Exclusionary Policies Alleged : ‘Poor’ vs. Newport Beach: Housing Suit Opens Today

Orange County Superior Court will be a battleground between the haves and the have-nots this morning, as a handful of low-income Southland residents take on the City of Newport Beach--an affluent, seaside community they contend wants to keep them out because they don’t make enough money and their skin is the wrong color.

The case is Davis vs. Newport Beach. And possibly at stake is the future of affordable housing throughout California.

Experts say that Davis vs. Newport Beach, which begins today in Department 17, is the first lawsuit of its kind to be tried in the western United States. The suit contends that Newport Beach’s land-use policies deliberately exclude all but the very rich, and it asks the court to force the city to build more affordable housing.

“This case will ultimately map out the extent of the duty that cities have to ensure low-cost housing is constructed and how those cities must use their police powers to do so,” said Crystal Sims, an attorney with the Legal Aid Society of Orange County who helped file the suit in 1980.

Many local residents contend that living in this seaside mecca--where new, single-family homes can cost from $600,000 to $1 million and boat slips are a common backyard feature--is a privilege that must be earned. City officials say Newport Beach already has homes for the poor.

Mayor Philip Maurer has lived in Newport Beach for 33 years, and “the only thing I know is we already have low- and moderate-income housing all over this city,” he said. “I think we’ve done everything that we possibly can.”

Sims disagrees.

“This suit challenges the city’s land-use regulations as excluding low-income and minority persons,” she said. “We have argued that through the (housing) densities the city allows, and other means, the city has in effect excluded these persons from residing there.

Davis vs. Newport Beach and similar lawsuits tried on the East Coast in the 1970s pose “a classic confrontation between the nation’s haves and have-nots,” said Mark Baldassare, a professor of urban sociology at the University of California, Irvine.

“These cases focus on questions of race, status, environmental protection and future American growth,” Baldassare commented last year. “They set the stage for conflicts in suburbs that could become as volatile an issue in the ‘80s as busing was in the ‘70s.”

In the late 1970s, the Newport Beach City Council took several actions that Sims contends impaired the future of low-cost housing in the city and eventually triggered the lawsuit. The first was its treatment of a proposed housing development, dubbed the Ford Aeronutronic project.

When the complex was proposed, Sims said, it had 600 units--50 of which were designated for low-income tenants. But by the time the project was approved, she said, it had been decreased to 300 units and the affordable units were cut out completely. Finally, in 1978, the city dropped out of a federal block-grant program that is local governments’ major subsidy for low-cost housing.

“Between density restrictions and the failure to participate in the most significant federal subsidy program this country has and doing things such as removing an affordability component, those were the major things that led to the suit,” Sims said.

Most of the nine plaintiffs suing Newport Beach are low-income Southern Californians who pay high rents for substandard housing, Sims said. They would like to live in Newport Beach for its amenities and its bustling job market, but they cannot afford it.

Olive Davis lives in a Santa Ana mobile home and spends more than 30% of her income on housing, Sims said. Alfredo and Maria Ortiz are a Latino husband and wife. They live in Santa Ana with their seven children in inadequate housing that costs them more than 50% of their income, the lawyer said.

Sharion Garrison is a black Cypress resident who lives with her two children and who also spends more than 50% of her income on housing. And Dorothy M. McAleavey lives in Long Beach’s Carmelitos housing project, “a crime-ridden, environmentally unsound public housing project operated by the Housing Authority of the County of Los Angeles,” the plaintiffs’ complaint said. “The unit in which she lives has been condemned as substandard by the city of Long Beach.”

According to Sims, the city is not shouldering its share of the region’s responsibility to provide affordable housing. And she contends it is denying the plaintiffs an opportunity to work in Newport Beach, “one of the major employment areas in the county.” Because even if people like Davis and Garrison got jobs in the city, the commute would be almost prohibitive, Sims said.

“If you’ve ever tried to get to Newport Beach in the morning and leave in the afternoon, you can see that there are significant numbers of people who work there and cannot get housing,” she said. “Starting teachers, firemen, policemen cannot afford to live in any of the ‘affordable’ units in the city.”

The city has 65,549 residents, according to Donnelly Demographics, a private marketing research firm. Of that population, 94.5%, or 61,954, are white; 0.2%, or 131, are black; 2.3%, or 1,508, are Asian; and 3%, or 1,966, are Latino. City officials estimate that the city’s median income is $55,000, compared to the county median of $38,300.

Of the city’s 32,843 total housing units, 19,078 are detached single-family homes, according to the Southern California Assn. of Governments. Only 7,052 are in buildings with five or more units--the type of building in which affordable housing is most typically found.

