Villaraigosa loses votes with eyesore in Moreno Valley

Cropped photo: Jessica Garrison/Buzzfeed

For all of the time that he was mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa owned a dump of a home in the Riverside County exurb of Moreno Valley. The city out there wrote up the property several times for code violations. And the neighbors loathed the absentee owner, apparently without knowing that it was Villaraiogosa. Hey, but at least he didn't waste water on the brown grass.

From a story at Buzzfeed by Jessica Garrison, the former LA Times City Hall reporter:

"He’s a slumlord, that’s what he is,” complained Steven Patzer, who lives next door to the small house on Eucalyptus Avenue in the city of Moreno Valley.

Town records show that the house — which recently featured boarded-up windows, peeling blue and white paint, and cinderblocks in the weed-choked front yard — racked up a series of code violations, including for unmaintained landscaping and discarded junk in the yard. Villaraigosa owned the house from 1990 until last month, county records show.

“You see it for yourself. It looks like shit, and you can quote me on that,” said Patzer, 42. He said it “shocked the living daylights out of me,” when he learned last year that the absentee owner he had long resented was the former mayor of Los Angeles....

In an interview Monday, Villaraigosa said this was the first he was hearing of problems at the property or of neighborhood discontent. “If I had known, I would have taken care of it as soon as possible,” he said. “I had two property managers who would inform me when there were issues, and we would fix it as soon as we were informed.”

Villaraiogsa recently sold the investment property — and cheap.