City Proposing Mandatory Sidewalk Repairs During Escrows!

By MARY FUNK, President, Southland Regional Association of REALTORS®

After more than three decades of letting a problem spiral out of control, the City of Los Angeles is considering forcing home sellers to repair unsafe, broken sidewalks before a home sale can close escrow – known as a “Point of Sale” ordinance.

It is inconceivable that the City wants to impose sidewalk repairs at a time when home sales are greatly reduced and many home owners are struggling to save their home from foreclosure.

It’s insensitive and beyond belief that anyone – even big city bureaucrats – could think that ordering sidewalk repairs at a point of sale makes any sense, especially when elected officials from the President and Governor on down are implementing plans to rescue beleaguered home owners.

Dumb ideas are doomed to fail, but to ensure that this one vanishes we need every member of the Southland Regional Association of Realtors to voice their opposition to their City Council member.

More than just killing an unworkable point of sale proposal, Realtors need to take the lead in solving a problem that the City has wrestled with unsuccessfully for 35 years – how to improve neighborhoods by repairing 4,600 miles of broken, unsafe sidewalks.

Details are available on-line at www.LASidewalks.org, but here are just a few of the pertinent facts:

• Prior to 1973 home owners used to be responsible for repairing sidewalks, but the City Council voted to accept responsibility and make repairs.
• The City’s inadequate efforts since then have lead to a backlog of broken sidewalks – more than 40 percent of the 10,750 miles of sidewalks – that they say will take upwards of 83 years to fix at the current pace.
• Despite a windfall from record-high property tax receipts from the recent home sales boom, the City now wants to shift responsibility back to home owners, sticking them with a bill for thousands of dollars – upwards of $4,000 per property. (Tell me if I’m wrong, but I believe home owners think they already pay for street and sidewalk maintenance and repair.)
• Incredibly, if the seller contracts with the city to fix the sidewalk and pays in full up front, the city wants three years to make repairs.

Trying to fix broken sidewalks during an open escrow is a disaster waiting to happen.

It is also a piece-meal approach that leaves the public unprotected. It fails to eliminate dangerous public hazards that generate multiple multi-million dollar lawsuits every year. One sidewalk would be fixed while even more dangerous sidewalks next door would remain.

There are other imperatives at work when it comes to the City’s point of sale proposal. The city wants to shift legal liability to home owners, retain control over property and, in the process, expand its work force.

Even during the housing boom when thousands of homes changed owners every year, this proposal made no sense.

Yet clueless bureaucrats pursue it because, as they stated in a draft report, they believe they can “require that repairs be made when the property owners are receiving funds from the sale.”

What happens in a short sale? Do City Council members think home loan lenders will fix sidewalks on foreclosed properties?

And what about homes with severely damaged sidewalks that are never put up for sale because the owners are too poor, too elderly, or too handicapped?

In a citywide survey conducted last year, Neighborhood Councils stressed that sidewalk repair is a quality of life issue that is important to all residents. Neighborhood Councils also expected the City to live up to its obligation.

We need your voice NOW to see to it that the point of sale proposal dies.

We need your support to ensure that a reasonable plan is implemented and that ALL sidewalks are repaired, finally.

We need help pinpointing all of the most dangerous sidewalks throughout the city.

We need REALTORS® to urge City Council members to fund a voluntary sidewalk public safety program.

Go to www.LASidewalks.org for details, farm tools and printed support materials.

Thank you.