City Seeks to Say a House Is Not a Dorm : Housing: City Atty. John Witt’s office is preparing a measure that would allow the city to decide what constitutes a San Diego family.

Frustrated with ineffectual attempts to control college students who turn single-family homes into “mini-dorms,” City Atty. John Witt’s office is preparing a more drastic measure that would allow the city to decide what constitutes a San Diego family.

Witt’s office has drafted an ordinance that would divide single-family home dwellers into “traditional” and “non-traditional” families, imposing parking restrictions on groups of adults not joined by blood, marriage or adoption.

The city’s community planning groups have endorsed a separate proposal that achieves much the same purpose and are preparing to forward that proposal to City Hall. Both proposals are expected to go before a San Diego City Council committee Nov. 13.

Either measure, if passed by the San Diego City Council, is expected to spark a court battle because the restriction on the rights of non-traditional families flouts a 1980 state Supreme Court decision that specifically prohibits cities from attempting to limit the number of unrelated adults who may live together.

But that is part of the plan. With the dramatic change in the composition of the Supreme Court in the past nine years, the thinking at City Hall, and among some community group leaders, is that now may be an opportune time to directly challenge the court’s ruling in “City of Santa Barbara vs. Beverly Adamson.”

“Only (Justice Stanley) Mosk is left from the court that wrote that decision. All the rest are (Gov. George) Deukmejian’s appointees,” said Chief Deputy City Atty. Fred Conrad, who drafted the proposed city ordinance. “In an effort to protect our sacred single-family zones, we would at least like to hope that the court’s inclination has changed.”

The city proposal already has drawn opposition from building industry representatives who worry that it might prevent groups of unrelated people from buying homes together and from others who believe it is simply unfair. Even among residents of neighborhoods plagued by the noise, parking problems and declining property values caused by the proliferation of homes jammed with college students, there is some hesitancy to back Conrad’s solution.

“We don’t live in an ‘Ozzie and Harriet’ society any more and, particularly in San Diego, with the cost of housing being a critical issue, we have to create definitions that allow non-traditional families” in single-family homes, said Doug Case, chairman of the College Area Community Council, the planning group for the San Diego State University neighborhood.

“If the issue is density, if the issue is parking, it should not make any difference what the nature of the relationship between the people in the house is,” he added.

But others, who have lived through a decade of hard-partying students in their formerly quiet, traffic-free, single-family neighborhoods, are ready to address the problems with drastic measures.

“What we have now does not work,” said Barbara Greene, another College Area Community Council member, of the city ordinances and programs aimed at mini-dorm problems. “The mini-dorms are escalating. The problems in this area are so bad. Property values are going down.”

Born of the enrollment boom at SDSU, the mini-dorm controversy is primarily a clash of cultures between exuberant college students and aging single-family homeowners who for decades have populated the neighborhoods near the university.

As on-campus housing grew scarce in the early 1980s, and the residential population around SDSU began retiring, more of the single-family homes put up for sale were purchased by investors, many of whom rented the homes to groups of college students. Today, there are about 500 rental properties in the college area planning zone, Case said.

With the students came more cars than driveways could handle, and on-street parking became more difficult to find. Some students simply began parking in front yards.

Loud parties became more common, and absentee investors did not keep up some of the properties they rented out. The students, who often lived in a home for a year or less, were not responsible for maintenance either.

The problems, victims note, are not restricted to the SDSU neighborhood. In Del Mar Terrace, residents complain that low-cost “Go Homes,” five or six one-person suites clustered around a single kitchen in one building, have caused some of the same parking and nuisance problems.

“This isn’t what you expected to have when you bought into a single-family neighborhood,” said Opal Trueblood, chairman of the Torrey Pines Community Planning Group.

The city has responded with a battery of ordinances and programs, none of them effective. In July, 1988, the Single Family Rental Overlay Zone ordinance went into effect in the College, Del Cerro, Rolando, Navajo, Grantville, Allied Gardens and San Carlos communities. The ordinance, which applies only to rental housing, limits the number of people who may occupy a residence based on the number of bedrooms, bathrooms and off-street parking spaces.

