Newport Beach Like ‘Old South’ Cities, Housing Lawsuit Claims

Lawyers for low-income tenants who say that Newport Beach’s housing policies purposely exclude racial minorities and the poor have filed 117 pages of closing arguments in a long-running case in which they compare practices in the pricey coastal community to “the discredited and dying molds of cities in the Old South.”

The documents were filed Wednesday in Orange County Superior Court, where the case, called “Davis vs. Newport Beach,” has stretched on for more than a year.

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

Olive Davis, for whom the suit is named, lives in a Santa Ana mobile home and spends more than 30% of her income on housing, the lawsuit said. Even though she owns her mobile home and now receives a rent subsidy, the closing argument said, Davis would like to move because of her neighborhood’s crime problems. The document said “she has looked at housing in Newport Beach and found only mobile homes for sale in the range of $200,000, which she obviously could not afford.”

The lawsuit asks Judge Leonard Goldstein to rule that the city’s land-use regulations are unconstitutional and in violation of California statutes. Its ultimate goal is to force the city to build more affordable housing.

“The 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,” Crystal C. Sims, a plaintiffs’ attorney with the Legal Aid Society of Orange County, said before testimony began in September, 1985.

Experts contend that the lawsuit is the first of its kind to be tried in the United States and that its outcome could affect the future of affordable housing throughout California.

In their closing arguments, submitted in writing, plaintiffs’ attorneys charge the city with subterfuge and racial discrimination and say that any means employed by the city to alleviate the problem since the suit was filed in 1980 have been “highly suspect, too little and too late.”

“The actions of the city have been diametrically opposed to its low- and moderate-income housing needs, resulting in the perpetuation and exacerbation of the city’s racial and economic segregation. . . ,” the attorneys said. “This court must find that the city’s land-use policies and actions existing prior to the filing of this lawsuit were clearly exclusionary and that the city’s actions taken since the filing of this lawsuit have been inadequate in dealing with its past abuses.”

Many residents of Newport Beach, however, contend that living in the community--where new, single-family homes can cost from $600,000 to in the millions and boat slips are a common backyard feature--is a privilege that must be earned. And city officials say Newport Beach already has homes the poor can afford.

The closing argument cites copious examples of what it calls the city’s bad faith in providing homes for the poor--especially those who work in Newport Beach but cannot afford to live there.

It contends that:

- Census data provided during testimony shows that since 1970 Newport Beach has been one of the wealthiest cities in Orange County, both in terms of family and household incomes and the cost of rents and mortgages. Such data also shows that the city is among the most racially segregated in the county in terms of its ratio of whites to non-whites.

- The city has the county’s lowest percentage of renters participating in the Section 8 housing program, a federal rent-subsidy, in the county. Only 27 households in the city receive rent subsidies, and only two of those are minority households.

- Amendments to the city’s general plan made in 1978 and 1979 decreased density so greatly that it is impossible to build affordable, multifamily housing in the city. “The city had erected a legal barrier to the development of low- or moderate-income housing, and it had insured the perpetuation of its racial and economical segregation as effectively as if it had constructed a physical barrier with very expensive toll gates,” the document said.

- City officials accepted federal money from the Community Development Block Grant program, which is designed to create affordable housing for the poor, built a senior citizens center but left the program when the Department of Housing and Urban Development began pressuring cities to use the money for the direct needs of the low-income, the document contends. “The city did prostitute itself by taking $865,000 (for the senior center) and then turning its back on its low- and moderate-income family housing needs and on the obligations it certified it would meet,” the document said.

“I don’t think the senior center has ever had a significant impact on low-income people in Newport Beach,” lawyer Sims said. “Building a senior center is a nice, safe action politically. Building a family housing project obviously was not.”

In the closing argument, Sims and co-counsel Jonathan Lehrer-Graiwer acknowledge that Newport Beach officials have made some strides in creating affordable housing but call the recent measures a “thinly veiled charade.”

“Since this lawsuit was filed, the city has assisted in producing only 20 units of housing required to be affordable to very low-income households and approximately 174 units actually required to be affordable to low-income households,” the document said. “In contrast, the city has required the development of approximately 300 units affordable to moderate-income households, while approving the development of more than 2,300 total units.”

The results of Newport Beach’s actions since 1980 are “little more than tokenism and a public relations attempt to fool this court into believing that the city is aggressively responding to its housing needs,” it adds.

Attorneys for Newport Beach are scheduled to file their closing argument on Nov. 7. The plaintiffs must file a written rebuttal by Nov. 24, at which point Goldstein will probably take the matter under submission, deciding the issue at a later date.