Maddening Lot in Life : Homeowners Protest Athletic Club Plan to Surround Them With Parking Spaces

Ken and Vicki Piety’s home has become a virtual island among the vacant, dusty lots of what once was their section of a neighborhood of middle-class tract homes. And more trouble is lapping at the couple’s door.

For behind the Pietys’ small home at the corner of Golden West Street and Sowell Avenue is an L.A. Fitness health club. And with the recent decision to convert their now vacant neighboring parcels to customer parking, the Piety home will soon be hemmed in on three sides by the health club’s paved lot.

Already distraught at the constant traffic along the health club driveways around their home, the couple is bracing for an even larger invasion of cars and people once the lots open and health club members begin parking on nearly every side of them.

“We have no peace and tranquillity, no privacy,” Ken Piety said. “It’s very traumatic. Nine-tenths of the time we have to keep the drapes drawn. My wife can’t get out of bed without putting a robe on.”

But representatives of Rodeffer Investments, the Fountain Valley firm which owns the land behind the Piety home, said they have tried everything to appease the couple--including offering them twice the market value for their home.

“We’ve tried everything we can to make (Ken Piety) happy, including putting in landscaping,” said Myrle Holloway, a general construction manager for Rodeffer. “His aggravation factor has cost (us) over $100,000 more than what it should have cost us, not including all the extra time.”

The contractor also plans to install a six-foot wall between the Pietys’ home and the parking lot.

Ken Piety, 51, first moved into the once-quiet tract of houses 30 years ago. He kept three horses behind his property, and his animals ran loose around his yard.

Today, the couple, who live with a renter, Ken Piety’s 23-year-old son, three springer spaniels, cats, doves and a cockatoo, said they have no intention or desire to move.

“We never had a ‘For Sale’ sign in our front yard,” said Vicki Piety, 40. “But people always walk by and ask if this house is sold yet.”

Rodeffer bought the property where L.A. Fitness is now located when the San Diego Freeway was built through the area more than 20 years ago. Piety and some of his neighbors first started protesting when a racquetball club was built on the land almost 15 years ago, arguing that a club was inappropriate for the residential neighborhood.

Over the years, as the three homes surrounding the racquetball club became available, Rodeffer bought and eventually razed them. L.A. Fitness moved into the building three years ago after the racquetball club’s lease ran out, and asked that the vacant lots, which had gone to weeds over the preceding three years, be converted into extra parking.

The city first denied Rodeffer’s proposal. But last year it approved the parking lot, citing the increasing overflow of health club members’ cars throughout the neighborhood. Paul Norris, chief financial officer for L.A. Fitness, said the lot will substantially reduce the parking burden on the community.

Piety said neither the racquetball club nor L.A. Fitness, part of a 24-club chain based in Diamond Bar, should have been allowed into the area. He sued the city’s Redevelopment Agency for misuse of land more than five years ago. The suit has yet to be adjudicated.

The gym is open from 5 a.m. until midnight Monday through Thursday, from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. on Friday and from 8 a.m to 8 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. About 200 people come through each day, the manager said.

Management at L.A. Fitness said the majority of patrons use the gym between 4 and 8 p.m., Monday through Thursday. But Ken Piety said he hears people and cars at all hours of the day and night, and the sound invades his home.

“Here is . . . my castle,” he said. “Now my bedroom is six feet from a driveway. I hear domestic disputes, kids sit in the parking lot with boom boxes. I’m sure my animals will get run over eventually. When reality hits, and you realize how small you really are and what rights you really have, you become depressed.”

Piety, a printer, said he has developed severe headaches and has trouble working.

Holloway said the company offered Piety $300,000 for his house a few years ago, twice the value of the property at that time, but Piety would not sell.

Piety insisted he’s never been offered $300,000 for his house, but said that price would still not compensate him adequately.

“We can’t replace the house, and what we’ve done with it over the years,” he said. The house, which Piety said is paid off, is filled with plants and antiques and covered inside, Piety said, in natural antique wood.

Piety said he could not buy a house of similar value without losing money. Nor would $300,000 even cover his attorney’s fees or the inconvenience of moving from the home where he raised his three children.

But Holloway, who has worked as a manager with Rodeffer for 20 years, said he feels Piety has the upper hand in the situation.

“This is the best thing that has ever happened to him,” he said. “This enhances the value of his property. He has a locked-in buyer. He’ll always get more than the thing is worth.”

Holloway contends that the noise, pollution and traffic that Piety complains about would exist with or without the club and its parking lot, because of the area’s proximity to the Golden West Street off-ramp of the San Diego Freeway.

“If the noise and traffic is so bad, he should be moving,” Holloway said. “The traffic volume is there already, we’re just lessening off-site parking. Instead of people driving by, they will be driving in.”

Some neighbors agreed that paved lots might be better than the weed-filled vacant lots, but they wish the club was not in their neighborhood to begin with.

“I feel bad we didn’t protest when the racquetball club first came in,” said Betty Vanderbrink, who with her husband, Stan, has lived in the house across the street from the Pietys since 1957. “I’m not happy seeing the lots. I wish we had our residential neighborhood back.

“I don’t think the lots will resolve the parking problem,” she said. “There will just be more people.”