Occupancy Control Law to Be Reviewed : Thousand Oaks: City planners will re-examine the year-old overcrowding ordinance. It has been criticized as being too permissive and too restrictive.

With its strong school system, widely envied libraries and perfectly manicured parks, Thousand Oaks has long promoted itself as a community geared toward families.

The question now is, what kind of families?

The city’s Municipal Code describes a family as a “bona fide housekeeping unit” bound by social, psychological or economic ties. And only people who fit that description can live in single-family residences.

A year-old overcrowding ordinance prohibits more than three unrelated adults from sharing a single roof, unless they can prove that they form a family. But in recent months, the ordinance has come under fire from two directions, blasted both as too permissive and too restrictive.

The Planning Commission tonight will begin a months-long process of re-examining the ordinance. Commissioners Forrest Frields and Mervyn Kopp are expected to join Councilwomen Elois Zeanah and Jaime Zukowski in an ad-hoc committee set up to clarify the overcrowding code.

Yet even committee members concede that their task might prove impossible.

Controlling occupancy without stomping on personal freedoms will require a delicate balance that may be beyond the power of the city’s code-enforcement bureaucracy, city officials said.

“When we get to the subject of how people are going to sleep and how many are going to stay in a room, we’re treading on pretty thin territory,” Frields said. “We just may not be able to have an overcrowding ordinance.”

Although Thousand Oaks is notorious for its stringent public-nuisance codes, council members are reluctant to intrude into residents’ private lives. At the same time, however, they sympathize with neighbors who complain that rooming houses can ruin a block by generating too much traffic and noise.

In a case that will come before the City Council in September, neighbors of a single-family house occupied by four unrelated adults have argued that the landlord is violating city zoning by running a business on a residential street.

They have also insisted that the house looks unkempt contrasted with others on the block, because the tenants have no commitment to the neighborhood, or to one another.

“Most of the neighbors want to see a family in that house which is representative of most of the families in our area, meaning a mother, a father and children,” said Debra Handlos, who lives next door to the rental house.

But by the city’s definition, the four unrelated tenants may very well constitute a family.

“I might say to someone, ‘Listen, I can’t afford to pay the rent on this house, so let’s go in it together,’ and then we’re bound by economic ties,” commissioner Frields explained.

Zeanah rejects such logic as a misinterpretation of the spirit, if not the letter, of the law. She wants to tighten such loopholes.

“We’re not trying to control who occupies each house,” she said. “We’re just trying to eliminate problems where four or more unrelated adults are living in homes and causing spill-over nuisances.”

Yet while Zeanah wants to strengthen the ordinance, Councilman Frank Schillo said he is leaning toward scuttling the code entirely. Although he voted for the overcrowding measure last year, he said he now believes it was ill-conceived.

“It’s too restrictive and too invasive,” Schillo said. “It’s impossible to define a family.”

With several challenges to the overcrowding ordinance set to come before the Planning Commission within two months, Zeanah said her ad-hoc committee will have to work fast to pin down a workable definition.

Those who live near rooming houses cheer her on. “These mini-apartments are inappropriate for our neighborhood,” said Marsha Maupin, who lives down the street from the house with four adult renters.

Yet the house’s landlord, Marilyn Longo, contended that the ordinance itself was inappropriate. “This thing is a nightmare,” she said. “Where will it all end?”