Boarding House Blues
The Joyce boarding house and Ozawa residence, a landmarked property with a very long history of providing affordable housing to Japanese immigrants, is on the market. Curiously, the listing says nothing about the two buildings’ landmark status.
One of the buildings was illegally altered with plastic windows, and the entire property is listed at $4.2 million - $2 million more than the current owner paid for it in 2021. I know East Hollywood is gentrifying, but YIKES.
Hollywood Heritage caught unpermitted work being done. That’s not disclosed in the listing either. LADBS kicked the can to the Housing Department (is anyone surprised?).
According to Making a Neighborhood, habitability issues began under the current owner:
At the same time, Mulcahy began organizing with the tenants who still lived there, most of whom are elderly and only speak Japanese. Despite communication issues, they formed a Tenants Association and asked the new landlord to address a slew of habitability issues, according to emails sent to Mehdizadeh by Mulcahy on behalf of the tenants.
“When he first took over, he stopped laundry service and stopped cleaning,” explains Mulcahy. “All of a sudden they are living in a construction zone, where it’s harder for them to use different facilities.”
Do read the rest of the piece - it calls out construction dust causing breathing problems, sleeping tenants being woken up by demolition noise, and broken heaters that were not repaired or replaced (California state law requires landlords to provide heat).
Who the hell treats their tenants like that? My great-grandmother had a boarding house across town in Sawtelle, but she would not have disrupted her tenants’ lives with unnecessary construction (in the interest of full disclosure, she did live there herself). My old boss would never have denied a tenant access to the laundry room or turned any of her buildings into a construction zone without truly needing to (i.e. mold mitigation, structural issues, water intrusion), and if I had ever done such a thing, I would have been in serious trouble. My current landlord is fixing my kitchen sink as I type this.
The listing for the property notes that “[a] majority of the leases provide rental subsidies through PATH” and boasts about its resulting high cash flow. So…where are all the Japanese elders who were living here?
I’m all for helping people transition out of homelessness, but there is still a need for boarding houses. LA used to have so many more of them catering to renters of limited means (case in point: many of Bunker Hill’s mansions had a second life as boarding houses). Pretending that there isn’t a need for a particular kind of housing will not make that need go away.
Let’s be real here - this is all about money, and it’s the tenants who suffer.