Full Disclosure and the Hunt for a House

As the real estate agent guided his station wagon along a narrow, winding street, my husband and I gazed at Morro Bay on our right, chaparral-covered hills on our left, sand dunes in front of us. We were enchanted.

“So, you know about Diablo?” the agent asked, as we rounded a curve and saw the dark waters of the Pacific Ocean stretched out before us.

“Diablo?” The devil? Why was he asking about the devil? Was he a fundamentalist preacher moonlighting as a real estate agent? And why did he ask in Spanish?

Then I remembered the pictures on the front page of The Times, showing picketers at some God-forsaken place north of Santa Barbara.

“You mean the nuclear power plant?”

Years ago our family toured San Onofre Nuclear Power plant in Orange County. The public relations materials convinced us we understood how a nuclear power plant worked and of its safety. Ever since, we have considered ourselves fairly liberal concerning nuclear energy. Of course, that was before Chernobyl.

“Montana de Oro State park is between here and there. PG&E; has bought all the land in between, so there is a barrier.

“You know the state has imposed a moratorium on San Luis Obispo County,” he continued. “They’ve found trace amounts of nitrates in the aquifers from which the drinking water is drawn, so until a sewage treatment plant is on-line no building is allowed.”

We had no intention of building a house, so I didn’t see how this information concerned us.

His was not the cheery tour guide banter I expected from a real estate agent. I felt uncomfortable listening to one grim detail after another.

“Of course, they may find out that the nitrates are coming from the fertilizer the farmers dump on their crops upstream,” he quipped. If he meant to reassure us, he didn’t.

When a person considers moving, it’s natural to hope you’ll leave all your problems behind, that life will become one long golden sunset. He predicted a radioactive glow.

I remembered that 25 years ago, my husband stated that I could never find a house I liked which we could afford. I was determined to prove him wrong.

The first house I’d looked at was a two-story colonial on a large lot with a remarkably low price for its location near the back bay in Newport Beach. As I peeked into the walk-in closets and wandered through the large kitchen, I naively concluded that the poor quality of the draperies forced the buyer to ask such a low price.

Only when I walked toward my car and the roar of a jet taking off from Orange County Airport almost flattened me to the sidewalk did I understand the true drawback to the house.

The next house I visited had hardwood floors, a brick fireplace with bookcases on either side and a small orchard behind the lushly landscaped back yard. I fell in love with it, and my husband fell in love with the price: $29,000--low for Newport Beach even in 1966.

“Aren’t you concerned about the freeway?” a neighbor asked the day we moved in. “What freeway?”

“The one that’s scheduled for construction at the end of the block.”

Fortunately for us, public outcry kept that freeway from being built, but we still hadn’t learned our lesson. When we went house hunting again three years later, the real estate agent drove us under a freeway ramp in Thousand Oaks, proudly pointed it out and saying, “Look, a freeway only five minutes away. It will open in a few months and you’ll be able to hop on it and go to work.”

As we looked up at the empty freeway lanes, we never suspected that 20 years later tens of thousands of people would hop on that on-ramp each morning and attempt to drive to work. We never imagined a freeway could make so much noise it would force us to move again.

So here we were in Los Osos, trying to escape civilization, and finding it creeping into our consciousness even as we look at the high mountains on either side, and prayed they could shut it out.

Then the real estate agent steered his station wagon up the long driveway toward the house of our dreams: a 3,400-square-foot, 4-year-old house of Victorian design with views of two valleys, mountains, the ocean and Morro Bay. I fell in love with every grain of sand in the yard, every nail in the wooden porch steps, every tile in the kitchen.

We returned home, mesmerized. Nothing else entered our minds except the house, the views. Two weeks later we returned, to determine if it was as charming as we remembered.

On the second visit, the house only improved. The rooms appeared larger, the views more breathtaking. Within an hour, we found ourselves sitting down with the realtor to talk serious business.

He began that business by pushing a disclosure statement across the desk.

Before the transaction could begin, we had to verify that he had told us about Diablo, about the building moratorium, about the nitrates in the drinking water.

The state mandates the form. Its purpose is to protect the buyer, but once signed, it protects the seller, the realty company, utility companies and local, state and federal governments from liability in case the worst happens.

My first instinct was to push the paper back across the desk and walk out. Seeing the words Diablo Nuclear Power Plant in print is even more frightening than hearing them. The form seemed to forecast a meltdown.

Then I began to think what we would have done if we’d been presented with similar forms years ago. No, we wouldn’t have bought the house under the airport runway, but we also wouldn’t have bought the one near the freeway scheduled for construction in Newport Beach.

We probably would have bought the house in Thousand Oaks, because that freeway looked so docile at the time. It would have been the right decision, because we had 20 years of quiet, privacy and open space before the population explosion caught up with us.

It’s important to know the dangers and drawbacks associated with a piece of property, but in the end it is the buyer’s responsibility to figure out the trade-offs. He has to decide under which clouds he’s willing to live.

Easterners wonder why Californians live under the threat of earthquakes. Californians wonder why Easterners abide tornadoes and hurricanes. Modern people wonder why the citizens of Pompeii didn’t move far from the menace of Vesuvius.

So we signed the disclosure statement along with the more intimidating loan papers. Now we own a delightful house in Los Osos. We look out on the mountains and valleys, the ocean, Morro Rock and Morro Bay.

There’s only one small worry.

The morning after we moved in, a rocket took off from Vandenberg Air Force Base. As I watched the contrail head for the ocean, I saw a poof of smoke. Five minutes later the radio newscaster announced that scientists had blown up the rocket in mid-flight because it was faulty.

Why didn’t the realtor compel us to sign a disclosure about exploding rockets?