Life & Times - Transcript

About Us \| Contact Us

Life & Times Transcript

05/16/06

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

Renters are getting booted out to make way for these. What will the wave of condo conversions do to the rental market?

Larry Gross>> The face of Los Angeles will never be the same unless they stop this outrageous activity by developers who really -- it's all about greed and profits over the needs of the people who live in this city.

Val Zavala>> And then, she fell in love with this fixer-upper, but will it take more than she thought to restore this bit of history?

These stories and more on tonight's Life and Times.

Announcer>> Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val Zavala>> If you think it's already hard enough finding an affordable apartment in southern California, well, get ready for even tighter rental markets and hope you don't get evicted between now and then. Why is that? Sam Louie explains.

[Film Clip]

Sam Louie>> It's a common sight in the southland, construction workers busy building new homes, but the flurry of activity isn't to build your typical house. Instead, these are future condominiums built on what was once an existing apartment complex. In the past five years, apartment landlords have evicted tenants from more than eleven thousand units so they can convert the apartments to condos.

Herb Malina>> "Hello, my name is Herb Malina. I'm calling regarding a possible one-bedroom apartment."

Sam Louie>> Herb Malina spends his days looking for a future apartment. The seventy-one year old retired senior citizen is among those forced to move out of his apartment in Valley Village. The new owners plan to turn the apartment building into a condo complex.

Herb Malina>> Anticipating this would be happening, so I really was shocked, but certainly disappointed. You know, I'm on fixed income and it's difficult to find an apartment within this price range.

Sam Louie>> Malina has lived in his apartment for thirteen years and had no intentions on moving until he was given this eviction notice. He lives off social security and uses most of the money for rent which is just over six hundred dollars a month.

Herb Malina>> It's difficult. I don't know what I'm going to do. Like I say, I'm on fixed income. I have my two sons and certainly I don't want to get involved in their lives, but certainly they're willing to do something to help, but I'd rather not because I feel a little independent and I'd like to stay that way.

Sam Louie>> Of the eleven thousand units lost to evictions, more than half came in 2005. Larry Gross is the Executive Director of the Coalition for Economic Survival. The nonprofit agency is an advocate for tenants' rights and affordable housing.

Larry Gross>> We have to look at the impact of the city and the impact of our people who live here. The fact is, we have an affordable housing crisis. This is only increasing that crisis to extreme proportions. So what you're going to have is a city of the rich, a city of the wealthy.

Sam Louie>> Started in the late 1970s, the agency led the charge to bring rent control to Los Angeles. Gross says that he's now seeing a huge displacement of the middle and lower class, similar to what happened to Los Angeles before rent control was established.

Larry Gross>> These folks, as I stated, they sure can't live in their neighborhoods that they've been living in because they can't afford the rents in there and we're seeing these tenants being forced out, moving out of the city, out of the county and, in a lot of cases, even out of the state because they cannot afford the price of a home in Los Angeles.

Sam Louie>> Supporters of condo conversions say this is just a reflection of the marketplace. With the average home in Los Angeles County topping five hundred thousand dollars in recent months, condos are considered an affordable option of home ownership.

Dan Faller>> It gives people an opportunity to live close to their jobs. That's certainly an advantage. They don't have to mow their lawn (laughter). They don't have to do all these things anymore.

Sam Louie>> Dan Faller is President of the Apartment Owners Association of California. He says that, in addition to giving home buyers more options, condo conversions also give property owners a better return on their investment.

Dan Faller>> He's in business and he's not being paid a fair market price for his product, so he's going to get rid of that product and offer another product just like you would do if you were in a store.

Sam Louie>> Faller says that, as home prices have shot up in southern California, the value of rents have not been able to keep pace with the rise in home prices. He blames it on rent control.

Dan Faller>> This is what's forcing some of the conversions. You have people paying five hundred dollars a month for an apartment that's worth a lot more and they're stuck with it. They can't get the value of their property.

Sam Louie>> But the typical condos going up are expensive. These in Studio City and North Hollywood start around six hundred fifty thousand dollars. Critics say that the high prices are out of reach for most Californians.

