CONVERTED UNITS CALLED DEATHTRAPS.

Byline: Anne Burke Daily News Staff Writer

In December, five young sisters and brothers perished when fire broke out at their Watts home - a converted garage with barred windows, a double-bolted door and no smoke detector.

A month later, Los Angeles housing chief Gary Squier warned that unless swift action was taken to vacate or make safe the estimated 50,000 to 100,000 such dwellings citywide, more deaths surely would follow.

On Wednesday, Squier's ominous prediction came true. Two young sisters and their grandmother died in a fire at the 900-square-foot converted garage in which they lived with three others in Sun Valley.

City building officials said the conversion was illegal.

``We need to seriously sit down and take a look at this,'' Squier said in the fire's aftermath. ``To see a 3-year-old and 8-year-old dead, it's just completely unacceptable.''

With eight people dead in less than three months, city officials now appear poised to take a serious look at the problem - in part, proposing an interdepartmental task force to come up with solutions.

``We realize this is a serious problem with life-threatening consequences. We want to take a proactive approach,'' said Dave Keim, spokesman for the city Building and Safety Department.

City officials say illegal, substandard housing is one of the biggest dilemmas faced by the city today. There are no easy answers.

``I feel very frustrated by this,'' said Councilwoman Laura Chick, who heads the council's Public Safety Committee. ``How do we pay for all those inspectors to go out there and make annual checks?

``Then what do we do with the massive numbers of families who are very poor and can't afford the housing that's available?''

Some officials already are pitching solutions.

Squier said he favors setting a deadline - say five or seven years - after which owners must vacate tenants from converted garages. In the meantime, owners would be required to make the units safe to live in.

``We can't afford, for social reasons, to put all these people out on the streets,'' Squier said.

Many homeowners groups don't like Squier's solution, favoring instead an aggressive effort by the city to get owners to kick out tenants from converted garages.

``People shouldn't be living in converted garages,'' said Gerald Silver, president of Homeowners of Encino. ``It's unfair to both the people who live in the garages, who don't have adequate sanitation and bedroom facilities, and it's dangerous for the community because it puts more people per square mile in an area than the infrastructure can handle.''

Squier said Los Angeles is the western United States' capital of substandard housing, largely due to the shortage of low-income housing, the abundance of low-paying jobs, and lingering effects of the recession.

The units can be death traps. Circuits are overloaded. Gas piping is improperly installed. Cross-connected water and sewer pipes can contaminate supplies of potable water, Keim said.

``They'll have a space heater, microwave, hair dryer, television set for basically a place that was built for one light bulb,'' said Don Cocek, a deputy city attorney who prosecutes scofflaw owners.

Despite the enormity of the problem, Mirta Ocana, an aide to Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg, estimates that of the city's 400 building and safety inspectors, only 38 are involved in code enforcement for multifamily housing.

Keim claims that figure is far too low. But he concedes that with a total of only 400 inspectors to handle 1 million buildings in 465 square miles in the city of Los Angeles, the department is ill-equipped to combat the problem.

Because of understaffing, inspectors can respond only to complaints. They are not able to survey neighborhoods to ferret out converted garages, Keim said.

Keim said that inspectors investigate several hundred complaints about converted garages each year. Most result in misdemeanor citations, but are resolved before they end up in court, he added.

``Most of the owners restore them back to garages,'' Cocek said.

Officials say the long-term solution is affordable housing. On Wednesday, a joint City Council committee started looking at ways to restore deep funding cuts for low-income housing.

CAPTION(S):

Photo, map, box

PHOTO (color) A neighbor looks at the occupied garage that burned in Sun Valley.

John McCoy/Daily News

MAP: Site of fire

BOX: Who to call