Palmdale Vows to Enforce Ban on Real Estate Signs : City codes: The council orders a crackdown. But some critics say the action is poorly timed and could discourage housing sales.

One of Palmdale’s most characteristic features after the Joshua tree--the omnipresent weekend real estate signs often loved by builders but deplored by residents--are due to vanish this weekend under a new city policy that bans them as urban clutter.

Although the small stick signs lining thoroughfares long have been prohibited in Palmdale, officials had turned a blind eye to the signs for years until the City Council finally got fed up last month and ordered a crackdown.

So, city workers on Saturday began patrolling Palmdale to tear down and haul away any of the signs that surface. “We are going to be enforcing it strictly,” promised city code enforcement officer Mike Morrisey.

City officials say the new policy will prevent Palmdale from resembling a giant bazaar or garage sale. Palmdale officials acted, they said, only after concluding that the city’s prior practice of allowing builders to police themselves was not working.

But sign company officials said the city’s move comes at the worst possible time, with the economy and housing sales already suffering. They predicted that the ban could harm the local economy by discouraging housing sales, thus preventing new taxpayers from moving into the area.

Called “bootleg” signs by their detractors or “weekend directional signs” in the industry, the colorful paper or cardboard placards mounted on wooden sticks traditionally provided a virtual road map to new housing tracts for buyers traveling unfamiliar streets of the high desert.

Builders typically placed their signs along thoroughfares to attract housing shoppers arriving in the area via the Antelope Valley Freeway. In the past, the signs could be displayed with virtually no limitation on weekends, but they had to come down by Sunday night.

At times, developers would leave the signs up past Sunday night. Sometimes, complying with city regulations halfway, they would remove the placards but leave the sticks in the ground.

A builder might mount 100 of the small signs just for a single tract of new housing. And with perhaps dozens of separate projects offering new developments in Palmdale at any given time, the weekend signs quickly proliferated. So did complaints from the public.

In a sign of how emotional the issue became in the area, two former members of the Town Council in nearby Acton were prosecuted last year for tearing down developers’ signs, which they said created blight in the high desert. Charles Brink and Joel Levy plead no contest to vandalism and were sentenced to community service.

The sea of signs even produced enough disenchantment among some local developers that the board of the Antelope Valley Building Industry Assn. voted recently to support the ban, though some member builders and non-members still favor the signs, Executive Director Rick Norris said.

“There was a general feeling in the membership that there were too many of the signs, that they lost their effectiveness, and that it was a visual blight on the city,” Norris said. Now, Norris said, the association plans to upgrade sign kiosks it has near major intersections, where developers can rent space.

But one of the most active sign vendors in the area called the city’s decision “a sad state of affairs.”

“The builders are struggling as it is. And the city now takes away the most cost-effective way for them to advertise,” said Rene Serkin of the Calico Sign Co. in Canoga Park.

Serkin said people typically cruise neighborhoods when shopping for housing, making the street-level directional signs particularly effective. Builders can escape the city’s ban, she said, by planting the signs in unincorporated county areas within and around Palmdale.

Serkin said she and other sign vendors tried to persuade Palmdale to create a permit system--similar to those used in other cities--that would limit the number of signs per project and impose permit fees. But that plan never received city support.

Councilman David Myers said city officials never really wanted the signs in the first place, and thus the city is now only following the policy it had on the books all along. “We have no plans on changing our minds now,” he said of the ban. “This is not a try-and-see proposal.”