Larry Gross>> It's fine to build condos on vacant lots. It's fine to provide these opportunities where office buildings exist. But if you're destroying the affordable housing stock, then what are you really gaining for this city? In a sense, you end up with a net loss because the people who are being displaced are not the ones who are getting these condos because those condos are priced at prices far beyond the reach of most Los Angeles renters.

Sam Louie>> Because of this housing crisis, Gross wants to see the city put a moratorium on condo conversions.

Larry Gross>> If the government doesn't do something about this, we're going to see the city of Los Angeles change significantly. The face of Los Angeles will never be the same unless they stop this outrageous activity by developers.

>> ". . . will be to see if we can find a balance that works for everyone."

Sam Louie>> To address this issue, City Council members are conducting several public hearings. Councilman Ed Reyes chairs the city's Planning and Land Use Committee.

Ed Reyes>> We're trying to figure out, okay, how do we deal with this notion of balance? What do we learn from other cities?

Sam Louie>> Some ideas he's looking into include long-term lease guarantees for low-income tenants and establishing a lottery system that awards only a set number of apartment units for conversions each year.

Ed Reyes>> You don't deny the right for conversions, but you do it in a methodical manner where you don't hurt folks who are essentially suffering a catastrophe type experience. It would be like a Katrina hitting them because the next thing you know, boom, they're displaced. Where do they go? So not to sound melodramatic, but a person on a fixed income, where do they go? They end up being homeless or they end up living in motels because they can no longer afford that apartment.

Sam Louie>> For tenants like Herb Malina, it may be too late. As he scrambles to find a place within his budget, he must now seriously consider living in less desirable places such as homes for seniors or government public housing.

Herb Malina>> Although I'm seventy-one years old, I don't feel seventy-one. You go to these building and there's a lot of old people in there. You know, I don't feel compatible with those people.

Sam Louie>> With over three thousand apartment units already approved for conversion this year, the hardships and disruptions will begin for countless more renters as this struggle for balance spreads even further throughout the city. I'm Sam Louie for Life and Times.

Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, plus transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org, scroll down the page and click on "Life and Times".

Val Zavala>> I'll bet you've never thought much about how something as simple as a sidewalk can make a big difference to a neighborhood. Well, we met one man who's given a lot of thought to not just building houses, but building communities. He's a Presbyterian pastor named Eric Jacobsen and Toni Guinyard talked with him about what really makes a neighborhood appealing.

Eric Jacobsen>> I think what we need to think about is the role of neighborhoods in encouraging the kind of interaction that's healthy for us in this society. We have tended to think in two isolated ways. You think about a home, for instance, and oftentimes we think about how much square footage can I afford with very little thought to how far does this put me from all the things that I need to do in my life rather than just think about what kind of neighborhood do I want to live in and what kind of interaction I want to have there.

I think, you know, neighborhoods, when they're set up right, when they're mixed in income, that's oftentimes forgotten about. You know, we think about mixed use these days and that means, for a lot of people, retail on the ground floor and apartments or condos above and they're all luxury condos. But what I'm talking about is mixed in income. You've got folks that are school teachers or janitors living there and you've got CEOs living on the same block.

That might sound utopian, but that happens in traditional neighborhoods all across the country, so it's not unrealizable. You've got folks living on the same block at very different income brackets, racially mixed and then, the important thing, you've got informal community gathering places. Coffee shops are extremely important for that purpose.

Toni Guinyard>> But we are guilty -- just the average John Q. Public -- we're guilty of separating and segregating ourselves anywhere, are we not?

Eric Jacobsen>> To some extent, but I do think that it's been encouraged by the way we've placed ourselves. We place our homes far away from each other, our homes away from retail, our homes away from our work. So, yes, there is a somewhat natural human instinct to separate, but people do congregate when you have really attractive places to do so. Old Town Pasadena, for instance, people go there because people are there. So there is an instinct that we have for bumping into other people and I think we can encourage that kind of thing instead of discouraging it.

Because of zoning laws, for instance, and the patterns of development, we've made it the cheapest option to buy a home in a subdivision where you're only surrounded by other homes where there is no other coffee shop you could walk to. That's kind of the standard thing that you can buy right now. But more and more, folks are moving into towns when they can. When they can afford it, they're moving into traditional neighborhoods. I do think the tide is shifting. People do want community despite the fact that they oftentimes make micro decisions it seems to push in the other direction.

