Officials Say Party’s Over : Newport Beach Wants to End Revelry, Tackle West Newport’s Crime, Noise, Traffic Problems

As dusk falls on a Saturday night in West Newport, a row of bare-chested young men lean over their second-story railing, beers in hand, and call out to a car full of women that has slowed to case the scene.

“Hey girls, come on up,” one guy says, and soon the women join the men upstairs.

The beer flows from the ever-present keg stored in a refrigerator on the 46th Street porch. A bamboo bar and dart board create an ambience not unlike a fraternity--an image that is enhanced when one of the men urinates onto 46th Street as a handful of party guests chat a few feet away.

“If you live here, you want to have a good time. That’s why you move here,” said Rick Ingram, 26, one of three young men who share the 46th Street apartment. “Everyone who comes down here wants to have fun.”

This is a neighborhood of people who adore the beach, love being outdoors, and put a premium on having fun. Students and young professionals say it’s the place to be.

But officials call the community--where a tiny portion of the population accounts for more than a third of the city’s serious crime--the war zone. And if they have their way, the 46th Street gathering, which some say is vintage West Newport, may be an endangered species.

“Our purpose here is to keep it from becoming a stain and a drain on the community,” said Deputy City Manager Ken Delino, who is directing the Seashore/Oceanfront Comprehensive Plan, an intensive study of the neighborhood that will try to solve the problems of traffic, crime, noise and declining property values.

“It’s borderline blight,” Delino said, displaying police photographs of graffiti and overflowing garbage cans that fester in the neighborhood. “We want to keep it from crossing the border.”

Built at the start of the century when zoning laws were lax, West Newport is a crowded collection of about 750 duplexes and 350 single-family homes stretching along Seashore Drive, from the Newport Pier to the Santa Ana River.

Only about a third of the property is owner-occupied. Much of the rest is owned by people who live out of town and collect high rents by the month in winter and by the week in summer.

Each weekend, hundreds of twentysomethings flock to West Newport for impromptu parties on porches and a veritable promenade down the main drag, a bike trail and one-way street that parallels the beachfront.

On sunny afternoons they parade up and down Seashore on all sorts of wheeled recreational devices. As the sun sets, they trade in their surfboards for bottles of beer, replacing the sounds of crashing waves with blaring stereos.

Each weekend, the police follow the flock, breaking up parties and making arrests as a tiny corner of this coastal community swallows a disproportionate percentage of the city’s resources.

Although it contains only 5% of the housing and 4.8% of the population in Newport Beach, the neighborhood last year accounted for 38% of the city’s serious crime, including 63% of the 235 aggravated assaults, more than half of the 22 forcible rapes and nearly half of the 1,538 grand thefts.

In 1991, police responded to 1,066 disturbance of the peace calls in West Newport--56% of the city’s total and an average of 130 calls a month in the summer and 75 each month of winter.

The partying peaks every year on the Fourth of July, when Seashore Drive is wall-to-wall people and every house seems alive with revelers. This year, after spending an extra $150,000 on police patrols, making more than 200 arrests in just two days, and witnessing two shootings and a stabbing, the city has decided the party’s over.

“We’re going to take a very strong stand on this. We’re not going to let the area go to pot,” said Councilman John Hedges, who represents the adjacent Balboa Peninsula and co-chairs the executive committee of the comprehensive plan.

“We need to develop hope amongst the people who are there on a permanent basis that their lot is going to improve, that the city of Newport Beach is committed to helping them improve their lives and their property.”

While July 4 draws attention to the problem annually, residents and city officials say the neighborhood is plagued year-round. As Hedges said: “In the larger scheme of the problem, July 4th is a pimple on a gnat’s butt.”

City council members and local homeowners hope to transform West Newport by encouraging people to live in their beachfront properties rather than using them for lucrative rentals. They plan to increase pressure on short-term renters to comply with anti-partying ordinances and are brainstorming ways to limit congestion on Seashore Drive.

Some want the bike path closed and rebuilt on the beach itself so pedestrians, cyclists and skaters are not endangered by cars backing out of driveways--and so that cars are not blocked by overflow from the bike path.

Those involved with the comprehensive plan are considering everything from incentives for condominium conversion to creating cul-de-sacs all along Seashore. Other ideas include burying utility wires and adding landscaping to beautify the sidewalks; installing parking meters or establishing resident-only zones for cars; and various measures to make absentee landlords more accountable for their tenants and their property.

During the past two months, Delino has held open meetings, conducted surveys and compiled statistics about the neighborhood. There is no specific agenda or timeline for completion of the project. All that seems settled so far is that the kids will either quiet down or have to go.

