Effect of tax initiative on rent unclear
By Niki Cervantes
Depending on your view, Proposition 13 is either a long awaited godsend or nothing but shallow promises.
Advocates of the proposition, the Jarvis-Gann Initiative, say once a landlord’s property taxes have been cut, he will pass the savings along to his tenants in the form of lower rents. The initiator of the bill, Howard Jarvis, has promised, "They (the landlords) are going to lower rent. It won’t cost them anything so why the hell shouldn't they?”
However, nowhere in the measure is such an action required or requested.
Opponents scoff at that claim, calling it naive.
“Why should landlords lower rents if they don't have to? They never have before,” said a spokesman for the No on 13 campaign.
Rough estimates indicate that almost half of the students at the university rent off-campus apartments, many of which are in the immediate neighborhood. If Proposition 13 passes June 6, will local landlords who rent primarily to university students lower rents as promised by supporters of the bill?
Alfred Martorano, who owns an apartment building on 28th Street, rents mostly to students. He will vote for Proposition 13 in order to put a “ceiling on too much government spending.”
His response to the possibility of lowered rents is, “Don’t you believe it.” Many of the local landlords and managers agreed.
Martorano said the rents as well as other small apartment owners, are already so low that “we can only about cover the cost of upkeep and utilities as it is.” By the time those rising costs are paid, the profit margin is too slim to warrant dividing it up among tenants, he said.
John Kim, another local landlord, also
doubts that rents would be reduced. In fact, he believes they might be raised.
Some contend that Proposition 13 would create a $700-million shortage in the county’s budget because of the bill’s sharply reduced property tax rate (1% of the assessed market value).
“In order to make up the lost revenue, somebody will increase something, probably the sales tax,” Kim said. “And paying increases in police and fire protection will eat up whatever we got from Jarvis in the first place. In the end, it will affect all of us badly.”
Landlords claim the fact that they rent to students makes it even harder to reduce rents if Proposition 13 is passed. Jack Chernoff and Mike Hodosh, who
own and manage Hoover House, said student renters tend to drive up maintenance costs. They said each year they pay from $5,000 to $7,000 for repairing ruined wails, burned carpets and broken furniture. Apartment owners renting mostly to students said they must also hike up rents overall to compensate for the sudden rash of vacancies each summer.
Chernoff said “$300 for a single is ridiculous but that’s what you’ve got to charge to make a reasonable profit. If there’s a 10% profit, we’re lucky.”
Hodosh and Chernoff support Proposition 13. If it passes, they said they intend to pay their increasingly high maintenance and utility bills without passing the costs on to tenants. If not, they will have to increase rents again this fall.
Both also said if the proposition is put into effect they can stabilize rents.
However, there is an even greater roadblock to reduced rents for students, said an employee of a property management firm that runs a local apartment building.
“Landlords won’t lower rents, not with the competition for housing around USC
—	especially not at a university full of rich kids,” she said.
The employee said while utilities and maintenance do reduce profits, they do not make as large a cut as landlords claim.
“Rents are more a reflection of the competition for some place to live at USC than the costs landlords pay for (continued on page 2)
University of Southern California
Volume LXXIII, Number 60	ios	Angeles, California	Monday,	May	15,	1978
Daily
Trojan
Poor equipment hurts language lab’s usefulness
By David Watson
The girl walked into the foreign language laboratory in Founders Hall. After she noticed that no teaching assistant was on duty, she took five laboratory time cards from her backpack.
She quickly inserted each of them into the time clock. After performing this task she went to the back of the room. For the next hour she read a paperback novel.
One of the other owners of the five cards would perform the same favor next week for her and the other card owners.
Crimes of deception are committed every day in Founders Hall 212.
This is the location of the foreign
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language laboratory, which is set up for individual student use. Almost all students in the initial levels of a foreign language are required to use this facility at least one hour a week.
The language lab contains taped language lessons and exercises, programs for slide-synchronized machines and cultural and educational films in English and the language being studied.
Students can use lab time to do
exercises on computer terminals, play scrabble in a foreign language or simply converse in a foreign language with other students.
Cultural background slide-synchronizer programs on every Hispanic nation are available for student use.
Yet despite the variety of ways to spend time in the language lab, students would rather read newspapers, do homework for other classes or simply punch in, leave for an hour, and return to punch out.
“The students are frustrated and bored. Simply memorizing sentences is no way to learn a language,” said one less-than-enthusiastic user of the lab.
“The people talking on the tapes talk in a monotone that drags people down,” she said.
David Tool, director of the language lab, agrees that the tedium of lab use is a problem. The present physical condition of the lab doesn’t do much to excite student participation, he said.
Students are required to work one hour a week on obsolete audio equipment that costs $5,000 a year to repair, he said.
Of the 10 computer terminals available for student use, three of them are broken down at any given time, he added. Repair costs of the terminals average $2,000 a year.
Only two slide-syncuronizer machines are available for approximately 4,500 students required to use the lab. Because of the shortage of machines, teachers are told not to encourage their use.
In addition to equipment problems, the lab does not have enough space. It is impossible to properly store the lab’s vast amount of audiovisual resources so they can be easily retrieved for student and faculty use, Tool said.
The offices of the language staff, the technical equipment for reproducing tapes and much of the present re-
David Watson, a Daily Trojau staff writer, is a junior in journalism. Additional research was provided by Jemi Reis, a junior in journalism.
source storage facilities are housed in one small room on the second floor of Founder Hall.
This room is so small it is difficult to centralize all the equipment and storage resources of the language lab, Tool said. Language lab paraphernalia can be found in the basement and almost every other room on the second floor of the building.
Tool said the size of the staff doesn’t permit proper supervision of the individual language lab. He said it was difficult to find interested people with the technical skill necessary to work in the lab.
The absence of TAs has contributed to the theft of many valuable wall hangings and equipment.
Tool said even the time clock was stolen and claims to have circumstantial evidence proving students were responsible.
Tool said the lab doesn’t have the funds to be kept looking good, so the walls remain bare. The new time clocks have also been bolted to the cabinets.
It is a rule in many foreign departments that lab hours are invalid unless signed by an attending teching assistant.
Tool said the policy of signing lab cards displays a lack of trust in the students. He designed the cards with space for comments to serve as a communication between the TA in the lab and the teacher in the classroom.
However, there are very few times when a TA in the lab listens to a student work with the tapes. Teachers said they seldom read a student’s card to see if he had received any comments.
Theoretically, the lab cards should be of great assistance to the student and the teacher, Tool said. If a teacher notices his students are consistently receiving bad comments in one area of the course, the teacher would know that additional work is needed in that area.
The lab receives $16,500 from the budget of the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. The lab fee of $5, in addition to tuition, generates an additional $15,000.
(continued on page 2)