepped up, but they said part of the problem is the economy.

Elvin Porter, planning director, said many homeowners are so pressed to meet their mortgage payments that they are forced to rent illegal units. And the housing market is so tight, Porter said, that tenants are forced to live in them.

“The program is needed, but the timing is very poor. People are losing their jobs and we can’t just turn out people who are living in illegal units . . out into the streets,” Mayor Thomas K. Sawyer said.