But the young people like their neighborhood the way it is.

“If you don’t like the noise, you can go somewhere else,” Ingram said. “There’s no old people here, there’s no one who wants peace and quiet.”

Inside Ingram’s three-bedroom apartment, which rents for $1,500 a month, about a dozen people watch football as the stereo blares in the corner and a handful of people mill about on the porch. Over the mantel sits a shrine to a liqueur, 18 empty bottles of the 70-proof, berry-flavored drink. A giant, blow-up beer bottle propped in the corner enhances the collegiate decor.

“We don’t want any trouble from the cops,” Ingram said at first mention of the City Council’s project. “We’ve got our own jobs, we just want to have a good time on the weekends.”

The gathering on 46th Street was a fairly regular occurrence--not exactly a party, just some friends hanging out. A few blocks away it is cocktail hour at another patio, where a handful of guys pour mixed drinks from a pitcher, relaxing on lounge chairs as evening passes into night.

“We value our weekends and like to have fun,” said 26-year-old David Sommerhauser, the host of this gathering. “Anywhere where you get so many people together, there’s going to be partying.

“They can have the police crack down but that’s not going to do anything,” said Sommerhauser, whose run-ins with the police have been limited to having parties broken up on July 4. “There’s nothing they can do except not let people our age live here.” Sommerhauser and his roommate, Adam Polkinghorne, are both 26 and have full-time jobs. They pay $1,200 for their first-floor two-bedroom apartment, the third they have lived in since they moved to West Newport 18 months ago.

“People travel here for their vacations,” said Polkinghorne, who moved to Newport Beach after growing up in Northern California. Adds neighbor Michael Beasley: “It’s like a permanent vacation.”

That Newport is ideal for vacations is exactly why some are so worried about the neighborhood’s condition. They fear that noise and crime will force tourism dollars toward quieter coastal areas.

“Whatever hurts one section of the city hurts the image of the entire city,” said Bill Schonlau, president of the West Newport Homeowner’s Assn. “If there are problems in West Newport, that’s a drag on the name of Newport Beach.”

Schonlau, a realtor who works, lives and rents property in the neighborhood, said that oceanfront homes in West Newport sell for $1 million to $1.5 million. Homes on the inland side of Seashore are worth more than $500,000.

Schonlau believes that if the homes were split and sold as condos, more young families could afford them, and the neighborhood would soon become dominated by owner occupants. He denies that this amounts to an unfair routing of the young people, saying: “It’s just a matter of trying to maintain the peace and tranquillity every American deserves.”

The problems of West Newport have a long history, and efforts to combat the noise and lawlessness date back several years.

In 1987, the Police Department began giving tickets for “loud and unreasonable noise,” imposing fines on people for public partying. The next year, the City Council enacted the Party House Nuisance Abatement Ordinance, which allows police to notify property owners, and even file lawsuits, if officers respond to “loud, unruly assemblages” at the same location twice within a month.

That same year, the City Council authorized the police to bill property owners for service if officers responded to the same house twice in 24 hours. Last year, that ordinance was stiffened so the bills are sent whenever police go to the same address twice in a month.

This year, council members tried a different tack, establishing a Transient Occupancy Tax that treats short-term rentals like businesses rather than residences. The law requires owners to buy a $75 permit and post an occupancy limit in each apartment.

“The ordinances are giving us more teeth now, more tools to solve the problem,” said investigator John Ludvigson, who handles disturbance calls as part of his role as the Police Department’s environmental services coordinator.

But less than 300 short-term lodging permits were distributed this season, and party houses continue. Of the more than 200 “disturbance advisement cards” residents have turned in to Ludvigson this year, 90% pertained to homes in West Newport.

“It gets real tiring trying to be someone who lives down here trying to get some peace and quiet and get some rest,” Ludvigson said as he cruised past patios dotted with ratty couches, hammocks and lounge chairs.

“It’s the center of town, it’s the action area,” said Ludvigson, a 10-year veteran of the Newport Beach department who has patrolled West Newport in the past. “The person who has a mellow party in West Newport--he invites 15 friends and the next thing he knows he’s got 75 people in his yard. They get free food, free drink. Sometimes they say: ‘Hey, we don’t have a place, can we sack out for a few days?’ ”

Upon hearing of the city’s plans, renters were skeptical about the possibility for change. They doubt that politicians can control who lives where, and dismissed the notion of parties ever coming to an end.

Mostly, though, they mourned the idea of West Newport becoming like the rest of the city.

“The rest of Newport is old, retired people,” said John Bouffard, 29, who lives in the 46th Street duplex where beer flows freely most weekend evenings. “They could make this like the rest of Newport--boring.”