Obituaries : Milford Bliss; City Building Dept. Official

Milford Bliss, former deputy superintendent of the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety and chief of its Community Safety Bureau, has died. He was 74.

Bliss died June 18 at his home in Palm Desert, his daughter, Sue Brewer, said this week.

He began his 42-year career with the department as a building inspector in 1948, after serving as an Army paratrooper in France during World War II.

When he took charge of the department’s Community Safety Bureau during its revamping in 1987, Bliss stationed inspectors in communities where building complaints arose rather than in a Downtown office. He also had inspectors meet with neighborhood leaders.

“It made a hell of a lot of difference,” he told The Times in 1989. “Suddenly they’re interested in Watts; it’s not just a miserable neighborhood. . . . This is their territory and they’d like to take care of it too.”

Bliss, who had toured Europe shortly after World War II and observed towns that were “just flattened,” believed that the reconstruction of old buildings there could serve as an example for rehabilitating run-down neighborhoods in Los Angeles.

If city inspectors found people living in garages converted to housing, he said, the city should work to upgrade the dwelling to health and safety standards rather than evict the inhabitants.

“There’s an awful lot of people living in garages, living in a sub-habitable environment,” he said. “But it should be to minimum housing standards. It should be healthy. I think we could make some of these places habitable and safe.”

After he was named chief of the building department’s inspection division in 1967, Bliss developed a “combined inspection” program in which a single inspector could check construction projects for building, electrical and plumbing standards. Bliss, who taught at Trade Tech and later at Cal State L.A., also worked with area community colleges to develop a building inspection curriculum teaching all three disciplines.

Recognizing the danger of mudslides and erosion on newly graded hillsides that were not replanted, Bliss was a prime mover behind the city’s “Green Hills Law” which prompted the city’s landscaped freeway slopes and hillsides. He enlisted local universities to recommend non-flammable vegetation that would deter erosion.

In addition to Brewer, who lives in Yorba Linda, Bliss is survived by his wife, Nadine, of Palm Desert, and another daughter, Marilyn Langsdorf of Lake Oswego, Ore., and six grandchildren.