Los Angeles City Hall as Slumlord

“If you can’t do this job, fund-raising, and then vote against somebody the next day — you shouldn’t be in this job,” insists Cornejo. “[Contributors] have no, absolutely no bearing, on what we do. That’s the simple truth.”

YET THERE’S ANOTHER TRUTH as well: that Cardenas and Perry, with an assist from legislator Núñez, provided Islas a level of effort, aimed at winning him public funds, that few noninsiders can typically expect to receive.

Ted Soqui

Tough cookies: Barbara Rowe, with neighbor Hilda Quintana, are targeting their rich landlord at the tattered Alexandria Hotel.

Decrepit majesty: 100 years ago, the lavish building became the hot spot for studio chieftains.

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More About

• Jan Perry
• Alexandria
• Ruben Islas
• Politics
• Local Politics

Before the CRA board’s vote on the Rosslyn Lofts, the agency’s loan committee tried to stop one-half of Islas’ requested package — a $4 million loan riddled with problems.

In one e-mail obtained by L.A. Weekly, the CRA’s chief operating officer, Glenn Wasserman, skewered Islas’ package of funding, saying that $4 million of it was “misleading in that the second loan is referred to as a ‘short-term loan’ when the details reveal that it is unlikely at best that this loan will be repaid in three years or at all.” (Commenting to the Weekly, Islas’ partner Jules Arthur promised that the loan would be repaid.)

Yet Wasserman slammed that use of public money as “an unsecured $4 million ‘grant’ with no expectation of repayment.” And, in an e-mail dated August 13, 2007, obtained by litigants in the court case against Islas and the CRA, Estolano, the agency’s CEO, backed Wasserman in opposing that financing for Islas.

That’s when Perry, Cardenas and Núñez called Villaraigosa’s office to talk to him about the Islas controversy. Then, after CEO Estolano reversed her course and backed the full $8 million, Cardenas openly thanked her. “Cecilia,” he said during the packed CRA meeting last August, “you and I have worked together for quite a few years.... And I’m glad to see that what is on the table today is an $8 million proposal for this board to allow this project to go through.” (Estolano declined to discuss whether Cardenas had pressured her on the funding, citing ongoing litigation involving the Alexandria and the Rosslyn project.)

William Jackson, who chairs the redevelopment agency’s commission, defends the commission’s decision, saying that even before Islas took over the Alexandria, the place was riddled with problems and problem tenants. “One of the things I remember is how miserable people were,” Jackson says.

Louis Rafti, an attorney for Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, who represented the tenants in the federal lawsuit, concedes, “Of course, we want to get rid of that” — referring to drug dealing and other problems at the Alexandria. But he argues that most residents are simply destitute, and that the Alexandria is their roof of last resort.

“At least you had a place to live. You’re not getting thrown out on the street,” Rafti says. But instead, they were “disenfranchised by someone who said they were there to give them affordable housing, received money to provide affordable housing, then pulled the rug out from under them.”

Amerland officials strongly dispute this characterization, with Islas’ partner Jules Arthur telling the Weekly, “There was always hot water. It was inconsistent. We bought a building that was 100 years old [and] that had numerous deficiencies.” The Alexandria, he says, is “vastly superior than it was before.”

But Rowe, the Alexandria tenant, says many of her poor evicted neighbors ended up living on rough downtown streets — ironically, in Councilwoman Perry’s run-down district. Rowe says Perry “didn’t do anything to solve that part — people who had to sleep on the street.”

As of last week, city leaders were still dissembling over the slum conditions found by the court.

Asked if the federal judge’s order that Islas provide hot running water at the Alexandria had shaken Perry’s faith in him, a spokeswoman e-mailed Weekly the dubious claim that, to Perry’s knowledge, “there is no federal order from a judge regarding the Alexandria Hotel.”