In October 2003, Inner City Law Center filed suit on behalf of 111 adults against three sets of owners of a building located at 1168 Bellevue Avenue, a transitional part of Echo Park dealing with gentrification.  Collectively, the plaintiffs have resided in the building since 1990. The building has changed hands over the years, and thus there are three groups of defendants.

In September 2004, the court granted ICLC’s motion to add over 100 children as plaintiffs.  The complaint contains twenty causes of action, all centering around habitability issues.  During the terms of the plaintiffs’ tenancies, the building has become an unsafe, unsanitary, and unhealthy slum.

On June 12, 1997, the first owners were the subjects of a 30-count misdemeanor complaint issued by the City Attorney’s Office for violations of various codes.

On March 31, 2003, the County of Los Angeles Department of Health Services Housing Task Force issued a report detailing numerous code violations.  On April 28, the City of Los Angeles issued a Substandard Order against 1168 Bellevue, listing 88 code violations.  The violations were to have been corrected by May 28.

On December 16, a 34-count Misdemeanor Complaint was issued against the current owner for violations similar to those alleged earlier against the previous owners.  Notwithstanding the various complaints and orders issued by the City and County against the building, few of the code violations have been cured.  In fact, conditions at the building are so bad that the City has put it in REAP, which has cut rents and allowed them to be paid into escrow to create a fund for making necessary repairs.

The conditions at Bellevue are horrific.  The building teems with roaches crawling up walls in living rooms, sinks, bathtubs, stoves, cabinets, and refrigerators.  Roaches have even lodged in tenants’ ears on several occasions while they slept.

1168 Bellevue also has a serious problem with rodents swarming through the building’s floors, walls, cabinets, and tables of plaintiffs’ apartments, even getting into and behind their stoves and heaters.  Mice get into the tenants’ food and crawl over them and their children at night.  In one unit, the tenants killed 12 mice in a single night.  One day, one tenant reached into her sweater pocket for a bus pass, and found a mouse instead.

The tenants at Bellevue also have been—and currently are—plagued by leaks from ceilings and walls, missing flooring, clogged drains, lack of screens on the windows, broken windows, lack of trash collection, intermittent hot water, electrical deficiencies, and appliances in need of repair.  Perhaps even more serious than these problems is the lack of security in the building.  In one unit, there was an attempted robbery in 2001.  As a result, the door to the unit was badly damaged.  The tenants were told it was “their problem,” and for 3 nights they slept with a dysfunctional door kept closed only by chairs propped against it.

At the end of last year, ICLC had a great victory when a unanimous panel of the Court of Appeal granted our application for a peremptory writ, preventing a narrowing of an injunction which would have led to the eviction of at least four families and their children.

Recently, the litigation was declared “complex,” and sent to a special branch of L.A. Superior Court which deals with such cases.  The parties are preparing for mediation, hopefully at the end of April.  If mediation is not successful, ICLC is prepared to go to trial.

This case is just the next step in a long history of ICLC fights on behalf of those neglected by the social safety-net.  Where regulations and enforcement fail, ICLC and its dedicated team of attorneys stand firm in bringing justice to these families.  This work is what sets ICLC apart.  Few agencies are able to take on major litigation similar to the Bellevue case, and fewer still have decades of experience in the field.  We are uniquely positioned to attempt to bring fair and affordable housing to these families, and we are poised to continue this work well into the future.