The House I Live In

What Isaac Gabriel wants more than anything is to live in peace.

He came to this country in the first place 23 years ago because he felt threatened in Egypt as a Christian in a Moslem world.

“I was afraid for my life,” he said as we walked through the garden of his home on a quiet street in Temple City. An 80-year old camphor tree towered over us. “I felt I had to leave. There was danger. . . . “

It wasn’t an easy decision. He’d been a reporter for Reuters in Cairo but had to take what he could get in the U.S., which was a job as an accountant. His wife Mounira teaches.

But they made enough and saved enough for a down payment on the Temple City house. Two houses actually. The back house had been an enclosed boat port and a workshop with some living facilities in it.

An industrious man, Gabriel turned it into a comfortable home and they moved in, renting out a front house to pay the mortgage. He retired, his wife kept teaching. A son was born there. Life was good.

Then the bureaucrats stepped in.

With apparently little to do but harass a family trying to get by, they came down on the Gabriels like an avenging army and said he couldn’t have two houses on the same property.

And the peace he sought by coming to America ended.

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It began two years ago with a letter from the city saying that by living in the second house, the Gabriels were violating a zoning ordinance and had to vacate. Sixteen years it took for the bureaucrats to figure that out.

Since receiving the letter, the couple has spent about $17,000 on permits, construction materials and legal advice trying to restore the tranquillity they thought they had.

Gabriel has badgered just about everyone at City Hall, including the City Council and the Planning Commission, trying to get some kind of variance that would allow him to live in one unit and rent the other.

It’s not as though he’s opened a whorehouse on a tree-lined street or is running guns out of a garage. What he’s done, City Manager Hugh Riley informed me in a tone of righteous indignation, is Violate The Code.

Experience teaches that it’s not difficult to violate a city code. A hole in the ground, a tree over a sidewalk, a dog that barks after 9 o’clock, a driveway two inches too narrow can all be code violations.

I tried to build a fish pond once in the Bay Area and was told it violated a code. It wasn’t deep enough or round enough or sturdy enough. I told them to go to hell and built it anyhow. That was 30 years ago. It’s still there. The fish love it.

Gabriel didn’t tell the city to go to hell. A slightly built, mild-mannered man, he tried to do what they wanted to the point of going back to school and getting a contractor’s license.

He pointed out that when he bought the property in 1980, the second house already had a kitchen, a bathroom and a large workshop. What he did was turn the workshop into two bedrooms and a bathroom.

It’s an attractive, comfortable house. Solid and neatly kept. But it (gasp) Violates The Code.

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Community activist Shirley Hanson, hearing of Gabriel’s plight, has stepped in to help. Both she and her husband Richard, a real estate appraiser, say there are at least 60 other pieces of property in the area with two homes on them and they have pictures to prove it.

“Usually a city will try to work things out,” Richard said, “but they haven’t in this case. For unknown reasons, they aren’t being friendly.”

Temple City is predominantly white and Gabriel, a dark-skinned man, hints that he might be the victim of a racist attitude.

“That’s horse pucky,” Riley snapped to the accusation. “Pure baloney. We’ve never been approached with a compromise. They’ve just decided to live there come hell or high water.”

Abatement proceedings will be filed by the city and a judge will decide what’s going to happen, Riley said.

Codes are intended to protect, not destroy. If the Gabriels were living in a house built of beer cans I could understand the city’s concern. But they aren’t. Flexibility is required.

The family came here in the first place for a little peace of mind. It would be a hell of a thing if they were done in by a dreaded Municipal Code.

Al Martinez’s column appears Tuesdays and Fridays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com