Obey Thy Neighbor : Homeowner Groups Try to Enforce a Strict Code Among Residents

Neil Ladouceur pulled a weed from the cactus garden in front of his house in Castaic as he talked about the homeowners association man who kept peeping into his backyard.

“At first he told me I couldn’t keep my 18-foot boat in the garage,” Ladouceur said. In mid-January, the man left Ladouceur a note ordering him to remove outdoor Christmas lights that he hadn’t had time to take down.

After a heated discussion on a third occasion, about a topic that Ladouceur, 26, said he has long since forgotten, “I told him to take a hike.”

Ladouceur and nearly 100 of his neighbors in the Stonegate development sent their homeowners association a similar message this week. They voted overwhelmingly to allow a small group of residents to keep basketball hoops that had been installed atop garages, in violation of the development’s covenants, conditions and restrictions, known as CC&Rs.;

Vow of Obedience

Restrictive covenants and the homeowners associations that administer them are common in planned housing developments across the Santa Clarita Valley. The conditions, which residents agree to obey when they buy their homes, usually require yards to be maintained and often ban the storage of boats or recreational vehicles in driveways and garages. The rules also can address architectural or aesthetic concerns, such as the material and color allowed in the installation of a roof or a front door.

For example, most homeowners associations probably would frown on a house painted bright orange, or a resident who insisted on taking apart three 1969 Chevrolets on his front lawn.

But in some instances, such as the basketball hoopla, homeowners complain that the agreements, if enforced too strictly, can erode their privacy and limit their enjoyment of their homes. Some say they never expected their association boards to fix such a watchful eye on their property.

“You’ve got a couple of old ogres ruining it for everybody else,” Ladouceur said. “All of us worked very hard to move into these houses. My brother and I spent our life’s savings. We want a happy community.”

“The CC&Rs; are supposed to prevent people from putting in a green driveway or painting their house purple,” said Don Dixon, 28, who lives down the street from Ladouceur in a house with a basketball hoop. The hoop’s opponents, he said, “were taking the situation too far. But everything turned out just right, and that’s the way I want to leave it.”

Many residents--an overwhelming majority, say Santa Clarita Valley homeowners association leaders--support their CC&Rs; and are glad to have an elected group to whom they can turn for fast action against the garish, gaudy and gauche.

Indeed, the homes and yards in Santa Clarita Valley developments are as well tended and crisp-looking as Ladouceur’s cactus garden. Yet while architectural harmony may abound, maintaining social harmony can be difficult for residents who feel constrained by the CC&Rs; and for association board members with the task of adjudicating it all.

Ed Freitas, who lives in a Valencia development called The Bungalows, is a refugee from the San Fernando Valley. He said he moved his family in January after 12 years in Sun Valley because of Valencia’s schools and to get away from “the hustle and bustle” of the Valley. The old neighborhood had a lot of problems, but the car situation was worst.

“People tended to use the streets for doing maintenance on their automobiles,” Freitas, 40, said. “Or else they just buy a lot of vehicles and use their property as a storage area.”

Elaine Benson, a resident of the Valencia Hills development, moved from Van Nuys 10 years ago. “Many of us were drawn here at that time for those reasons,” she said. “CC&Rs; represent freedoms rather than restrictions, because they allow me to live in an area in which my own standards are reflected in the appearance of my neighbors’ yards.”

Parochial Concerns

Maintaining those standards tends to keep Santa Clarita Valley homeowners associations occupied with more local, parochial concerns than their politically active counterparts in the San Fernando Valley, said Art Reddy, a sergeant with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and a member of the North Valley Homeowners Assn. in Valencia.

Yet politics is not absent from the associations’ functioning. Most impose assessments, often amounting to $50 to $100 a month, to pay for upkeep of “common areas” such as pools and clubhouses. Most boards are elected once a year by a vote of the homeowners.

Backers of planned developments supported a state law passed in 1985 that switched the burden of proof in CC&R; civil disputes from the association to the homeowner. They also support a bill that would allow associations more freedom to increase assessments on homeowners. That bill passed the state Assembly last month and now is pending in a Senate committee.

There are at least 18 associations in Valencia and perhaps 40 or more in the entire Santa Clarita Valley, said Larry Mosesson, vice president of the association in Valencia’s Old Orchard I development.

In unincorporated areas like the Santa Clarita Valley, some legal authorities say, the associations are much like governments. But the fact that they are not governments is an important distinction for residents who think their rights under the U.S. Constitution are being trampled.