But enforcement of the rules is time-consuming and cumbersome, with a maximum $1,000 fine allowable only after a court hearing. Overburdened city code enforcement officers must take complaints, then determine the number of people living in a home before enforcement proceedings can begin.

In 16 months, the city has corrected about half a dozen problem homes, said Joseph Schilling, deputy city attorney in charge of code enforcement.

“They make so many trips out there . . . and then the semester changes, and the kids move out,” said Councilwoman Judy McCarty, whose 7th District includes the College area.

“The whole issue is how do you prove, from a legal standpoint, who is living at a certain residence,” Schilling added. “Whether it’s under SFROZ or this new definition of family, you’re going to need a zoning inspector to go out and determine who lives there, and you can’t.”

The city followed the zoning ordinance with a civil penalties ordinance allowing daily fines of $2,500 for flagrant violators; a “second response ordinance” that establishes fines of as much as $500 against party hosts if police must respond a second time to complaints of an unruly party; a good neighbor program; a one-warning policy for loud parties that gives police the right to shut down parties during the following year based on a single complaint by a neighbor; and a boom box confiscation ordinance.

Throughout, the city has been hamstrung by the “Adamson” case, a Rose Bird-era court decision that overturned a Santa Barbara court’s injunction prohibiting 12 unrelated people from living together because of a city ordinance that defined “family” as two or more people related by blood, marriage or legal adoption.

The court ruled that cities cannot impose arbitrary numbers in family definitions, stating that such ordinances discriminate against “alternate families.”

“Population density can be regulated by reference to floor space and facilities,” the majority wrote. “Noise and morality can be dealt with by enforcement of police power ordinances and criminal statutes. Traffic and parking can be handled by limitations on the number of cars (applied evenly to all households) and by off-street parking requirements.”

This year, the swelling number of complaints about mini-dorms led to a series of hearings before the Planning Commission and other city officials, followed by the demand that Witt’s office develop a legal solution.

Conrad’s simple ordinance change creates two family classifications for single family homes. A traditional family would be two or more people related by blood, marriage or adoption, as well as anyone placed in the home by a court or under legal guardianship. Foster homes with fewer than six children would qualify.

Non-traditional families would be two or more people who do not qualify under those rules.

Non-traditional families would be subject to a new parking regulation requiring an off-street parking space for each adult over 18 beginning Jan. 1, 1990. Homes occupied by more than one traditional family would be subject to the same requirement.

Conrad admits that the ordinance sets up non-uniform standards for traditional and non-traditional families, but claims that it is legal and responds to a longstanding, valid complaint of single-family homeowners. He acknowledges that, for example, a traditional family with four teen-age drivers who own their own cars would not be subject to the same rules as three unrelated drivers living in the same home.

“We need relief of some kind from a pattern of conduct and living that is typically that of our college students,” he said. “That goes back to lack of parental supervision (in the mini-dorms), any father figure or mother figure who keeps the conduct within the bounds of propriety.”

Conrad is equally certain the regulations will be tested if they are passed by the City Council. “It would be naive to think somebody won’t,” he said.

The Community Planners Committee, a citywide advisory body composed of the chairmen of the city’s 31 community planning groups, has a different suggestion. The panel last month approved a resolution asking the city simply to enforce an ordinance still on the books that prohibits more than three unrelated people from living together in a single-family home in neighborhoods zoned for single-family use. Non-traditional living arrangements would be allowable in other zones.

“What we endorsed was the idea of the city going back to the original definition that was in ‘Santa Barbara’ and carrying that through to the state Supreme Court again,” said Trueblood, chairman of the Torrey Pines Community Planning Group.

McCarty is also considering a suggestion to license rental housing like businesses, forcing investors to conform to parking, noise and landscaping regulations and face loss of the license if they do not continue to comply. But McCarty said she would support the new family definitions if they can be legally enforced.

“We’ve got to do something,” she said. “I think (the ordinance) has possibilities, but we’ve got to make sure we are within the spirit of the Constitution. That means the Constitution, not Rose Bird’s interpretation of the Constitution.”