Sidewalks are extremely important and understood in terms of how they help integrate a community. Jane Jacobs, in her book, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities", gave three uses of sidewalks in city streets. Sidewalks are there for assimilating children. Children play on the sidewalks and they meet older people and they learn the roles of our society. Sidewalks are a place where we have personal contact with one another, and this is my favorite one. Sidewalks are there for personal safety.

She says, in most neighborhoods, in most urban areas in fact, it's not the police that keeps you safe, but it's the residents. If you've got what she calls "eyes on the street" and you've got active things happening on the sidewalk and you've got apartments that come right up to the sidewalk and people are leaning out their windows and watching what's going on, that's what's keeping your neighborhood safe. It's not the police.

What makes this a community-enhancing kind of sidewalk is the fact that this house is pulled up close enough to the sidewalk so that we could have a conversation with the person on the front porch there. We see a front door there. It's not a very prominent front door, but it's clearly there. In a suburban area, a house will be pulled further back and you'll see mostly two or three garage doors instead of any kind of front that you could interact with.

Toni Guinyard>> They don't want to talk to you.

Eric Jacobsen>> They don't want to talk to you, or at least they've purchased a house that doesn't want to let them talk to you. They may want to talk to you, but there's no place for them to do it. The fact that we've got a parking strip here and a row of cars parked here makes us feel safe from ongoing traffic here. The street's skinny here, so the cars have to slow down to make their way by each other. Slower cars makes us feel more comfortable crossing the street, makes us feel more comfortable just interacting as pedestrians in this area. This sidewalk seems simple, but it's all designed when community was important.

This building coming up like this creates a sense of enclosure. A good street and a sidewalk should feel like a hallway in a house, and a good open space feels like a room. It invites you to walk along and to sit down and enjoy yourself. In the suburbs, they don't think about the space in between. It's just this big sort of amorphous thing. All you see are garage doors and all you see are curvy roads and you're not invited to walk and to sit. Any traditional neighborhood, you'll feel that this is pleasant. When you walk in Old Town Pasadena, you just walk and walk and you don't even notice the time passing.

Toni Guinyard>> So this is a good sidewalk?

Eric Jacobsen>> This is a good sidewalk. I like it.

Toni Guinyard>> (Laughter) Okay.

Eric Jacobsen>> I think the new urbanist movement does its own community, but it's helped us understand that we've been pursuing anti-community development since about World War II. We've been orienting all of our new developments and pulling apart some of our old developments all around the community to the automobile, the idea being that the automobile would get us more efficiently from one point to another.

But what we forgot to realize was that there's a lot more things happening when we went from one place to another besides just getting there. That is talking to one another, interacting, you know, getting to know our neighborhoods and getting to know our neighbors. So new urbanists have helped us to realize the important role that neighborhoods play in developing a community.

As a convenience, I think the automobile is great. The problem is, we started developing around the automobile, so it no longer became a convenience, but a necessity. The only way you could get to work is by way of car. The only way you can get an aspirin is by way of a car. The only way you can get to a coffee shop is by way of a car.

You didn't have a choice anymore and, all of a sudden, you weren't deciding between when do I want convenience? When am I going to trade off some potential for interacting with my neighbors for the convenience of getting there quickly? You only had one choice and that's when the problems started happening.

What people aren't talking about in the sprawl issue is why people want to get so far away from everybody else, right? I mean, yeah, of course, we want space, we want a bigger house, all those kinds of things. But why do we feel this need to isolate ourselves from everybody else? I think the deep reason there is that we've forgotten how to live in communities.

Toni Guinyard>> What would you like all of us to take away after reading your book?

Eric Jacobsen>> The reason we build, the reason we do anything on this earth, is to support human communities. You know, life is about relationships and somehow, for the past fifty years, we've got it turned around where we've built not for the convenience of people, not for the enhancement of communities, but for the convenience of the automobile, and I think that's been a mistake. But if we can get back to building human communities, it's going to do a lot of good for us.

