Rental Management Firm Charged With Discrimination

In the largest Orange County case of its kind in a decade, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has charged a Santa Ana-based property management firm with 42 incidents of discrimination against minorities and families with children.

“This is not common in Southern California,” HUD spokesman Larry Bush said Monday of the federal charges filed against Yoder-Shrader Management Company Inc., which operates 11 properties in Fullerton and Buena Park. “The people who got turned down for places just didn’t know why.”

A spokeswoman for Yoder-Shrader denied any wrongdoing. “The allegations in these charges are totally false,” property supervisor Suzanne Bermingham said. “We plan to defend this vigorously.”

The investigation began two years ago when a resident of one of the company’s buildings in Fullerton filed a discrimination complaint with the Fair Housing Council of Orange County. That complaint eventually was dismissed, spokesman David Levy said, but the council launched a full-scale investigation of Yoder-Shrader’s apartment complexes, conducting 26 undercover tests in 1998.

“We sent two testers, one white and one minority, to an apartment complex with nearly identical portfolios,” Levy said. “In some cases we even made the minority tester’s background and portfolio a bit more impressive to make more of an attractive applicant.”

The council used similar tactics to test for discrimination against families with children.

The federal Fair Housing Act of 1968 outlaws rental decisions based solely on an applicant’s race, color, religion or nationality. The law has been expanded to include decisions based on gender or family status.

Levy said the council’s testing revealed several instances in which potential applicants who were nonwhite or had children were not told about available apartments or waiting lists, while others were allowed to apply. Once the tests were completed, he said, the council approached HUD with its findings and asked for an investigation.

“These people were told politely, gently but falsely that there were no apartments available,” HUD secretary Andrew Coumo said during a press conference in 1998 announcing the opening of the department’s investigation. Among other things, the conference featured a disguised former Yoder-Shrader manager alleging on videotape that the company’s policy was to limit the number of minorities and families with children.

After a 10-month investigation involving numerous interviews and a study of tenant records, HUD filed 42 charges against eight of the nine Yoder-Shrader buildings, seven in Fullerton and one in Buena Park.

The Fullerton complexes named in the charges are Nutwood East and Moonraker Apartments, both on Nutwood Avenue; El Dorado Apartments on Madison Avenue; Sturbridge Village Apartments on Yorba Linda Boulevard; Idylwood Apartments on Brea Boulevard; the Pines Apartments on Topaz Lane; and the Kashmir Apartments on Union Avenue.

The Buena Park complex is Elmwood Apartments on Western Avenue.

Yoder-Shrader and the council now have 20 days to decide whether to mediate a conclusion to the case or take it to court. If found guilty of the charges, the company could eventually face civil fines of up to $11,000 on each charge.

About 800 cases of housing discrimination are brought before the county’s Fair Housing Council each year, though usually on a smaller scale affecting smaller management companies or rogue complex managers, Levy said.

“We don’t relish the fact that these things can happen here,” he said.