Racial Covenants Outlawed

“For the Constitution to apply, you need state action,” said Robert Ellickson, a professor of natural resources law at Stanford University. Restrictive covenants are centuries old and were an important form of land-use management in an era before government zoning, he said. As late as the 1950s, sellers drew up covenants that discriminated against racial or religious groups, although the U.S. Supreme Court ruled those sorts of agreements unenforceable in 1948, he said.

Since a 1975 Florida appeals court decided that a condominium association could bar drinking in a clubhouse, courts around the country generally have upheld CC&Rs; unless they are discriminatory or unreasonably burdensome on the homeowner, Ellickson said.

State laws also limit associations’ power, but “the real rules of the game here are established largely by informal interaction by residents who know each other and live together,” he said.

“People don’t want to get involved in lawsuits against their neighbor,” Ellickson said.

Sometimes they do. The Valencia Hills Homeowners Assn. sued two couples in 1983 in disputes over new roofs. The association has maintained that the roofs were incompatible with others in the neighborhood, and that suing to remove the roofs was necessary to maintain architectural standards.

The couples are bitter.

Chester and Marcia Greengard’s case “is going into its sixth year now of harassment,” Marcia Greengard said.

“It came to a point when they adopted some kind of code of silence,” said Susan LaCroix. The association’s suit against LaCroix and her husband, Lenny, was dismissed last month. “Nobody would talk about it and nobody would talk to me.”

Residents of other developments describe similar tensions that arose over CC&Rs; and homeowners associations.

Fiery Meetings

Mary Cowan said the year she spent on the board of the Canyon Country Homeowners Assn. was tumultuous. Cowan and her husband, John, were concerned that the old board wasn’t following some of its bylaws governing financial management and disclosure. “I’ve never been treated politely,” by the board, she said, adding that she was told, “ ‘If you don’t like it, move the hell out.’ Always the words hell and damn, you hear those a lot.” A newsletter circulated in the development a year ago contained an unsigned letter that referred to a meeting attended by one homeowner “of questionable sobriety.” The Cowans say it was clear to anyone who had attended the meeting that the reference was to John Cowan, who said he had not been drinking that night. John Cowan said he was offended when, at the next meeting, another resident joked to him, “I hope you’re not drinking at this meeting.”

In the Old Orchard II development of Valencia, a resident said she recently was at a picnic with her husband when a homeowners association representative told her an item in her front yard had run afoul of one of her neighbor’s aesthetic standards. It was a small planter shaped like a duck.

The association has not pursued the matter, but the woman said, “It just points up . . . how petty, how stupid people can be.” She asked that her name not be published because, “I would rather not be labeled as a troublemaker,” she said.

Scott and Vicki Pryor, residents of The Bungalows, are pleased with the neighborhood rules, but the rules prompted a former neighbor of theirs to move out this year, they said. Boats were against the CC&R;, so the neighbor built a wall that surrounded his boat and that matched the surroundings, to avoid trouble about the boat.

“Somebody bellyached about the wall,” Scott Pryor said.

“I know who it was that bellyached,” his wife chimed in. “It was because he didn’t think of it first.”

Woeful Watchdog

But for all the complaints of homeowners who have a hard time pleasing their neighbors, life as a neighborhood watchdog isn’t always fun either, said Cliff Arrington, president of the Vista Ridge Homeowners Assn. in Valencia.

“I’ve had my house egged,” Arrington said. “You are a volunteer and you don’t have a lot of help. . . . You shouldn’t have to tell people not to do things, but that’s what you end up having to do.”

Arrington’s position brings mostly mundane responsibilities and a burden of sorts, he said.

“From time to time there are things, they are very, very minor,” he sighed. “A guy lets his sprinklers run too long and the water runs onto the neighbor’s grass, and rather than say something to the guy, they’ll call me up at 11 o’clock. . . . They get dependent on you.”

Although Arrington is on the other side of the fence from those who moan that restrictive covenants go too far or that association boards are too power hungry, his story is not unlike theirs. Each came to the blue skies and gentle hills of the Santa Clarita Valley looking for someplace quiet, someplace peaceful, someplace without the constant butting of heads.

“Everybody’s looking for paradise, right?” said Ed Freitas of Valencia, formerly of Sun Valley. “We’ll probably be here five or 10 years, and then start bitching and go somewhere else.”