Out of the Doghouse: Landlord Ordered to Pay Tenant Booted from Bootleg Unit

By Erica Williams

March 11 -- A Santa Monica landlord who tried to avoid paying City-mandated relocation benefits to a tenant forced out of a bootleg unit that once served as a doghouse settled out of court Tuesday, the City Attorney's office said.

Under the settlement, Cassius Blakely, who owns the apartments at 651 Grant Street, agreed to pay the $3,400 in relocation fees his former tenant was entitled to after being forced out of his unit due to building code violations, officials said. Blakely also will have to pay a $500 fine.

City building officials ordered the tenant to vacate his 200 square-foot rooftop studio apartment in December because it had been illegally converted from its approved use in 1962 as a doghouse, said Deputy City Attorney Adam Radinsky. Blakely was ordered to demolish the unit.

"The relocation law is one of the most important protections a tenant in Santa Monica has," Radinsky said. "It requires an owner to give fair compensation when a tenant is forced to leave."

According to Radinsky, Blakely tried to hinder the City's search for his former tenant. Photocopied documents Blakely submitted "including the purported lease for the unit, had been altered to change the tenant's last name," Radinsky said.

Blakely's documents showed the ousted tenant's last name as "Piguono" -- "the F was clearly altered into a P," Radinsky said. But City investigators were able to track down the tenant, whose last name was Figueroa, and obtain the original documents.

"It appears that the documents were altered specifically to make it harder for the City to locate the real tenant and help him get the money he was entitled to," Radinsky said.

"It's bad enough that the landlord was getting $768 a month for this unit, but altering documents to try to cheat the tenant out of his benefits, that's just outrageous. Landlords need to know that the relocation law is serious business."

But landlord activists disagreed with the City's action.

Rosario Perry, a local attorney, said the City's policy of cracking down on such "bootleg" units was aggressive and unrealistic. He said City building officials had no understanding of Santa Monica's need for low-income housing and called the department "the perfect bureaucrat."

"If Building and Safety is allowed to use the City Attorney's office to continue their attack on low-income units, then we will not have any low income units in our city," Perry said.

A unit built without a permit, he added, is not necessarily unsafe. The criteria should be "is it safe, is it sanitary, and is the tenant happy?"

Gordon Gitlen, a local attorney and president of ACTION Apartment Association, a Santa Monica landlord group, characterized the City's law as an unfair mandate on landlords.

"There should not be relocation assistance paid when the City orders a property to be vacated," Gitlen said. "That's not a voluntary action on the part of the property owner."

Radinsky estimated that his office deals with one to two dozen violations of the relocation law per year.

"It's important that all tenants and landlords know what's required," Radinksy said.