Recommendation on Garage Dwellings Shows No Vision

At least no one will accuse the Los Angeles City Council of being overly courageous or visionary. A council panel last week rejected a potentially unpopular proposal to find ways of making safer and legalizing some of the city’s 50,000 to 100,000 garage apartments. Instead, the council committee took the easy way out: It endorsed a plan to crack down on the landlords who rent garage apartments, making it a misdemeanor and slapping them with fines as high as $1,000. If approved by the full council, the plan would all but guarantee that the shadow market in unsafe dwellings continues.

The suggestion that the council allow some well-built and safe garage apartments grew out of a report commissioned in the wake of deadly fires that claimed the lives of eight people living in illegal units. In the most recent fire, two Sun Valley girls and their grandmother died because flames blocked the single way out of their apartment. No one knows for certain how many people live in illegal dwellings--which range from pleasant, airy rooms to dark hovels with poor ventilation and no plumbing--but some estimates are as high as 40,000 families citywide.

Council members at last week’s meeting correctly pointed out that living in a garage apartment is far from ideal. Yet even as they preached compassion, the committee members turned their backs on thousands of residents for whom the only choice is between a garage apartment and the streets. The line for public housing is years long, and the supply of affordable apartments is not nearly as plentiful as the council would like to believe.

The issue before the committee was safety: Is there a way to make illegal units safe and livable until better accommodations can be found? The answer, clearly, is yes. But rather than looking at creative ways to make units safer, to regulate them and to give them some sort of provisional status until better housing can be found, the committee decided to further punish and endanger residents by giving owners no incentive to make repairs.

Last week’s action--or inaction, rather--will mean almost nothing to the weakest, poorest residents of Los Angeles. On paper, the council can point to a plan that purports to address the problem. At the same time, it can mollify leaders of homeowners associations protecting the supposed sanctity of the city’s single-family residential zoning. In the end, though, not much changes. That appears to be the way the council likes it.