Val Zavala>> Pastor Eric Jacobsen is the author of a new book, "Sidewalks in the Kingdom: New Urbanism and the Christian Faith".

Announcer>> To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address:

Life and Times
4401 Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles, California 90027

You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org.

Val Zavala>> We southern Californians are famous for spending thousands of dollars to fix up our homes, so we found one woman who fell in love with a different kind of fixer-upper. Anne McDermott has the story.

Anne McDermott>> The Aztec Hotel is eighty-one years old now and, while it still retains its decidedly wacky charm, it sure could use a facelift. The new owner of the Aztec, Kathie Reece-McNeill, is all over that because she knows there was a time when Hollywood called it home.

Kathie Reece-McNeill>> It was built and opened up September 6, 1925 and it was the place to go.

Anne McDermott>> The place on the highway, Route 66. Oh, sure, there were plenty of other hot spots on this fabled freeway, but for sheer elegance, nothing compared to Monrovia, California's Aztec Hotel.

Kathie Reece-McNeill>> People from Hollywood would go from Hollywood out to Palm Springs and they'd stay here and even come out for a little weekend thing, so it was a place to go for a lot of people.

Anne McDermott>> A lot of famous people, like Marilyn Monroe, Bing Crosby, Humphrey Bogart, western star Tom Mix, and a real-life western legend named Wyatt Earp. Yes, the gunfighter of OK Corral fame came here too. What did they find at the Aztec? Well, it wasn't called the Aztec Hotel for nothing.

Architect and designer, Robert Stacy-Judd, put Aztec symbols and signage just about everywhere except, oddly enough, in any of the forty-four guest rooms. But the public areas were overwhelming for a while anyway. The first blow was the Great Depression and then the United States Highway System which rendered Route 66 largely irrelevant and the hotel too.

Kathie Reece-McNeill>> In fact, it went into bankruptcy. People said that it was too grand.

Anne McDermott>> The Aztec was out or, in the parlance of the times, it was for the birds. And then a little more than five years ago, Kathie appeared on the scene and fell in love with the Aztec, so she plunked down all of $1.4 million dollars. You know, you can buy a nice middle-class home in the San Fernando Valley for that. But she bought herself an old hotel. Well, a dump really, which was renting rooms to those brave enough to stay there. In other words, the hotel had problems like peeling plaster, crumbling cornices and rooms full of transients.

Kathie Reece-McNeill>> If down on their luck was a good way of terming it, they were probably very, very, very much down on their luck.

Anne McDermott>> So Kathie rolled up her sleeves. Work began slowly. Murals that had been painted over were copied by using old photographs dug out of libraries, and she started adding entertainment.

[Film Clip]

Anne McDermott>> This singer, by the way, is also the live-in art restorer, the man who painted the beautiful murals. So Kathie has some help and now she's getting more. She recently landed a fifty thousand dollar grant from the National Parks Service to help with repairs, a grant she has matched with her own money. But, you know, one hundred grand is truly a drop in the bucket.

Kathie figures it will take ten years to restore this place at a cost of two million, maybe more. Yeah, she dreams big. She's also one determined lady. Do you think someday in the future we'll see, say, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie staying here?

Kathie Reece-McNeill>> I'm looking forward to that. I'm convinced of that.

Anne McDermott>> And Brad and Angie might want to snag a room now while prices are low. These days, rooms go for about fifty-nine dollars a night, but if Kathie has her way, prices will rise once the Aztec Hotel regains its status as one heck of a hip hideaway. Anne McDermott for Life and Times.

Val Zavala>> So you thought you'd head down to Ensenada for a little weekend getaway? Well, why not hitch a ride on a yacht? More than four hundred of them took off recently from Newport to Ensenada in one of the biggest sailing events of the year. Orange County reporter, Roger Cooper, talked to Mike Whitehead, a boating journalist and Coast Guard captain, about the Fifty-Ninth Annual Lexus Newport to Ensenada Yacht Race.

Roger Cooper>> We're at a great annual event with Mike Whitehead. We're off Corona del Mar. Mike, what is this?

