Panel Restricts Cars at Rental Home : Thousand Oaks: Vote limits site to two vehicles. Owner says he may have to evict tenants. He can appeal to the council.

Responding to neighbors’ complaints about traffic and parking problems, the Thousand Oaks Planning Commission has employed the city’s crowding ordinance to prohibit a property owner from renting his home to tenants with three or more cars.

Following a two-hour hearing, the Planning Commission voted 4 to 1 late Monday to impose the two-vehicle limit on Adel Barakat’s rental permit for his single-family home on Calle Tulipan. Commissioner Mervyn Kopp cast the dissenting vote, saying he opposed the vehicle restriction.

Barakat said the condition would probably force him to evict his tenants and make it more difficult to rent his 2,300-square-foot house. The family now living in the house includes two children and six adults, four of whom have cars.

The city recently notified Barakat that he was in violation of a year-old ordinance that requires landlords to get a permit when renting single-family homes to four or more adults.

The controversial ordinance was approved in March, 1992, after city officials were barraged with complaints from homeowners who said their neighborhoods were overrun with traffic, noise and parking problems because of crowding. The ordinance gives the city power to limit the number of cars at single-family rental homes, up to a maximum of four depending on available parking.

At the commission hearing Monday night, half a dozen residents complained that traffic and parking problems on Calle Tulipan had gotten out of hand because of the increasing number of rental homes in the neighborhood.

“It’s becoming the slum of Thousand Oaks,” homeowner Stanley McClain said. “Traffic is unbelievable. And with the amount of cars parked on the street, you don’t always have a place to pull over.”

Joseph Rizzo, who lives one street away on Calle Nogal, said he was concerned that problems on Calle Tulipan were lowering property values throughout the neighborhood.

“The street is always tied up with traffic,” he said. “When I drive down there, it just looks like a completely different place. It’s like you’re not in Thousand Oaks any more--at least as I know it.”

Barakat, a Moorpark resident, agreed that there are problems in the neighborhood, but pleaded with the commission to make an exception in his case. He said that the house he rents has a two-car garage, and that his tenants are of one family and have not caused any problems. None of the complaints made Monday were directed at his tenants.

“I’m proud of my tenants,” Barakat told the commission. “I have chosen carefully the people who live on my property.”

But Commissioner Marilyn Carpenter said the primary goal of the crowding ordinance was to crack down on traffic in problem neighborhoods. She said the condition placed on Barakat’s permit helps accomplish that objective.

“It places in the hands of the public some controls over” traffic and parking in their neighborhoods, she said.

Carpenter suggested that the two-vehicle limit be incorporated into the crowding law. But this idea was dropped after Kopp said it would only result in “one helluva legal problem for the city.”

During Monday’s hearing, Chairman Forrest Frields directed the commission’s staff to further investigate residents’ complaints about crowding in their neighborhood.

Barakat was also informed that he has 20 days to appeal the commission’s decision to the City Council.