ORANGE COUNTY PERSPECTIVE : Suddenly He Had a Credibility Problem

For the past 15 years, the Fair Housing Council of Orange County has worn two important hats. With the help of funds from the cities and county government, the nonprofit council has fought discrimination in housing at the same time it has helped resolve disputes between tenants and landlords. It is that second mission that has proved troublesome for David T. Quezada, the 40-year-old executive director who was suspended without pay last week.

Speaking of hats, Quezada discovered for himself in recent weeks just how complicated things can get when you wear more than one. In addition to being the executive director of the council, he allowed himself to fall into a category fraught with potential awkwardness and embarrassment: He’s a landlord, too.

The council’s board chairman gives Quezada high marks for his consistent record as an advocate for tenants rights. He runs an organization with enough credibility in Fullerton, to cite one place, that the agency is where the city’s code enforcement officer refers tenants who have problems getting landlords to fix code violations.

No wonder, then, that a city inspector was surprised when she looked at a duplex on East Truslow Avenue that had rotten floors, cracked windows and leaking plumbing and learned that the owner was the executive director of the county’s Fair Housing Council. A check of city records also turned up an illegal third rental unit in the back of the duplex.

Quezada later said he had heard no complaints until he tried to evict tenants from one of the three units in the building so that he could convert the building back to a legal, two-unit complex. Yet the executive director of an organization pledged to resolving landlord-tenant problems can ill-afford to get caught up in such a dispute.

Quezada’s triplex masquerading as a duplex became the focus of a joint inspection by the Orange County Health Department, the city Fire Department and the Building Department. That kind of attention a Fair Housing Council doesn’t need. Both the director and his board were embarrassed, as they should have been, and he was called on the carpet.

The board’s decision to suspend Quezada without pay until he corrected violations was fair enough, considering the high marks he has received for his work. Yet it should be clear to him now what should have been obvious in the first place. You can’t wear the hat of a fair-housing advocate when you wear another as slumlord.