Kitchen, Bedlam & Bath

Considered coldly, the Los Angeles housing situation was not much different from that of most other big U.S. cities. But Los Angeles was not considering it coldly. Last week virtually every landlord was certain his constitutional rights were being ground under the heel of a psychopathic bureaucracy, and countless tenants were convinced that they were soon to be 1) homeless, 2) victims of the vastest, most blackhearted swindle in the regrettable history of man. So the atmosphere was not unlike that around the lifeboats two minutes before the Titanic went down.

Strange things were done. The state, hot for progress of a sort, phlegmatically prepared to tear down 21 apartments, a hotel, 382 houses to make way for a new superhighway. There were rumors: Los Angeles heard that hundreds of Japs were about to descend from Tule Lake, seeking bed & board. Then 1,500 members of the Los Angeles Apartment House Association held a meeting to abuse the OPA, ended up by deciding to take no less than 21,474 apartments off the rental market.

Tenants reacted to all this in the patternless fashion of men making the last clutch at the lifeboat. Some cried that the whole thing was a huge bluff--an apartment owner must prove he is losing money before getting OPA permission to evict a paying tenant. Others argued that no law can keep a man in business if he wants to quit.

Bad to the Last Drop. The calamity howlers were sure OPA would be forced to eliminate price ceilings. But all prepared to fight until water in the last tap had been turned off. When Landlord Paul Sierson got OPA permission to evict 40 families from Villa Italia apartments, tenants began writing letters to the President, hired a lawyer, shrilly predicted that the place would be turned into a hotel if they were thrown out. The new rates, they said, knowingly, would be higher.

There was less unity but even more uproar among people about to be evicted for the parkway project; a radical faction which wanted to march on the City Hall was at swords' points with conservatives who just wanted another place to park their beds.

Meanwhile some Los Angeles tenants with apartments to sublet sought bribes more greedily than the fattest landlord of fiction--one asked and got a $750 bonus for subletting a $100 apartment for six months.

Occasionally someone spoke a few reasonable words. Said Gladys Tilden, a Westwood apartment operator: "The idea of withdrawing housing is scandalous and idiotic. They [the Apartment Association] are trying to break the OPA but they're too stupid to see that would only make matters worse. Increased operating costs haven't hurt like inflation would."

But few seemed to be interested in reason or in the grim fact that only time and new construction would really solve the trouble, in Los Angeles or anywhere else. Los Angeles last week seemed to be convinced that low rents, high profits, ample housing, 100% occupancy and complete subjection of both landlords and tenants would be achieved if everyone only yelled loud enough.

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