Homeowners Savor Victory Over Adult Businesses

Studio City residents got mad six years ago when an adult bookstore threatened to sue them for slander for complaining that the shop was disrupting a nearby neighborhood.

Today, the homeowners are getting even.

Los Angeles city officials this morning will begin enforcing an ordinance inspired and partly written by Studio City residents that bans adult-oriented businesses within 500 feet of homes anywhere in the city.

Besides Le Sex Shoppe, which has rankled Studio City homeowners since it opened at 12323 Ventura Blvd. seven years ago, the ordinance threatens to close another 80 or so adult bookstores, topless bars and porno movie theaters throughout Los Angeles.

“Revenge is mine,” said Daniel M. Shapiro, former president of the Studio City Residents Assn., who proposed the ordinance after he was threatened with the slander suit.

“We were just after that one place. But now all of them in the city are going to feel the effect.”

Approved in 1986

The crackdown on sexually oriented neighborhood businesses was unanimously approved by the City Council in 1986. It gave business owners two years, until Monday, to apply for waivers to keep their doors open.

Three-year waivers can be granted to adult businesses that can prove they have long-term leases on their buildings or that they have major investments in their sites. Exemptions can also be approved if a business owner can prove there is no place to rent anywhere in the city that is not 500 feet from a residential zone--an unlikely prospect, according to officials.

Today, city building and safety officials are printing up special citation forms that will be used to write violations against adult entertainment businesses that failed to comply. Such citations can eventually lead to criminal prosecution by the city.

“We shouldn’t need many. I’ve ordered 100,” said Jim Carney, principal inspector with the Department of Building and Safety’s bureau of community safety.

Carney said the city has a list of about 80 adult businesses that allegedly operate within 500 feet of homes. By Monday, 24 of them had applied for waivers.

Hearings on Waivers

City zoning administrators will conduct public hearings on each application before deciding whether to issue waivers. Those rulings can be appealed by homeowners or owners of adult businesses to the city’s Board of Zoning Appeals, officials said.

Shapiro, a lawyer, said the crackdown was prompted by a 1981 exchange of letters between his homeowner association and operators of the Le Sex Shoppe, a chain of 23 Southern California bookstores.

He said he wrote to complain that their newly opened Studio City store was “offensive to the community . . . a source of problems” for nearby homeowners.

“I got a letter back from their lawyer threatening to bring a slander and libel action against me. They got me upset and angry,” Shapiro recalled Monday.

According to Shapiro, he promptly sat down and drafted an ordinance proposal aimed at restricting adult entertainment near neighborhoods. Then he tried to find a Studio City-area city councilman who would introduce it.

“Joel Wachs wouldn’t touch it with a 10-foot pole,” Shapiro said. “Then I took it to Zev Yaroslavsky and got the same answer. I shopped it a good two solid months before I took it to Hal Bernson.”

Bernson, long an opponent of smut, “looked at it at 9:30 one morning, drafted a motion at 9:45 and dropped it in the council hopper at 10,” Shapiro said.

Wachs and Bernson were out of the state Monday and unavailable for comment. But Yaroslavsky said he could not remember Shapiro ever approaching him with the proposal.

Lawyers for the city say the ordinance proposal was scrutinized before it was submitted to the City Council.

“We think it’s constitutionally valid,” said Claudia McGee-Henry, a deputy city attorney who wrote the final version of the ordinance.

“We had to pay close attention to the First Amendment rights of business operations and their patrons. Great care was taken in drafting this,” she said.

A spokesman for Le Sex Shoppe disagreed, however.

David M. Brown, an attorney, said he will argue that the ordinance is unconstitutional if any of the Le Sex Shoppe outlets or other adult businesses he represents is denied permission to continue operation.

He said it is not possible for neighborhood bookstores and movie houses to close and reopen amid factories in isolated manufacturing zones as allowed by the ordinance.

“There are definitely new locations that can be found,” Brown said. “Unfortunately, they have very little relationship to specific communities and market areas.

“As a practical matter, the areas left are totally inadequate for adult businesses. That would be the basis of a constitutional challenge.”

Of the 23 Le Sex Shoppe outlets operated by a Chatsworth-based corporation, seven are in Los Angeles, Brown said. Only one of those, located in Hollywood, is farther than 500 feet from residences, he said.

Brown also said he cannot remember writing the threatening letter to Shapiro six years ago. “If I wrote that letter, I’m sorry I wrote it,” he said.

City officials said Monday they had not tallied the number of adult-oriented businesses in the San Fernando Valley that will be affected by the ordinance. But such businesses include gay-oriented sexual encounter facilities, adult motels, adult-oriented cabarets and adult arcades.

Polly Ward, president of the Studio City Residents Assn., said patrons of Le Sex Shoppe have attracted prostitutes to the area and disrupted a neighborhood of single-family homes across the Los Angeles River behind the shop.

Homeowners have seen lewd acts taking place in front of their residences and on a footbridge over the river that links the neighborhood with the Studio City shopping area, Ward said.

One resident has installed a spotlight aimed at the bridge to halt sexual acts that have occurred there, Ward said.

Investigators from the Police Department’s North Hollywood Division vice squad who are familiar with the Studio City area were unavailable for comment Monday. But police acknowledged that officers rely on the homeowner’s light when watching for suspicious activity on the bridge.

While periodic police sweeps have scared prostitutes away from the area, homeowners plan to demand that the city install permanent lighting and gates on the bridge, Ward said. Her association is willing to pay a private security guard service to lock and unlock the gate each day, she said.

Tonight, members of the Studio City Residents Assn. will be asked at a meeting to write letters to the city demanding closure of Le Sex Shoppe, she said.

“We’ve put up with it long enough,” Ward said. “We intend now to let the city ordinance do the talking.”