SDSU Neighbors Irritated : Cultures Clash Over ‘Mini-Dorms’

When sunlight breaks through the early-morning clouds on quiet Dorothy Way, Frances Hallahan opens the back door of the house she and her husband, Tim, built 29 years ago and sprinkles peanuts on her kitchen windowsill for the four blue jays that call her backyard home.

“Frances puts the peanuts out, and the birds just look at us when we eat breakfast,” said Tim, gazing out of the window. “Then they hide the peanuts in the lawn. I don’t know how they ever find them again.”

The Hallahans raised two daughters in this safe, quiet neighborhood just a five-minute walk from San Diego State University. Tim Hallahan was manager of university facilities until his recent retirement, walking to work down neat streets with trim lawns and big, late-model cars parked curbside.

“But the neighborhood has changed in the past five or six years,” Frances Hallahan said, her face hardening as she leaned against her shining oven. “If I had thought that it would have gotten this bad, I never would have stayed this long.”

As affordable campus housing has become increasingly hard to find, students have flocked to the Hallahans’ once-quiet street--and most other neighborhoods circling the university--turning single-family houses into what local officials call “mini-dorms” and what outraged residents call “student ghettos.”

The result has been a clash of cultures--old versus young, established resident versus transient student--that has polarized this area of San Diego.

Students claim that no problem exists, that most “mini-dorms” house only a handful of youths and that the right to privacy guarantees that they can live in whatever numbers they please in any neighborhood.

“I don’t think there is an issue,” said Mike Sigler, past student body president at San Diego State. “People are complaining about the fact that there are people living next door to them that have a different life style than they do, and they tend to be students. So they call and complain about noise and litter and things like that.”

But longtime neighbors have banded together in an effort to eradicate what they consider a serious threat to property values and personal safety. Their solution is a proposal to limit the number of people who can live in any single-family house around the college.

“What has been happening is investors have been buying these homes and making mini-dorms out of them,” Tim Hallahan said. “There is one three-bedroom house that had 14 students living in it last year.”

“And you’re well aware of the houses that are rentals,” Frances Hallahan added, “because they’re not taken care of. These investors are making a business in a residential area. They’re running boarding houses, and they have no pride of ownership. These students park their cars on the lawns, and it kills the lawns and makes an unsightly mess. That’s just one more step toward a ghetto.”

According to the Hallahans and their neighbors, excessive numbers of students in the same house mean too many cars, too many strangers, too much noise and lowered property values.

“I don’t think they should be able to take an area zoned for a one-family dwelling and make it into a rooming house,” said one college-area resident who asked that his name not be used. “In the house behind me they’re dividing the rooms into small bedrooms . . . and down the street they divided up a bathroom and put in three toilets with curtains between them.

“You can walk in some of those houses any time you want to--the doors are always open--and there’s no furniture to speak of. It’s degrading to our community. It brings strangers in and out.”

But Paul Hopp, 21, a university student who lives with four roommates in a house across the street from the Hallahans, contends that he and his buddies are model neighbors.

“I don’t think we do anything that’s out of control,” Hopp said, as the strains of Mick Jagger’s “Stupid Girl” wafted softly out of his open front door. “We only have parties about every two months, and there’s only about 30 people, and they’re all friends . . . I’d say we’re pretty considerate.”

Hopp is concerned about his neighbors’ move to limit occupancy: “I hope they don’t kick us out. It’s really a pleasure living here.”

The state college area is in City Councilman Dick Murphy’s District 7, and during the past several years, his office has fielded numerous complaints about mini-dorms.

Between January, 1984, and March, 1985, the office received 28 letters and telephone calls listing 68 separate complaints about noise, drinking, unkempt property, parking problems and just too many people in general. The majority of the complaints surrounded 11 large houses on Dorothy, Baja, Lorca and Mary Lane drives, Remington Road, Defiance Way and Trojan Avenue.

“The complaints about certain addresses were always the same kind of thing,” said Gayle Falkenthal, a spokeswoman for Murphy’s office. “There was noise, which is always a problem out at State between students and residents, and there was trash, which has also been a problem.

“These are chronic. The properties would deteriorate, the lawns would die and in almost every case there was a huge number of autos.”

So in January, Murphy, conferring with the city attorney and zoning officials, drafted a tentative ordinance to limit occupancy in single-family houses around the university and appointed a task force to study the problem.

According to the proposed ordinance, no more than four unrelated adults will be allowed to live in a single-family house unless the planning commission issues a conditional use permit after holding a public hearing. In addition, such a permit would only be granted after all of the following prerequisites have been satisfied:

- There is at least one bedroom for each adult occupant.

- There is at least one room containing bath and toilet facilities for every two adult occupants.

- And there is at least one off-street parking space for each adult occupant.

The problem with Murphy’s ordinance as it stands is that a 1980 state Supreme Court decision prohibits ordinances that discriminate against alternative life styles, such as large numbers of adults sharing the same house. Falkenthal, however, said the proposed ordinance is merely a starting point for discussion of the issue and will be amended. If an ordinance is enacted, it would affect the immediate State college area--Interstate 8 to the north, El Cajon Boulevard to the south, 63rd Street to the east and Hewlett Drive to the west--as well as the Allied Gardens, San Carlos and Del Cerro neighborhoods.

