Chapter Three: Westside Rentals

One of the mysteries that befuddled me about this case was how a single-family house became three apartments with six bedrooms, four bathrooms, three kitchens and a studio apartment. In 2,047 square feet. With a combined rental asking price of $5,500.

No, it's not exactly solving the affordable housing problem but it does prove people can live in incredibly small spaces like ants.

My investigation took me to Westside Rentals, the company with the sign in front of the illegal conversion that's threatening the well-being of Tract 17111, my neighborhood.

If you believe the L.A. Times, Westside Rentals provides a great service to the public and is a very successful business allowing landlords to put up listings free and charging prospective tenants $60 to see them. In a story on May 2 under the headline "How I Made It," the Times informed us that owner Mark Verge's Santa Monica-based company employs "80 people and lists about 20,000 apartments, houses and rooms for rent."

No mention is made that at least three of those listings at the time were for an illegal conversion that had been cited by the Department of Building and Safety for construction without a permit

Verge said his first big purchase when he got rich with his westsiderentals.com website was a $50,000 race horse named "Hide from the Bride" and he dreams of doing a reality TV show called "Rental Man" His motivation for getting into the rental listing business was pretty idealistic: "The business had a really bad name to it."

Since he is an idealist who advises "Meet everyone and treat them all the same" I figured I'd give him a call and see if he could take me through how the owners of this house found two tenants already and are looking for a third for the big unit, three bedrooms, two baths, $2,095 a month -- a $400 drop in the original asking price.

I asked to talk to Verge , explaining I was a journalist, and was immediately put through to Kevin Miller, head of operations, who was cordial and open about the fact the company is merely a go-between. Landlords put up their listings, people search the listings, contact the landlord and decide whether to rent the house or apartment.

"It's all their own business," he said. "We don't get involved at all."

I noted the contract people agree to when signing up is extremely long and detailed and frees Westside of all responsibility. So what happens when there are complaints, I asked.

"We don't get involved in that. It's all 'he said,' 'she said.' You got to take it with a grain of salt. We're not the police."

I'm a newspaperman, or was for 44 years, and it's painful to see what's happening.

My paper gets thinner and thinner and the staff gets smaller and smaller to the point people who work at the Daily News and people who read it wonder if it can survive. It's happening all over the country as advertising revenue dries up and it happened today, again, at the L.A. Times.

The Times' announced today that it will cut the space in the paper by 15 percent and lay off 150  editors and reporters, about 17 percent of its staff. It will bring the total editorial staff to about 700, compared to the peak of 1,200 a few years back.

For those who lose their jobs -- and I had to look a lot of them in the eye when I told them their jobs at the Daily News were being eliminated -- it's a personal catastrophe. There's not a whole lot of jobs that use the same skill sets. There's not a whole lot of jobs that are as much fun as newspapering.

Many papers will not survive the current problems or become little more than small, very local news operations online and in print.

But the Times is in a class by itself. A lot of its resources are tied up in news gathering in faraway places around the world, around the nation, that are expensive operations and of lower value to most readers. Despite its pretentions, The Times after all is not the New York Times or Wall Street Journal or Washington Post for that matter.

You can bet a lot of the cuts will come from out of town news operations and for the first time in nearly 50 years the Times will have to become a Los Angeles newspaper.  I have said many times, not without some irony, that the Times is criminal in its neglect of L.A., its lack of vision for Southern California, and that it would be a better paper with 600 reporters and editors than it was with 1,200.

Few in the business agree with me and the whining and caterwauling you'll hear over these cuts will drown out all contrarian views.

Twenty years ago, I produced a story at the Daily News headlined "City of Lmits" that spelled out how a century of growth at any price must come to an end -- the nation's dirtiest air, worst traffic congestion, sprawl over five counties, soaring poverty, loss of good-paying jobs, gang-infested neighborhoods -- imperiled the Southern California dream.

I still think that story by reporter Karen West was the truest and most important story I was ever involved in.

Not much has changed in the last two decades. In fact, the problems have gotten worse. And the city, county and state have done little or nothing to develop strategies to deal with these issues.

Growth at any price is still at the heart of public policy despite the lip service occasionally paid to the environmental and quality of life issues.

And to me that's a crime. It's why I so passionately believe that only a grassroots movement, a people's revolution, can turn things around. It's why I'm hoping we'll get a large crowd to City Hall on July 14 to launch a concerned citizens coalition that can snowball into a region-wide movement that will seize control of the political system and turn things around.

