City Urged to Legalize Some Garage Units

In a report likely to provoke controversy over the future of Los Angeles’ prized single-family neighborhoods, the city’s task force on illegal garage apartments Tuesday recommended that the city set up a process for legalizing some of the city’s 50,000 to 100,000 garage dwellings.

But the group, organized in March after seven people died in three months in firetrap converted garages, took a cautionary tone in its report, predicting that the market for cheap, illegal housing will continue to increase in the coming years.

“As welfare reform affects the economy of Los Angeles, desperate housing ‘solutions’ such as garage conversions will most likely increase, not decline,” the group concluded.

To avoid the fire and health hazards that can accompany such dwellings when they are constructed outside the law, the group suggested that the City Council consider amending the General Plan, the document that for years has kept Los Angeles, officially at least, a city of mostly single-family homes.

Single-family neighborhoods, the report concludes, “have formed the fabric that has distinguished the city from other urban areas. . . . [But] it is the owners of single family homes who are themselves choosing to rent out their garages.”

As envisioned by the task force, the city’s first step would be to implement a $217,000 educational program aimed at garage residents and their landlords, citing the dangers of living in buildings with inadequate wiring, poor ventilation and few windows and doors to use as fire escapes.

The group also is urging the city to issue interim occupancy permits for the structures, which would allow tenants to remain in them for up to three years while landlords renovate them to meet minimum safety standards. After that, owners could apply for permanent status.

One alternative, the task force suggests, would be to allow the units to become permanently legal housing even in neighborhoods zoned for single, detached houses.

While planning officials on the task force wanted only existing garage residences to be covered by the plan, housing officials suggested giving homeowners the option of converting garages in the future as a way to combat the city’s chronic lower-cost housing crunch.

Homeowner groups have already vowed to fight the proposal, and even the councilmen who set up the task force, Richard Alarcon and Mark Ridley-Thomas, have kept some distance from its more controversial ideas.

Legalizing the garages would cost more than political capital--the process is likely to swallow up a lot of dollars as well. The Building and Safety Department has estimated that it would cost more than $27 million to inspect 60,000 units and issue permanent-use permits to their owners.

Task force chairman Gary Squier, who heads the Los Angeles Housing Department, said he would be satisfied if the council goes only so far as allowing temporary occupancy of garages that are made safer.

“To do hazard reduction without displacement, you’ve got to have the interim occupancy permit,” Squier said. “I think it’s politically viable and will protect the health and welfare of these occupants. The thornier issues are the planning and zoning alternatives.”