Brian Bennett, a college area resident and chairman of the task force, said the group was formed to find out whether the problems of noise, trash, scarce housing and debilitation of neighborhoods really are affected by the numbers of people living in each single-family house. It was also charged with finding out whether there are already ordinances in place--but not being enforced--that deal with these problems.

The group has already met five times, the most recent an evening public hearing that was planned to gain input from students, residents and the university. Although the group has no timetable, it will eventually report back to Murphy with a recommendation.

The hearing was attended by about 70 people, pretty evenly distributed between residents and students, Bennett said. Student Timothy Aires told the gathering that he thought Murphy’s proposal was unconstitutional, and that problems could be handled by enforcing existing ordinances.

But resident Rose Orsini disagreed: “I want homes, not a bunch of perilous, misguided students” in the neighborhood.

After studying the issue for the past five months, Bennett contends that the mini-dorm issue “looks like conservative neighborhood residents versus beer-drinking college students, but it’s not.”

“In my mind there are two issues: the right of a community to define and maintain a standard of living consistent with the major university located within it,” he said, “and what precisely is the university’s responsibility to its students to provide adequate and affordable housing based on enrollment.”

According to university officials, available housing is at an all-time low, and student applications are at an all-time high. There is campus housing for about 2,200, and a new dormitory complex for 360 is due to open in January. But last fall, more than 4,000 students wanting campus housing were turned away.

“Of those 4,000, 1,650 were people that we should have been able to accommodate,” said university housing adviser Doug Case. “The rest chose to go elsewhere, but there were about 1,650 who wanted to live on campus and were accepted into the university that we weren’t able to accommodate.”

In addition, Case said, students’ housing problems are worsened by the 2% vacancy rate in San Diego as a whole, and the 0% vacancy rate in the immediate state college area.

“This whole thing boils down to a housing problem,” said Sigler, who is also a member of the task force. “Because of the demand for housing here, a lot of senior citizens and Navy people are moving into what used to be student housing.”

Sigler also contends that the list of 11 problem residences is not accurate. When he was given a copy of the list, he said, he visited each house and found that “if this new ordinance was created as it now stands, only one of the houses would be in violation.”

Bennett contends that the university administration is ignoring the demand for more student housing. “The most silent group in all of this has been the administration out at San Diego State,” he said. “I think they believe that the university’s jurisdiction ends when students can’t find on-campus housing.”

William Erickson, the university’s vice president for business and finance, said that the university cannot have a position on the mini-dorm issue because the problem is outside of university jurisdiction.

“The thing is, you’ve got private citizens living out there who are very well meaning, and then you have private citizens who have homes they are renting,” Erickson said. “They’re renting them to students who are members of the community too. The problem with the university being an active participant is that the students are adults and can live anywhere they wish.

“If the other property owners want to take action, that’s fine,” he said. “But the university doesn’t have jurisdiction. When they come up with a proposal, we’ll make a comment if it’s appropriate at that time.”

Any ordinance proposed by the task force is limited by a state Supreme Court decision protecting the right of residents to privacy. In 1980, the California Supreme Court ruled that a city could not discriminate against large numbers of unrelated adults living together in a single-family house based on the fact that they are not a “family.”

A Santa Barbara court had issued a preliminary injunction prohibiting 12 unrelated people from living together in a house in a family residence zone. The city ordinance defined “family” as an individual or two or more people related by blood, marriage or legal adoption of a group of five or fewer people.

The state Supreme Court overturned the injunction, ruling that such an ordinance discriminated against “alternate families”--groups of unrelated adults that share a house, meals and expenses.

The majority opinion stated that “population density can be regulated by reference to floor space and facilities. Noise and morality can be dealt with by enforcement of police power ordinances and criminal statutes. Traffic and parking can be handled by limitations on the number of cars (applied evenly to all households) and by off-street parking requirements.”

“In general,” it stated, “zoning ordinances are much less suspect when they focus on the use than when they command inquiry into who are the users.”

Because of this decision, the task force will most likely amend Murphy’s proposal by imposing stiffer parking regulations in the area, said Fred Conrad, chief deputy city attorney. Many college neighborhoods already limit student parking by issuing parking permits allowing only residents to park on streets during weekdays.

Conrad said such a restriction would be one legal way to manage mini-dorms, if, for example, one off-street parking place was required for every adult resident of a college-area house.

“What it gets down to is that . . . if we say alternate families should be treated differently, we have to explain why we deal with them differently,” Conrad said. “Traffic impact is significantly greater for an alternative family group, so there is a rational basis in treating the alternate family differently from the traditional family.”

To the Hallahans of Dorothy Way some solution is necessary--and the sooner the better.

“We started with the permit parking, and that’s helping the neighborhood,” Tim Hallahan said. “But we have to get a handle on this mini-dorm thing, or it’ll turn the community into a ghetto. It’s still a good neighborhood for schools and such, and we want to keep it that way.”