$20,600 Awarded in Rental Bias Action

Owners of a Hollywood area apartment complex who effectively barred an interracial couple by imposing a prohibitive income requirement were assessed $20,600 in damages Wednesday by the state civil rights agency.

The Fair Employment and Housing Commission, meeting in San Francisco, unanimously found the owners and managers of the apartments at 1800 N. Harvard Blvd. guilty of race discrimination.

The five-member commission said a local housing agency that sent checkers found that the income requirement was applied only to interracial and all-black couples.

In November, 1986, John Vlautin, a white, and Lisa Teasley, a black, responded to a newspaper ad for a one-bedroom unfurnished apartment for $525 a month.

The manager, Alta Elrod, told them the owners’ policy was to require that each tenant have a monthly income of three times the rent, or $1,575.

The couple complained to the Hollywood-Wilshire Fair Housing Council, which sent several couples to the apartment, posing as prospective tenants, and found the same income requirement for every black or interracial couple. The apartment, owned by Hazel Flennikin and managed by Beaumont Property Management Co., had no black tenants, the commission said.

The couple later found a comparable apartment for $675 a month.

Describing the effect of the incident on the couple, the commission said Vlautin “became anxious, defensive and uncomfortable in public . . . lost confidence in his strength to deal with the discrimination he felt he and Teasley would have to face in the future,” and had trouble sleeping. Teasley also had trouble sleeping, “felt stressed, lost confidence and became reclusive,” the commission said.

The commissioners ordered $5,000 in damages for emotional distress be paid to Vlautin and $10,000 to Teasley. About $3,200 more was awarded for the difference in apartment rentals, and $1,205 apiece, the maximum allowed by law, was set as punitive damages. The commission also ordered the owners to advertise themselves as an equal opportunity renter, and allow the local housing council to inspect their records each quarter for three years.

The now married Vlautin, 24, and Teasley, 26, said Wednesday that they had not been informed of the findings. The decision was similar to one reached after an administrative hearing in February, Vlautin said. That resulted in a recommendation for a $21,000 award.

Vlautin said, “We felt from the very beginning, when we decided to confront them, (that) our main objective was not to win a settlement. We just wanted to make sure they wouldn’t do it again . . . . It was really traumatic for us.”

Attorney Robert Scholnick, who represents the owners and managers, said Wednesday that the damages of $15,000 for emotional distress would be appealed in Los Angeles Superior Court. He called the commission’s treatment of that issue “unconscionable.”