I know a lot of people believe that's a pipedream. So be it. A lot of people also believe it's the only strategy that will create a balance of interests and power between labor, business and the communities.

At the heart of the problem is the belief that we always have to have more and newer instead of enough and better.

I caught up with the neighbor lady Monday. It was hot, like only the Valley can be, when I walked to the corner and took a look at the house illegally converted into apartments.

There was a guy who didn't look all that healthy trying to get his car started in the driveway and sign in front: For Rent, Westside Rentals. I wrote down the phone number.

As I talked with my neighbor I looked around her house. It was filled with memories and memorabilia of the 50 years she and husband had lived there. A good life, the house they raised their children in and sometimes look after their grandchildren in now. It was home, she said, and I knew what she meant.

I hadn't had a home, a real home, since I was 18 until I moved into Tract 17111 as it's identified in government documents. For my wife and I and our son, our little bungalow was home, too, a happy home. It's what the Valley is all about, middle-class tracts like ours where neighbors know each other and look after each other, where people from all over the world, people of every race and religion live quietly and unpretentiously, in harmony.

And someone was trying to destroy that, infecting a deadly virus, a broken window, into our little piece of paradise. It's a crime these things are happening.

That's certainly how my neighbor feels about this. She was calm but clear as she described her frustration over months to get this attack on our way of life stopped by the city, by Councilman Dennis Zine's office, by somebody. But to the city it was nothing but a minor annoyance, just a routine "unapproved construction" problem -- no an attack on the quality of our lives, our neighborhood.

She and some other neighbors got the runaround from Zine's office and the bureaucrats for weeks as they tried to figure out how to get somebody to do something.

Finally, they drew up a petition that says in part:: "This community and others like it will not exist if investor-buyers succeed in violating zoning laws to create multiple family dwellings in single family dweIling zones and utilize schemes such as deliberate re-sales to associates, friends, and/or family, in order to delay government action."

I was hooked. Foul play was alleged. I loved the idea of playing a journalistic Columbo right in my own backyard but as we talked I learned my neighbor already had the part of Mrs. Columbo down pat.

My wife was out on her early morning jaunt through the neighborhood with Bruno the beast this morning and couldn't help noticing -- news maven as she is -- the number of drivers chatting away with cell phones at their ear.

It is after all the first day of the rest of our lives with our hands free, even though our minds may be far away in conversation.

And then she saw the motorcycle cops, red lights flashing, with victims pulled over to the side of the road.

Being the kind of person she is -- a cell phone hater -- she couldn't help commenting to one of the cops about the latest add-on to his role as server and protector of society.

"Just trying to save lives," he told her, with a friendly smile.

So watch yourself out there, friends, it's dangerous. The phone police are on the job -- and don't get hit by a stray bullet from some street thug. 

Chapter One

I'd suspected something was amiss for a while but until I heard the knock on the door I looked the other way like everybody else.

It was Saturday and there was a neighbor lady standing there. She held a piece of paper in her hand.

"Do you know what's happened?"

Bruno was going crazy, yowling and lunging at the screen door with the full force of that giant head of his, 60 pounds of pit bull/shar-pei fury. Damn, I wish my wife had never taken him in from the bushes just because she thought he'd kill somebody.

"Shut up, Bruno," I yelled to no avail.

The woman was unfazed.

"You know that house they turned into a board-and-care facility five, six years ago. The one at the corner? It's been converted into three apartments with kitchens and baths. It's illegal. Did you see who's moving in? We can't get the city to do anything ."

I perked up. This was my beat. I stepped outside, yelled at Bruno one more time and said: "You've knocked on the right door, ma'm. My name is Ron. Maybe I can help."

She and another lady were going door to door with petitions. They'd been trying for months. It's an illegal conversion. It's got to be stopped.

I got the picture clear enough. Our tract of modest bungalows on the Valley floor was threatened. Quiet streets, no through traffic, no crime, nice people. The only time we see a cop is when our next door neighbor comes by.

"I'm busy," I told her. "We'll talk."

To be continued....

I promised five double-doubles to the person who comes closest to guessing how much money the mayor raised at the end of the June 30 reporting period and if my info is correct Ethel B. gets the In-N-Out prize -- regular, with onions or animal style.

