Homeowners Strike a Small Blow in Battle on Regulations

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 had not 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 recently. 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 touch on 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 associations’ 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 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 that has 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.

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, 40, 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 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 in 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. 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 proposed law 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 such as 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 constitutional rights are being trampled.

Since a 1975 Florida appeals court decided that a condominium association could bar drinking in a clubhouse, courts around the nation generally have upheld CC&Rs; unless they are discriminatory or unreasonably burdensome on the homeowner, said Robert Ellickson, a professor of natural resources law at Stanford University.

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.

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.”

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 Santa Clarita Valley looking for someplace quiet and peaceful.

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