Developers Have Image-Building to Do : Survey: In Orange County, they make worst impression of all. Even labor unions fare better. Builders say they’re misunderstood by public.
If there’s one thing that most Orange County residents appear to agree on, it’s that they don’t care much for developers.
No other institution fared so poorly on a recent poll designed to gauge voter reaction to a set of tax proposals. Fifty-one percent of 500 countywide respondents surveyed by Sacramento-based pollster J. Moore Methods said they had an unfavorable impression of real estate agents, a negative image topped only by the one given land developers, who polled a 57% unfavorable rating.
The ratings were even worse in Laguna Beach, where a special sample of 200 respondents found that 83% had an unfavorable impression of developers.
In conservative Orange County, even labor unions did better than that, drawing unfavorable reviews from just 44% of the sample countywide and 47% in Laguna Beach.
Environmentalists, by contrast, did quite well in the public’s eye--though moderates came off better than extremists: Slow-growth advocates received favorable ratings of 49% countywide, compared to 33% recorded by no-growth environmentalists.
Developers, accustomed to taking some public relations hits, were not surprised by the results but said their negative image is undeserved.
“This doesn’t surprise me,” said Dale Stuard, president of Stuard Industries, which owns Signature Homes based in El Toro. “People don’t realize the role of builders. . . . They try to provide housing and a decent quality of life for those who want to move in.”
Christine D. Reed, executive director of the Building Industry Assn. of Orange County, agreed.
“I am alarmed because the industry is a major economic work base for the county,” Reed said. “It says something about the way the entire industry is being perceived. A lot of it is related to new environmental concerns. We totally reject the idea that builders are totally at fault for all that is wrong.”
The BIA, a trade organization of 1,200 construction-related companies, took a hit of its own in the poll. Its unfavorable rating of 24% outweighed its favorable mark by 4%.
Although the poll was intended to give policy makers an idea of where the public stands on several tax issues, an array of institutions and personalities were included so the poll’s sponsors could get a sense of who in the county was popular enough to lead a political charge.
The answer, it seems, is celebrities: Actress Bette Midler, former football star O.J. Simpson and former Los Angeles Olympics Chairman Peter V. Ueberroth all scored better than 60% in the approval category countywide. Midler, in fact, had the highest approval rating of anyone in the Laguna Beach sample, outpolling even President Bush.
But local political figures are largely unknown, as are most developers. Of the respondents who knew of developers, however, most said they disliked them.
“I think what you’re seeing is that people feel that there’s somewhat of a lack of balance at the moment,” said Paul Freeman, a public affairs consultant who works with the committee that commissioned the poll. “The score on developers to me suggests that there should be a better balance.”
Individual development companies took their lumps as well: Most respondents had not heard of many of them, but those that answered the survey gave most developers low marks. The Kathryn Thompson Development Co., for instance, received favorable ratings from 6% of the respondents, compared to 16% who viewed the firm unfavorably.
Respondents were a little softer on developers when the survey asked about human beings: developers Henry T. Segerstrom and William Lyon, for instance, each won modest approval ratings, though Irvine Co. Chairman Donald L. Bren and Thompson still got mostly negative reaction.
Similarly, negative reviews outweighed the positives for the Mission Viejo Co. and the Irvine Co., though in each of those cases the difference between the positives and negatives was within the poll’s 3% margin of error.
The slap was particularly sharp at the Irvine Co.: It worked with environmentalists to develop the poll and chipped in to help pay for it, only to draw unfavorable responses from 32% of the sample.
Carol Hoffman, corporate vice president of the Irvine Co., wrote it off to the bad image of developers in general.
“Generally people don’t like developers until they want to buy a house in one of their projects,” Hoffman said. “Once you have the house, you don’t like developers anymore.”