The tip I've heard is Villaraigosa hauled in somewhere between $1.6 million and $!.7 million to scare off as many challengers as possible. God knows what that will cost taxpayers although my rule of thumb is L.A. politicians come cheap so the bill for making special interests happy could be spectacular.

If I'm right, Ethel B. gets the prize with a guess of $1.65 million...though we'll have to test her crystal ball for possible doping. Congratulations Ethel, bon appetit!

I don't make this stuff up: No Home Depot activists finally got their chance Monday to examine 1,000 pages of city documents in the long-running controversy but the city's Dispute Resolution Program facilitator had them searched when they arrived and kept cops around in case they turned violent.

"You just can't be too careful these days," the facilitator told the two activists.
 
"And will Home Depot be searched and guarded when they show up for their appointment?"

"Absolutely," he assured us.

You can read the full story for yourself at the  No Home Depot website.

All I know is that it's no way to treat the people of this city for standing up for their basic civil rights.
 

You got to feel for Walter Moore. Maybe he should just call himself "Wally" and dress up and act like Rodney Dangerfield who plays an obnoxious talk show host in a 1997 movie that at least got some reviews.

Whatever your politics, you ought to support Moore at least getting looked at by the local media, having his public fund-raising events at least get a brief notice and at least have examined why his constituency  is so aroused by Jamiel's Law which would crack down on illegal immigrants in gangs.

But poor Walter gets totally ignored in the media -- except for radio talk show hosts like Doug McIntyre on KABC and blogs like Mayor Sam.

Moore held a fund-raiser at Cal State Northridge on Saturday and 300 people showed up so he can get a crowd. He raised about 10 bucks a piece from them to put his campaign warchest at $107,000 so he'll qualify for city matching funds. But he got no press coverage. Stories written about the upcoming mayoral election.state Antonio Villaraigosa as the only announced candidate and refer to the fortune he's raising for his campaign and the possibility that billionaire developer Rick Caruso who's vacationing in Italy is the only possible serious candidate who might challenge him.

In the eyes of the media, it's a coronation, not an election.

This isn't new. Across the country, the corporate media are complicit with the vast machinery of big government, big money and big politics. It's been that way a long time, ever since half the papers in the country went out of business in the 1950s  and 1960s because of  their inability to compete with television.

All that was left of a once free and vibrant press was corporate ownership of mostly monopoly newspapers. Gone were the 12 papers in New York, the eight in L.A. with a variety of owners and a variety of politics, styles and points of view. Instead, what we got was journalism that reduced politics to on the one hand this and the other hand that as if there were only two ways to see any issue. The result was apathy, alienation, the loss of freedom of expression and the vital public conversations that lead to compromise and progress.

Some think it's all an overt conspiracy but that wasn't my experience in my 44 years in newspapers and publications of various types in many parts of the country.

What there was and is today is a conspiracy of consciousness, a shared belief of journalists that what they're told by the vast army of political operatives and politicians -- and what they tell each other -- is the American political reality, that the political reality inside the world they operate in is the political reality of  Americans.

That is the big lie.

(This article was written for Nina Royal's North Valley Reporter and published in the current issue distributed this weekend.)

All across Los Angeles, thousands of people -- many of whom I've gotten to know over the years -- have been fighting City Hall to preserve, protect or improve their neighborhoods.

These are often long, drawn-out struggles that test their endurance, their ability to organize and mobilize their neighbors whether it's to get a streetlight or crosswalk, stop or modify a development, crack down on criminals and nuisances or the hundreds of other issues that come up from time to time.

Often, they are treated with arrogance bordering on contempt, drowned in meaningless lip service, beset with bureaucratic obstacles or overwhelmed by the clout of insiders -- the developers, contractors or the influence peddlers who posture as lobbyists, lawyers, p.r. types or consultants of one type of another. And, of course, there's the unions.

I don't honestly know how so many never give up and stay true to their cause.

I've been fighting City Hall too out of my own sense of right and wrong but I was also paid for it as an editor at the Daily News. Now that I'm retired from that role and blogging and involved as a community activist I can speak openly about my motivation and personal beliefs.

Like most of the people who don't get involved, I could go on just fine and look the other way and pretend not to see the giant flashing billboard around the corner, the megastore down the street, the McMansion at the corner or the failure of my neighborhood schools.

In fact, I do that in a lot of ways but what I can't stomach is what has happened to L.A. during the last 30 years, an era in which city government has become owned and paid for by special interests who have no sense of purpose beyond their own greed.

The result is L.A. is at the tipping point.