All of this, Sims contends, supports her clients’ stand. According to the suit, “the city systematically has prevented low and moderate income persons from living in Newport Beach” through the following practices:

- Newport Beach is about 95% developed. What little land is left, the suit charges, has been zoned for low-density, single-family housing. No adequate program has been created to provide sufficient multiple-family, high-density housing, “usually the only types of housing affordable by low- and moderate-income persons.”

- The cost of housing has been driven up by the city through regulations demanding high minimum lot sizes, unnecessarily large open-space requirements and an abundance of amenities, such as bike paths and equestrian trails.

“The city’s conduct reflects a continuing pattern of acts and omissions demonstrating hostility and unwillingness toward meeting the low- and moderate-income needs within the city,” the suit said. “Accordingly, many lower-income persons who are employed in the city must commute unreasonably long distances to work there, many are forced to live in undesirable, substandard housing outside of Newport Beach, and many are prevented from obtaining job opportunities in Newport Beach.”

Davis and the other plaintiffs want the court to force Newport Beach to adopt affordable housing programs. In addition, they want the city to create what they consider an adequate general plan--one with low-cost housing as a built-in requirement.

Jonathan Lehrer-Graiwer, who also is an attorney in the case, said, “We will hopefully get an interpretation . . . which will allow the development of least-cost housing and require communities to make a maximum effort in assisting developers” to build that housing.

In two landmark decisions, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled unanimously that suburbs could not block low-cost housing to exclude the poor. The state could no longer “set aside dilapidated housing in urban ghettos for the poor and decent housing elsewhere for everyone else,” the court ruled.

The justices, focusing on Mount Laurel, a community of 18,000 near Philadelphia, ruled in 1975 that New Jersey suburbs have a “regional responsibility” to provide a “fair share” of low-cost housing. In 1983, the court issued tough rules to implement its edict.

The ruling has encouraged public-interest attorneys to file similar lawsuits across the nation. Courts in Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania and Illinois have adopted the principles of the Mount Laurel decision in related cases, but without imposing stiff requirements.

“We see these kind of housing exclusions throughout Southern California, and the rest of the state as well,” Ray Catalano, a professor of urban sociology at UC Irvine, commented last year. “In all of these places, there are incredibly strong political pressures on the grass-roots level to block the construction of housing.”

Leonard A. Hample, attorney for the city and its agencies, has refused to discuss the suit because of the impending trial. City Manager Bob Wynn also remains silent. However, the city, in its response to the suit, denies all allegations that it is exclusionary and not fulfilling its duty to the poor. The response also outlines the city’s attitudes toward such charges.

“The City of Newport Beach is not required as part of its land-use regulations to assume an affirmative obligation to build low- and moderate-income housing, to grant tax concessions or to sponsor or finance any public housing projects,” the response said. “To do so is economically infeasible and could not be accomplished without sacrificing the city’s ability to provide needed municipal services.”

The suit accuses Newport Beach of breaking state laws requiring cities to expend a maximum amount of effort to build low-cost housing for the poor. But Bob Lenard, a Newport Beach city planner, said those “laws” are merely guidelines.

“Legislation prior to 1981 had been limited to something like a paragraph in the government code talking about providing housing for all economic segments of the community,” Lenard said. “The state Department of Housing and Community Development took the position in the late ‘70s that those guidelines were mandatory. Most local governments said this is not true and used them if they felt they were helpful.”

In 1981, he said, the Legislature “specifically put a provision in (new housing legislation) confirming what the local governments had said all along: the housing element guidelines were advisory only.”

In response to such changes in state law, Lenard said, Newport Beach has improved its affordable-housing programs. Densities have been increased on about 360 acres of residentially zoned land. The city is back in the federal block-grant program it withdrew from in 1978.

And two housing developments with affordable units are in the works. One complex has 888 units, 222 of which will be low-cost and price controlled. The other complex has 65 units, all low-cost.

“The greatest part of our most significant affordable housing programs has occurred since the change in state law in 1981,” Lenard said. “We now have very specific programs to provide and maintain our affordable housing stock.”

Sims acknowledged that Newport Beach has changed in the five years since the lawsuit was filed. But that, she said, should not hurt her case. And if Newport Beach should prevail in the trial, which could take up to six months, the results will not be all bad.

“If we lose, then the court will have said the city’s land-use practices are not exclusionary, and that the general plan is adequate,” Sims said. But she contends that the changes in Newport Beach have stemmed from the suit itself, rather than changes in state law.

“It would be hard to say it (losing) would be a setback, considering all that has changed in the interim,” Sims said.

Times staff writer Kim Murphy contributed to this story.