CALIFORNIA ALBUM : Where ‘Happy Trails’ Don’t Pass Every Door : Apple Valley was once the High Desert hideaway of the Hollywood set. Today it seeks to settle a fight over the use of an apartment complex for mentally disabled adults.

This High Desert community sounds downright hospitable and inviting. The entrance signs proclaim, “A Better Way of Life.” For years it was the getaway haunt for Hollywood celebrities. The main drag is called “Happy Trails Highway;” Roy Rogers and Dale Evans live here.

But not everyone is welcome here, the federal government contends.

The U.S. Justice Department has sued the city for refusing to allow a small apartment complex to serve as a group home for mentally disabled adults.

That denial, government attorneys say, is a violation of the federal Fair Housing Act which prohibits discrimination against people because of their handicaps.

“The city would rather have us out 20 miles in the desert than here in town,” complains Patrick Barris, co-owner with Tharmaple Davis of High Desert Residential Care, which already provides room and board for six mentally disabled adults in a neighborhood of apartments.

When they sought city approval in 1991 to accommodate 22 residents in the 11-bedroom complex--so they could be licensed by the state Department of Social Services--the Planning Commission refused.

Acknowledging the opposition from neighboring apartment tenants, the commission concluded that the facility would create an “over-concentration” of disabled persons, discourage “the integration of mentally ill persons into the community mainstream” and was an inappropriate commercial use in a residential neighborhood, according to the June, 1992 minutes of the meeting.

Barris and Davis appealed to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the U.S. attorney’s office filed suit in April, 1994. It alleged that the city--considered the Beverly Hills of the High Desert--rejected the residential care facility simply on the grounds that the prospective residents were mentally disabled.

The government offered to settle the case later that year if the city approved the facility and paid $350,000 in damages on behalf of Barris and Davis, reflecting their loss of revenue from 1991 as well as emotional distress, and paid $50,000 in punitive damages to the government.

The city’s counteroffer of a $10,000 settlement was rejected, Barris said.

In its answer to the federal charges, the city complained, among other issues, that the couple have not identified “a single person” who was denied a dwelling unit based on their handicap, and said that their group home “would constitute a direct threat to the health, safety and/or welfare of other individuals” and “result in substantial physical damage to the property of others.”

The city’s legal papers did not elaborate on what it was insinuating, but the message was clear to Paul Ferris, an architect working on behalf of the care facility.

“The city was making qualifications on who could move into a neighborhood based on their background. They might as well have said they didn’t want blacks or Hispanics or Irish,” he said. “The city was being un-American.”

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Apple Valley is steeped in a colorful history suggesting far more gracious neighborliness.

After the turn of the century, commercial apple growers did well here, 80 miles northeast of Los Angeles, on the High Desert side of the San Bernardino mountain range. But in the 1930s, their businesses withered in the face of the Depression and rising water costs.

In the mid-1940s, two real estate speculators, Newton T. Bass and B.J. Westlund, bought 20,000 acres of the desert plateau, bisected by what was then Route 66, with visions of turning a landscape of Joshua trees, yuccas and mesquite into a prosperous desert resort town.

To promote the place, they constructed the Apple Valley Inn resort and golf course, built an airstrip across the street, flew in prospective buyers from Los Angeles, offered them an all-you-can-eat breakfast for a buck, showed them the ethereal beauty of the desert landscape and put them up at the inn.

Back in those days, the inn’s bungalows had no phones; room service was ordered by attaching a food order to a pigeon assigned to a loft in each room, which then dutifully flew to the dining room. The order, was filled and taken to the room--along with a new short-distance homing pigeon, according to 1948 press clippings.

The Inn became the region’s worst-kept secret as a hideaway for illicit love affairs and, during the 1950s, Apple Valley was soon a favorite weekend getaway destination for Hollywood movie stars and entertainers.

In newspaper advertising inserts promoting Apple Valley, Hollywood gossip queen Louella O. Parsons swooned over the the country club, the equestrian estates and opulent residential manors with their pools and private tennis courts and how some residents parked their private planes alongside their homes. “Jayne [Mansfield] and Mickey [Hargitay] couldn’t get over this!” she wrote in her signature name-dropping fashion.

“The major impression one gets [when visiting Apple Valley] is the feeling of freedom, of relaxation, and of the luxury that even the casual visitor feels in this happy valley,” she wrote.

Even if some of the Hollywood glitz waned in later years, Western film star Rogers kept Apple Valley on the map by adding his name to the Inn and hosting steak-frys.

Today, Apple Valley, population 52,000, remains primarily a bedroom community, a mix of young families seeking affordable housing and retirees enjoying the clean air and a growing concentration of medical facilities.

The Apple Valley Inn was closed and converted by new owners into a head-trauma rehabilitation center. The largest single businesses in town are the Target and Kmart stores. A Walmart store was recently approved for construction on the old golf course driving range, but country club residents went to court to try to stop its construction because of what they say it’ll do to their neighborhood.

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Duane Van Ess says he doesn’t like what a residential care facility for 22 mentally disabled people will do for his neighborhood. He owns the two duplexes next to the facility, and circulated opposition petitions four years ago--which were begrudgingly but quickly withdrawn when HUD attorneys threatened to sue each signer for $50,000 on the grounds that they were seeking to abridge the civil rights of the mentally disabled.

Van Ess admits that before Barris and Davis bought the apartment, it stood empty and attracted transients and motorcycle gang members. But after the first six mentally disabled residents moved in, one of them turned the power off at his apartment one night, and some of the residents “sit out on the driveway and make passes” at his female tenants.

“There should be at least 300 feet [of buffer] between them and me,” he said. “The six people there now are nice, but I’m dead if more of them move in. Hey, I’m not against crippled people, but I’m not going to be able to rent my places if more of them move in next door.”

Barris said the facility will be staffed at all times and that the residents face a lights-out curfew. But he noted that the residents are free to come and go during the day because the group home is simply that--a residence, not a treatment facility. Some of the residents function well enough to shop and even hold jobs, he said; others attend school during the day.

Apple Valley Mayor Barbara Loux said the city has forwarded another settlement offer to government attorney, although apparently it has not yet filtered down to the owners of the facility.

“The new attitude of the current City Council is a little bit different [than the previous one],” she said. Besides, she added, “We don’t have a choice but to allow them to do it.”

Barris said:

“If we could have anticipated the heartache, the financial losses and the bad health that this project has brought us, we wouldn’t have come here in the first place. But a city has to be built for everyone, not just for the people you want.”