Plumbing the Fetid Depths of a City Remodel Job

When your kitchen sink fills up with waste from the toilet, you usually call a plumber or the landlord.

But if you’re living in public housing, in one of the poorest parts of Los Angeles and your landlord is the city, you call The Times.

At least that’s what several residents of Jordan Downs, a south Los Angeles project, did when they were dissatisfied with the city housing authority’s response to their complaints about sewage from the toilets backing up into their kitchen sinks.

*

A few days after the call I drove to Jordan Downs and met with Dorothy Toliver, president of the residents association, and a few others who live there. The project, housing more than 3,500 people in about 700 units, is located on 101st Street, east of the Harbor Freeway.

Toliver has been complaining that contractors modernizing the project, built some 45 years ago, did not replace the pipes inside the units. As a result, the old pipes are clogging up in some of the units.

I’m not the first person to receive her message. She’s sent letters to Mayor Richard Riordan, housing authority director Don Smith and, last month, to Andrew Cuomo, secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which is financing the modernization at Jordan Downs and other city housing projects. “For the life of me,” she told Cuomo last month, “I cannot understand how $70,000 per unit can be spent for beautifying our units, and truly they are beautiful, and yet neglect to replace the complete plumbing system.”

“In August, human waste started coming up in the sink,” Ada Milford told me. She said that workers for the contractor doing the remodeling told her the old pipes were the problem.

In a nearby unit, Terri King said she had encountered the same trouble last September. “It happened twice,” she said. Her neighbor, Wanda Pounds, said when she flushed the toilet on Veterans Day, “it backed up into the kitchen sink and went on the floor.” She called in an emergency repair request but because of the holiday, the plumbers took two days to do the job.

You’d think that if you are modernizing a place, you’d check to see if the pipes needed replacing.

It turned out that this simple idea had occurred to a housing authority inspector as far back as 1989.

Inspecting Jordan Downs before the modernization, the inspector reported: “The existing plumbing (gas and water) within the entire units is over 30 years old and corrosion and chemical deposits are causing an ongoing maintenance problem. Maintenance repairs are unable to adequately keep the hazards of gas leaks and water damage in check.”

The inspector’s solution: “Replace the entire units’ plumbing, including all pipe fittings and valves for the water and gas supply systems. Gas piping to be galvanized iron. Water piping to be copper. Hot water lines to be insulated.” He estimated the additional cost at $2,200 a unit for a total of $1.54 million.

Apparently that was too steep for the housing authority, so apartments are being modernized with the old pipes in place.

It’s true that repair crews come out when there are complaints. But they seem to be using a plumber’s snake to solve a problem that requires major reconstruction.

After my visit, I called Donald J. Smith, the housing authority’s executive director.

It’s true, he said, that replacement of the old pipes was not included in the bids. “I’m trying to find out why,” he said. Meanwhile, “I am focusing on solving the problem.”

“This year, we have had 900 stoppages in Jordan Downs, which is not unusual--grease in the lines, objects in the lines, broken sewage lines,” he said. “This is a little less than is historically true at Jordan Downs.”

He commissioned a survey in which a tiny video camera went cruising through the waste lines in 40 units and intends to present his recommendations of whether to repair or replace the lines Dec. 23.

*

After I heard his reassurances, I first thought there’s no story here.

City’s on the job. City’s going to fix it.

Then I remembered that this particular beef had been going on since 1989, long before Smith took over the agency, and, if Los Angeles city government follows its normal course, it may continue for years after he has gone. “Closure” is not a word in the municipal vocabulary.

But there’s nothing like the threat of bad publicity to kick-start bureaucrats.

The Jordan Downs residents, tenants to the city, know this better than anyone.

That’s why they called The Times. I’m glad we could be of service.