EDITORIAL FAKING THE GRADE WHEN IT COMES TO APARTMENT SAFETY, LOCAL GOVERNMENT FAILS.

LOS Angeles County supervisors seem determined to begin posting letter grades denoting the health and safety conditions of rental housing. While their concern for the living conditions of their constituents is laudable, their method is laughable.

Why not just enforce the law?

Posting A or B or worse on buildings, as county health inspectors do for restaurants, is a waste of a well-meaning effort. It would make more sense to enforce laws already on the books and perhaps toughen them, so owners would be forced to fix problems or face penalties.

The idea is that a bad grade would pressure slumlords who let their properties decay into unsafe and unhealthy conditions, while at the same time it would inform tenants of the hazardous conditions under which they must live.

But all the posting of a grade will really do is stigmatize the tenants. They know better than anyone the conditions of their buildings. They know if rats are running through the walls, if the heat doesn't work, if the plumbing backs up or if the place is infested with cockroaches.

Doubtless tenants would prefer housing inspectors to find and require owners to correct the problems, rather than simply grade them and assign a letter.

Five years ago, Los Angeles city government began levying a monthly fee on renters specifically to fund the hiring of housing inspectors who supposedly would regularly check out each and every rental unit in city limits.

But, as happens with so many promises from City Hall, city leaders never delivered what they promised. Two years after the fee was imposed, no housing inspectors had been hired, and one unsafe apartment building in Echo Park had collapsed, killing one person. Today, illegal granny flats and substandard apartment buildings are still the rule.

Clearly the city of Los Angeles and 87 other cities in the county have fallen down in their duties to protect residents from slum conditions. County supervisors are trying to take up the slack with what will likely be an ineffective and inefficient grading program.

The better solution would be to spend the effort on fining slumlords and enforcing housing code, rather than trying to shame landlords into fixing up their properties. After all, anyone who knowingly allows people to live in squalor, while making a profit off them, clearly has no shame.