Suit Claims Blacks Excluded From Apartment Complex

The Fair Housing Council of Orange County filed suit against the owners and operators of a Santa Ana apartment complex Monday, alleging that they systematically and illegally refuse to rent to blacks.

The council said that it used real apartment-hunters and “testers”--people of different races posing as home-seekers--to detect differences in the way the prospective tenants were treated.

Officials from the companies that own and manage the 52-unit Mango Tree Apartments in the 2000 block of East Santa Clara Avenue could not be reached for comment. But the on-site manager, Dan Bell, who is also named as a defendant, denied that race is a factor when he screens tenants.

The Fair Housing Council, a Santa Ana-based nonprofit agency that fights housing discrimination, outlined its allegations in a lawsuit filed in Orange County Superior Court. The organization traces its inquiry to a complaint from Yolanda Whitehead, a black woman who saw a for-rent sign outside the Mango Tree apartments on Nov. 4, 1989, and stopped to inquire.

Bell and his wife, Lorraine, told Whitehead that there were no apartments available and said she could inquire again after Jan. 1, 1990, the lawsuit said.

Suspicious, Whitehead asked a white co-worker, Michael Meisner, to ask about the vacant apartment, the suit said. When Meisner called on Nov. 8, he was told that an apartment was available, the lawsuit said. Whitehead returned to the complex the same day and asked again about the unit but was told that it was not available, the Fair Housing Council contends.

Whitehead complained to the Fair Housing Council, which sent two “testers” to the building on Nov. 14. The first tester, a black woman, was told that there would be no vacancies until Jan. 1 and that none were available for viewing, but the second tester, a white woman who arrived 25 minutes later, was told that an apartment was vacant, was shown the unit and given a rental application, the suit said.

Bell said that when Whitehead first inquired, there were no vacancies. After she left, a man who had recently moved in failed to come up with the remainder of his deposit, so he left, creating an opening just before Meisner arrived.

“It doesn’t matter to me who rents our apartments,” Bell said. “She (Whitehead) is the one bringing up all this racial stuff. If she had just come back with her application the first time, she could have had that apartment. We’ve got vacancies right now if she wants one.”

Bell said one black person currently lives in the complex.

The Housing Council suit names Calde Investment Co., a limited partnership that owns the building, and Capitalvest Property Management Co., which manages it, as defendants, along with the Bells.

It claims that the defendants have denied housing opportunities to blacks and given the apartment complex “a discriminatory reputation that deters otherwise-interested black renters from seeking apartments” there. The council tion seeks a court order halting the alleged discrimination and unspecified damages.