Ruling May Help Ex-GI in Allegation of Housing Bias

Glen Morris, an ex-GI who recently returned from a tour of duty in West Germany, was happy to be back in Orange County and looking for a place to rent earlier this month.

“This is where I was working before I went into the Army,” he said Monday.

But his California dreaming soon turned into a nightmare, Morris said, when he ran into what he believes to be discrimination against children during his search for an apartment in Santa Ana.

“The apartment was advertised and everything,” he said. “I told the lady (in charge of rentals) that I had a wife and a 10-month-old son. She said, ‘I cannot allow more than two persons to a unit because of the parking situation.’ But we don’t even have a car.”

So Morris went to the Orange County Housing Council, a nonprofit organization that investigates such matters, and lodged a complaint--one of about 700 reports of discrimination against families with children the council receives every year, staff attorney Elliot Block said.

Now, Block said, thanks to a ruling last week by the state Fair Employment and Housing Commission in San Francisco, the council has a new legal tool to deal with complaints such as that lodged by Morris. The commission ruled that occupancy limits may not be used to try to keep children out of rental units in the state.

Block said the new ruling “will be of great help to us in cases that discriminate against families with children.”

Discrimination against renters with children, Block said, “is a tremendous problem in Orange County. Last fiscal year we had approximately 1,900 complaints regarding discrimination, of which about 40% involved complaints about discrimination against families with children.”

A state Supreme Court ruling in 1982 outlawed housing discrimination against children. But Block and other fair-housing attorneys say landlords since have

used occupancy limits as a subterfuge.

The case decided last week by the commission involved an apartment complex in the Los Angeles County suburb of Hawaiian Gardens. A married couple and their infant daughter were denied an apartment because the complex had imposed a limit of one occupant per bedroom. The commission ruled that a two-resident limit for a two-bedroom apartment discriminated against children, whatever the intention of the limit.

Block said Monday that the commission’s ruling may be challenged in court. But, he said the 5-0 decision can and will be used by the Orange County Housing Council, which investigates discrimination complaints for both county government and most cities in the county, in its mediation work with apartment renters.

“We believe that ruling is going to stand, and we’ll use that ruling in much of our informal mediation with landlords,” Block said.

M. Dick Osumi, the lawyer for the state Department of Fair Employment and Housing who handled the Hawaiian Gardens case before the commission, described the 5-0 decision as a “landmark” ruling. He said there was no precedent in state law that could be used to fight private occupancy limits.

Marcella Brown, executive director of the Fair Housing Congress of Southern California, said many of her agency’s discrimination complaints have come from such areas as the Westside of Los Angeles and Orange County, where adult-only apartment complexes have thrived in the past.

It was such a complaint that led to last week’s commission ruling.

In 1986, Daleen Tolmasov, 29, and her husband, Morris, 28, filed a discrimination complaint against Merribrook Apartments in Hawaiian Gardens. The Tolmasovs alleged that the owners of the 102-unit apartment complex told them that they would allow only one occupant per bedroom, which made it impossible for the Tolmasovs and their infant daughter, Chantel, to live in a two-bedroom unit.

“When my husband came back and told me we couldn’t live there because of their rule, I thought it sounded peculiar,” Daleen Tolmasov said Monday. “I said, ‘No way--that doesn’t sound right to me.’ So I called the Fair Employment Department, and it didn’t sound right to them either.”

Last year, the Tolmasovs’ complaint was upheld by an administrative law judge. Then, last week, the Fair Employment and Housing Commission fined the owners of the Merribrook complex $5,000 for discriminating against the family.

The commission does not decide cases with the authority of a court. But it is empowered to interpret state codes. As a result, said Charles Isham, executive vice president of the 25,000-member Apartment Assn. of Greater Los Angeles, the decision “puts us on notice that the state will go after apartment owners who are in violation.”

Osumi said several similar family discrimination cases already have been filed and are being challenged by landlords. He said the Fair Employment and Housing Department’s Los Angeles office is investigating at least three cases.

Ronald Steinbach, a lawyer for the Merribrook’s owners, said he was unsure whether he would appeal the Tolmasov case to state courts.

William Kraus, executive vice president of the Orange County Apartment Assn., said the commission’s ruling does not appear to be causing much of a problem for the 3,000 apartment-owning members of his group.

“It really won’t have much effect on us because we have continued to recommend to our members a broader guideline for fair housing,” Kraus said. “That case in Hawaiian Gardens came as a result of a limit of one occupant per bedroom, but we have recommended the guideline of two plus one per bedroom--two adults and one child, for instance.”

Kraus said some apartment owners had called the association, “asking for interpretation” of the commission’s ruling. But he said there appears to be no widespread concern among apartment owners in Orange County “because most of our membership has been following that two plus one per bedroom standard.”

In its ruling, the commission did not say what type of occupancy standard might be permissible. But Osumi said a limit of three residents to a two-bedroom house could probably be shown to be discriminatory in most areas. He said a limit of four or five occupants to a two-bedroom apartment would be “a gray area.”

Kraus noted that the guideline his association has advocated allows up to six people--a husband, wife and four children--in a two-bedroom apartment.

The housing council’s Block did not share Kraus’ prediction that the commission ruling will have little impact on the county. Block said the number of complaints his office has received involving alleged discrimination against families with children leads to the conclusion that there is widespread use of occupancy limits by apartment owners to keep out children.

“The results have been terrible,” Block said. “Some families have had to split up, with children being sent to live with aunts and grandparents.”

Morris, the Army veteran who claims that he ran into discrimination against children in Santa Ana, said Monday that apartment occupancy rules should not force families to split up.

“I’m black and my wife is German and we’ve seen discrimination,” Morris said. “Discrimination really hits a nerve. It’s based on stereotypes, and it’s shocking.”

Morris said he finds discrimination especially deplorable when it is aimed at families with children.

“This is something to get angry about,” he said.

Times staff writer Stephen Braun contributed to this story.