LOS ANGELES – The city of Los Angeles will pay $38.2 million to resolve a 2017 lawsuit for “falsely” claiming on federal paperwork that its multifamily affordable housing units built with federal subsidies were accessible to people with disabilities.
The U.S. Department of Justice filed the complaint on behalf of Mei Ling, a wheelchair-bound Los Angeles resident, and the Fair Housing Council of San Fernando Valley, a disability rights advocacy organization. Their part of the settlement has not been established.
According to the lawsuit, Ling, 57, has been using a wheelchair since January 2006 and has either been homeless or lived on property without accessible features.
It claimed that the city of Los Angeles did not make its multifamily affordable housing alternatives accessible to people with disabilities for at least six years. Officials reported that several difficulties included too-steep slopes, too-high counters, and entryways that did not accommodate wheelchairs.
The lawsuit also claimed that the city neglected to keep a publicly available list of accessible apartments and their accessibility features and that it “knowingly and falsely certified” to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development that it met these standards. The lawsuit claimed that doing so violated the False Claims Act.
“The City denies that it violated the False Claims Act,” LA city attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto stated in an email. “Nonetheless, we are pleased to have reached this $38.2 million settlement, particularly in light of the federal government’s initial claim that it was entitled to well over $1 billion in alleged damages.”
According to officials, when the Housing and Urban Development Department offers grant monies to local governments for the construction and rehabilitation of affordable multifamily housing units, they must follow federal accessibility regulations. This includes a requirement that 5% of all units in certain types of federally subsidized housing be accessible to persons with mobility impairments and an additional 2% be accessible to people with visual and auditory impairments.
They must also have a publicly available list of accessible units with descriptions of their accessibility features, in addition to other housing-related accessibility standards.
According to the plaintiffs, the federal housing agency provided almost a billion dollars in various funding to LA in the six years preceding the case filing in 2017. This money was used to build at least 28 multifamily housing developments. None of them have the minimum number of accessible apartments mandated by law.
The city’s actions “caused HUD and the public to believe that it complied with all federal obligations relating to the receipt of federal housing and community development funds,” according to the lawsuit.