In the months before the recession struck, I spent a lot of time covering “condomania,” an L.A. affliction marked by conversion of affordable apartment houses into expensive condos. Many tenants, facing eviction, told me their stories. Then the economy collapsed and the condo developers disappeared, along with their plans to tear down the apartments.

Now they’ve returned. Construction of transit stations has focused developers back to the job of turning lower rent apartment houses into high-end rentals and condos, according to tenant advocate Larry Gross, executive director of Coalition For Economic Survival. He told me it’s happening in Hollywood, Koreatown, Studio City, Sherman Oaks and Valley Village. “And on the Gold Line into East L.A. we will see gentrification expanding,” he said, as well as along the Expo Line from downtown into West L.A. and eventually Santa Monica.

Affordable housing is generally defined as housing that costs no more than 30 percent of a low-income family’s pay. Gross said 58 percent of L.A. renters are paying more than 30 percent and a third are paying about 50 percent.

Yet the fate of tenants has not been a major issue in the election for mayor. That is until recently when the Apartment Assn. of Greater Los Angeles, the city’s major landlord group, announced its support for candidates Controller Wendy Greuel and City Councilwoman Jan Perry.

It’s not known whether this will help or hurt the recipients. As the L.A. Times’ Michael Finnegan wrote, “landlord endorsements are not entirely a badge of honor in a city where about 60 percent of the housing is occupied by tenants.”

Greuel said it was a sign of her support among business and labor. But tenant advocate Gross said the apartment house owners “have fought us for years, they have fought rent control and they are coalescing behind Wendy Greuel. Tenants need to know this when they go to the ballot box.”

He was kinder to City Councilman Eric Garcetti. Garcetti, Gross said, “has a mixed record. He hasn’t been with us on every issue, such as supporting a rent freeze. He voted against it. But on the other hand, he has provided leadership and support on some other key issues.”

Actually, Gross’ constituency of low income and middle-income renters have few, if any friends in city hall. If they had an enemies’ list it should start with Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and include the city council and high-level building and planning bureaucrats. The big campaign-contributing construction unions and developers who have great power in city hall have always favored condo conversion. Before the recession, Mayor Villaraigosa, beaming at all the construction, said the crane—a construction crane—should be the city’s official bird.

The council and the mayor support big construction around transit stops. As Dakota Smith noted in the Daily News, Villaraigosa, Perry, Garcetti and Greuel favor a Hollywood community plan that would allow pockets of high rises in the area, with its Metro station..
The trouble with such developments is that they sharply increase the value of buildings for many blocks around the station, totally changing neighborhoods and driving out low-rent dwellings.

Gross and the Coalition For Economic Survival want to keep these neighborhoods as they are, many heavily rent controlled and affordable. They are asking the candidates to “stand behind any attempt to weaken rent control” and to preserve rent-controlled buildings or at least require developers to replace the housing lost when they are leveled.

Good luck. With condomania taking hold, there’s not much chance of the tenants’ platform being adopted.

(an earlier version of this column incorrectly quoted Smith as writing Villaraigosa, Perry, Garcetti and Gruel favor the Millenium twin high rise development in Hollywood. Actually, she wrote they favor the Hollywood Community Plan, which allows more high rises in Hollywood).

LA Observed photo of downtown units

The winner of Tuesday night’s mayoral debate was the moderator, Professor Fernando J. Guerra, director of Loyola Marymount University’s Center for the Study of Los Angeles and a longtime analyst of local politics.

Like a professor trying to keep an early morning class awake, Guerra worked hard to breath life into an event where the five candidates gamely fought their way through another of the many forums that are the major public events of the campaign. This one at LMU occurred exactly a month before the March 5 primary election. It was hard to tell who is doing best. They all looked as though they were on a marathon, exhausted and praying the finish line was near.

The room was packed; warm and dark, for the benefit of cameras live streaming the forum. Guerra’s finest few minutes in the two hours was when underdog candidate Emanuel Pleitez revealed his plan to solve the city employee pension crisis. It was very complicated, involving borrowing money from Wall Street to buy out the pension obligations of city workers, who would then use it to build their own retirement accounts.

“It sounds good, but I don’t understand it,” Guerra said, turning a moment that could have been really boring into something amusing. He interrupted the debate, scorning a rigid format, and asked the other candidates if they understood it. None of them did. Neither did I. Afterward, I asked Pleitez aide John Hill to explain it. He did, sort of. Then Pleitez came up and offered to explain it more but I asked him not to. Hill, I said, told me all I had to know.

Pleitez, considered a sure loser by the experts, is actually could be a contender if he gets more campaign contributions. He has a good biography—poor in El Sereno, top student and athlete at Wilson High School, Stanford graduate, Obama transition team official, tech company executive. He’s Latino in a city where the Latino vote could decide the election. But so far, he’s been on display only in debates and before small audiences and may get lost among the television barrage in the final days.

Some other thoughts:

Councilman Eric Garcetti continues to describe Hollywood, in his district, as a crime-free, homeless-free, graffiti-free, low-unemployment island of prosperity in a city that has unfortunately not benefited from his leadership. Hollywood has improved in recent years but it’s definitely not free of the ills that afflict the rest of L.A.

Controller Wendy Greuel, considered, along with Garcetti a front-runner, has stopped talking so much about her audits. I can see why. The subject is uninteresting and the Times raised good questions about how much money they would actually save. Instead, she offered a more lively speaking style and promised to be tough as mayor.

Ex-talk-show host Kevin James remained the best with one-liners. The auditing Greuel, he said, boasts “she knows where the bodies are buried” He said “that’s because she buried the bodies,” presumably meaning city hall secrets.

Councilwoman Jan Perry, asked along with the others what she would like to do if she loses, said she’d study to be a rabbi, and when ordained would work outside temple walls to help society’s unfortunate. Politician turned rabbi—that might be a first.