Mike Whitehead>> This is the Fifty-Ninth Annual Lexus Newport to Ensenada Race, the largest international yacht race in the world.

Roger Cooper>> What is the goal here?

Mike Whitehead>> Oh, there's a couple of goals. The first boats you're going to see leaving will be the bigger boats, the Maxi Fleets, and they're out to win. They want to get to the finish line down in Ensenada, Mexico. The classes in between, some may want to win, some may just round up their buddies and they want to go out and have a good time and sail to international ports that they usually don't get to go to in a controlled environment with other sailors and be safe.

Roger Cooper>> Is this taken seriously? Is this hard competition?

Mike Whitehead>> For the larger boats, it is. And some of the upper classes, the J Fleets, they take it very seriously. The cruising class are out to have a good time. Maybe they'll win, maybe they won't.

Roger Cooper>> What are we going to see when they start?

Mike Whitehead>> You're going to have chaos (laughter). It's supposed to be organized chaos.

Announcer>> "And the Maxi A class is heading off. These are vessels that are fifty feet or greater in length. You'll notice the taller mast vessels weaving their way through. Now as each class comes up to start, the other vessels are supposed to clear the way for them. However, that never happens. There's always someone floating in the way, especially a light wind day like this, which makes it very difficult."

Roger Cooper>> What's the history of this? How did it get started?

Mike Whitehead>> It got started years back when some buddies wanted to go to Ensenada and organize a race. The yacht clubs have picked up on it and now it's organized by NOSA, the Newport Ocean Sailing Association. It's put on by volunteers and they put this race together year after year.

Roger Cooper>> Now there's got to be a big huge prize for winning this.

Mike Whitehead>> You get a plaque (laughter), a trophy. I've been a trophy presenter before. It's a lot of fun. It's at the Bahia Hotel down in Ensenada, Mexico. They have everyone up on the stage. The winners walk up and we present them with their trophies, their awards. Some are cups, some are plaques. Everyone is excited. The yacht club members all cheer.

Roger Cooper>> Some pretty well-known people participate in this race?

Mike Whitehead>> Yes. This year we have Dennis Connors out on the race course. In prior years, we've had Roy Disney on "Pyewacket".

Roger Cooper>> Why do I remember Humphrey Bogart in this race?

Mike Whitehead>> Oh, years back when Newport was a little quieter town and not so well-known, some of the more famous actors would come down here. Of course, they all had boats and their stories go way back (laughter).

Roger Cooper>> What is the beauty of this?

Mike Whitehead>> Seeing over four hundred boats sailing on the ocean off beautiful Newport Coast. Newport is the largest recreational harbor in the world. We have over nine thousand boats in here. You'll notice that the boaters are a very friendly crowd and they're from all walks of life. They're not just the elite. They're everybody. They're you and me. Also, trailer boats come down to Newport and you'll see the ambience up here in the crowd of the people watching these magnificent vessels today.

Roger Cooper>> Admit it. You wish you were out there.

Mike Whitehead>> Absolutely. This is one of the first years I'm standing on hard ground (laughter) and not on the water either on the press boat or out in one of the race boats. I'm up here on the bluffs instead and I'm enjoying it. It's a great time up here.

Roger Cooper>> What is the appeal to someone who does this?

Mike Whitehead>> It's the adventure. You're sailing, as the crow flies, a hundred twenty-five nautical miles. Now a sailboat will actually go further, but you have to tack or maybe jib on the course down. You're going to an international port. You usually don't get to go to an international port by yourself. The international port is basically sixty miles south of San Diego. There's nowhere to stop between. So the adventure of it, the camaraderie of all your other sailors, and then the benefit at the end with the great parties down there.

Roger Cooper>> Mike Whitehead, Boathouse Radio Show is your home on the air, but this is your home when the race starts. Thank you so much.

Mike Whitehead>> My pleasure. Thank you.

Val Zavala>> I would have been there, but my yacht was in the shop. And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

Announcer>> Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Sponsored in part by:


Home \| Features \| Arts \| Health/Science \| OC Edition \| L&T Blog \| Archives \| About Us \| Contact Us \| Privacy Policy \| Terms of Use © 2007 COMMUNITY TELEVISION OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA