Homeowner Wins Battle With Association

In a case testing the limits of private-property managers, an Orange County jury has found that an association was “unreasonable” in demanding that a 62-year-old Fountain Valley man clean up his knickknack-filled townhouse.

The verdict favoring Bob Cunningham, a semiretired Navy veteran, marked an important setback for the Fountain Valley Chateau Blanc Management Assn. in a three-year legal battle over the rights of homeowners versus property managers.

Cunningham said the 9-3 verdict, reached Wednesday in Orange County Superior Court, was “a tremendous leap” for homeowners pestered by management groups.

“It renews my faith,” Cunningham said. “There’s some agreement that an individual has some rights and can’t be railroaded by a quasi-government.”

C. Mark Hopkins, an Irvine attorney representing the association, did not return phone messages Wednesday and Thursday. A woman who answered the telephone at his office said he could not talk about “pending litigation.”

From 1994 to 1996, the management association had ordered several measures to counter what it called hazards in Cunningham’s two-story townhouse off Brookhurst Street.

In one letter, attorneys for the group told Cunningham to “clear his bed of all paper and books”--though they said he could keep books “considered standard reading material” on his shelves.

Cunningham was also told to take down a rack he used to hang clothes inside a bathroom. Managers had inspected Cunningham’s house after receiving complaints from neighbors, according to court records.

The group sued Cunningham in 1994 to enforce property regulations, and he later counter-sued, claiming harassment.

Photographs used as evidence in the case show the house brimming with papers, books and household items including an old vacuum cleaner and electric fan. In some places, the material is chest high. But several of the photos also appear to show some order.

Attorneys for Cunningham said an independent inspection by Fountain Valley firefighters and housing officials in 1994 found that the house posed no hazard.

Cunningham, who has lived in the house since 1981 and suffers from Hodgkin’s disease, is now seeking damages for “emotional distress.” His attorney, Alexandria C. Phillips, said that another trial would be scheduled after a conference in May.

Cunningham declined to allow a reporter and photographer into his house. “I’m drained,” he said Thursday. “I need some tranquillity. It’s been three years of hell.”