RV Drives a Wedge Between Neighbors

The Melida road cul-de-sac in Mission Viejo used to be a neighborly place--until the Hildees moved in last August and parked their 31-foot recreational vehicle on the street in plain view of the $300,000 homes.

Instead of extending a warm welcome and maybe a covered dish or two, the neighbors complained to Sharon and Gary Hildee that the motor home was an eyesore and a danger to young children, and would they please move it.

“It was a new RV, but almost as large as their home,” said neighbor Cheryl Altman.

When the Hildees refused, the troubles started. A neighbor called the police, who ordered it removed from the street. So the Hildees moved the motor home onto their lot. Then things got ugly.

The Hildees said most neighbors would look the other way when they crossed paths. Others hurled insults, calling the RV a “tin monstrosity.” One ran outside to take snapshots whenever the RV rolled up, making Gary Hildee so nervous one day that he backed the rig into a fence.

The Hildees said one neighbor hissed at them: “How pleasant could it be living here and knowing that people are upset all around you?”

The neighbors took their complaints to the local homeowners’ association, which ruled that the Hildees were in their rights to park the RV on their property.

“It’s just been a nightmare since we moved into that house,” Sharon Hildee said.

The RV controversy is not unique to Melida road. Similar incidents constantly flare up in communities across the nation, said Donna Actis, editorial assistant for Trailer Life and Motor Home magazines in Agoura Hills.

“There are those who don’t like looking at it parked on the street,” Actis said. And “motor home owners are very unhappy that they can’t park their motor home anywhere they want. This problem has come up so much that (for us) it’s an old issue.”

Actis noted that some homeowners on her own block in Agoura Hills harassed an RV owner so much with letters and petitions that he finally moved.

Richard Rouse, president of the company that owns the magazines, said in a recent newsletter to RV owners that “anti-RV forces have become increasingly vocal” over parking of the motor homes in residential neighborhoods as both the number of RV owners and the size of their vehicles have increased.

RV industry officials say the number of vehicles on the road has increased from 5.8 million in 1980 to 8 million this year.

“When only a few households in a neighborhood owned an RV, their presence was not as obvious as it has become now that the percentage of RV-owning families is increasing,” Rouse said in the letter.

Rouse warned that anti-RV parking ordinances that once were quietly overlooked are now being enforced with vigor, prompting hundreds of lawsuits and city council hearings.

In Orange County, complaints over RVs and other oversize vehicles are too numerous to even tally, observers say.

“In fact, I’m sitting here writing a letter to a homeowner about his catamaran,” said Steve Feistel, vice president of Villageway Management, which manages 84 of the hundreds of homeowner associations in Orange County.

Feistel said most of the associations in Orange County prohibit storage of recreational vehicles. Feistel said he tries to have the offending vehicle moved by first sending the owner a “friendly” letter.

“And if there’s no response, we follow up with a stronger letter,” he said. If necessary, the association owner will take the RV owner to court.

Cheryl Brown, district manager for Irvine-based Mercury Management, which runs about 100 homeowner associations in Orange County, said that RV complaints come up often enough that almost all the associations now have rules concerning them.

Some associations prohibit parking on streets. Others limit the hours the vehicles can be parked. And still others don’t allow RVs inside the complex at all, Brown said.

One of the major problems involving RVs, Brown said, is that they take up so much parking space in subdivisions where parking is already at a premium. Parking is so limited in some of the association neighborhoods that special stickers are distributed and vehicles without stickers are towed, Brown said.

Short of moving, the frustrated RV owner can store it in an RV park. But as the Hildees in Mission Viejo have found, doing that is almost more trouble than it’s worth.

First of all, there is a waiting list at many Orange County RV parks. Second, the storage fee can run as much as $50. And some of the parks have limited operating hours, which is inconvenient for such people as the Hildees, who want to come and go as they choose.

Before they moved in, Sharon Hildee, 43, an office manager, and her husband, 45, a regional manager for a transportation company, had spent 4 months looking for a home with RV access in south Orange County, something real estate agents say is increasingly difficult to find because lot sizes on new homes have become so small.

Owning a motor home “to roam around in” had been a dream for the Hildees. After raising five children at a larger home in Diamond Bar, the couple wanted to move to a smaller home with space for an RV.

On Mission Viejo’s Melida road, they finally found what they were looking for: a three-bedroom house on a corner lot with room for a 32-foot motor home on the side. Besides having RV access, which the previous owners had not used, the home had a picturesque view of nearby Lake Mission Viejo.

After closing the deal, the Hildees bought a $70,000 motor home. On moving day, Aug. 1, they drove it to their new home, but since it was late in the evening, they left it parked on the street rather than try to back into the RV space.

Deputy Called Out

The next day, an Orange County sheriff’s deputy was called out. After the Hildees managed to squeeze the motor home back onto their property, Sharon Hildee said, several neighbors came out and complained that it violated neighborhood rules.

Neighbors agree that that’s basically what happened but accuse the Hildees of being melodramatic.

“Everybody has been very calm and collected and kind to her,” resident Judy Deering said of Sharon Hildee. “She chooses to misinterpret most comments made.”

Said neighbor Cheryl Altman: “Yes, we were upset at the thought of having an RV there, because we felt it was just an eyesore. It just wasn’t something attractive like putting trees in there.”

After the neighbors came out, the Hildees decided to put their motor home in storage in San Juan Capistrano and find out their rights from the Pacific Coast Property Management Corp., a Mission Viejo firm that manages their tract.

At an August meeting, the association’s board of directors ruled that, indeed, the Hildees were permitted to park a recreational vehicle on their property. In consideration for her next-door neighbor, Sharon Hildee said, she asked permission to raise a mutual 5-foot fence 2 feet and put in trees and shrubbery to help obstruct the view of the motor home and give both families more privacy.

The association approved, but the neighbor, Kathy Wood, said no. She said the raised fence wouldn’t be high enough because the motor home is nearly 12 feet tall.

A petition was passed around the neighborhood soon after, asking the property association to keep the Hildees’ motor home out of the neighborhood.

Armed with the petition and pictures of the motor home, the residents took their protest to a September meeting of the property management association’s board of directors. The board refused to bend.

The neighbors now want the city of Mission Viejo to draft an ordinance banning motor homes from such neighborhoods as Melida.

“We have no protection that someone else might bring a motor home in here,” Deering said.

City officials say they have no plans to enter what they consider an essentially civil dispute.

Meanwhile, the Hildees have decided to take the advice of the neighbor who questioned how they could live in such acrimonious surroundings.

“My husband told me after that second meeting that we might have won this but that he didn’t want to live around people like this,” Sharon Hildee said. “So we put our house up for sale.”