W. Hollywood Official Backs More Curbs on Smokers

Smokers in West Hollywood--already banned from workplaces, restaurants and bars--now face a proposed city law that could limit their ability to rent apartments and houses.

A city councilman this week introduced one of the nation’s first municipal ordinances that would, if passed, fully empower landlords to designate apartments, hallways and other common areas as smoke-free and allow only nonsmokers as tenants and guests.

While the proposed ordinance would not permit owners to evict any current smokers, critics call it discriminatory.

Strong opposition to the measure stems from concerns over a local group of cancer and HIV/AIDS patients who legally smoke marijuana to ease their pain and the city’s large population of Eastern European and Russian immigrants, many of whom smoke.

As a result, an unusual alliance is emerging of pro-tobacco groups, rent control advocates and a majority of the West Hollywood City Council, which historically has been a champion of nonsmokers.

Still, the measure’s main sponsor, West Hollywood Councilman Paul Koretz, stands by his proposal. Koretz, who has lost relatives to lung cancer caused by smoking, said his idea for the law stemmed from a dispute between nonsmoking constituents and a neighbor who smokes cigars on a balcony next to theirs.

“It’s a clear health issue. Secondhand smoke is not a victimless crime,” said Koretz, who is the Democratic candidate for the Assembly seat in the 42nd District, which includes the city.

Landlords love the idea because they say it would reduce maintenance costs and the chances of fire. While some have previously rented only to nonsmokers without legal trouble, others say they have been afraid to reject smoking tenants without the shield of such an ordinance.

Both sides agree that smokers, like pet owners, are not protected by antidiscrimination laws. But that is where the consensus ends.

Besides expressing concern about the relatively high number of AIDS patients in West Hollywood who legally may smoke marijuana, council members who oppose the ordinance say it would increase the risk of eviction for tenants, particularly low-income immigrants, in rent-controlled units who pay rents that are a third to half the market rate.

“It seems counterintuitive to say West Hollywood opposes something on [regulating] tobacco,” Councilman Steve Martin said. “But at some point you have to see whether we can find ways to create a happy medium.”

Even if tenants are allowed to smoke in their apartments, landlords hungry for higher rents will try to catch them or their guests lighting up in corridors, opponents of the proposal contend. And if a guest smokes in a designated nonsmoking unit, that too could lead to a tenant’s eviction, they add.

“Don’t give these landlords another tool to harass or intimidate,” said Councilman Sal Guarriello.

This week, the council tabled a vote on the matter for at least a month so the city Rent Stabilization Commission can hear public comment and offer a recommendation.

The ordinance’s reception on the council is in sharp contrast to recent anti-smoking rules.

Earlier this year, West Hollywood banned smoking 20 feet from child play areas. The council last year prohibited restaurants and bars from displaying ashtrays and matches, a covert means of luring smokers after the 1998 countywide prohibition on smoking in those places.

And West Hollywood last year agreed to end an era by banning tobacco billboard advertising before the federal government enacted a similar prohibition. The move prompted the removal last year of the famous “Marlboro Man” sign that had overlooked Sunset Boulevard for decades.

Eric Schippers, executive director of the Virginia-based National Smokers Alliance, stressed that the issue comes down to personal liberties.

“The home is, in California, one of the last places for smokers to retreat to,” Schippers said.

Attorney John Duran, a member of the Rent Stabilization Commission and legal counsel to the Los Angeles Cannabis Resource Center, a group that distributes marijuana for medicinal use to patients with terminal illnesses, said he hopes that the City Council balances issues of “public health against privacy issues.”

About 14% of the Cannabis Center’s 840 members live in West Hollywood and nearly all are HIV-positive.

“Most leases are silent on the issue,” he said. But a future law that allows landlords to ban smoking would unfairly “encourage one lifestyle choice over the other.”

Anti-smoking landlords, tenants and condominium owners say they too deserve the right to comfortable living.

Among those who attended the West Hollywood council’s meeting this week was Zulema Sanchez, who is moving from the Hancock Park one-bedroom apartment that she has shared with her sister Sylvia for five years. Their downstairs neighbor’s chain-smoking has exacerbated Zulema Sanchez’s asthma and allergies, she said, and she must rely on an inhaler to breathe normally.

“The bottom line is: I have a right to be healthy and this individual is infringing on my rights,” Sanchez said. “I’m not getting what I paid for.”

For many of the 1,100 West Hollywood landlords, nearly all of whom own small apartment buildings, designating a building as nonsmoking without such an ordinance puts them at too great a risk of litigation.

West Hollywood landlord Wendy Guidry told the council that a tenant’s long-term smoking required her to replace carpets and blinds, repaint walls and scrub unfinished wood fixtures to eliminate the stains and smells of smoke after the tenant moved out.

She then began to advertise for nonsmoking tenants, but didn’t write it into the leases. Consequently, a smoker in another unit posed as a nonsmoker and rented it. Guidry had no legal means to evict him.

“Now I know better,” she said, and includes such bans in the leases.

Esther Schiller, an advocate for nonsmokers who helps maintain an Internet list of smoke-free housing in the Los Angeles area, says the ordinance is needed to encourage other property owners to do the same.

“Landlords are kind of caught in the middle,” Schiller said. “There just is so much ignorance out there about what the rules are. With this ordinance, we are just trying to clarify the status quo.”

Los Angeles attorneys who specialize in helping nonsmokers seek relief from smoking neighbors say the few such lawsuits have failed.

For example, Los Angeles condominium owner Roy Platt in 1997 sued his homeowners association and his downstairs neighbors because he said the smell of their smoke was a nuisance.

Platt, 53, whose parents both died of lung cancer, lost the case on appeal and was forced to declare bankruptcy after being ordered to pay the other side’s large legal fees.

“The lower court judge said he wasn’t willing to break away from the old notion of a man’s home is his castle,” Platt’s attorney Joseph Cobert said. “We were breaking new ground and it broke us.”