Caution Sign Urged for Urban Refugees

Mayor Mary Rocha wants to give her town’s new home buyers a dose of Monday-morning reality.

It’s time, she says, to educate the two-income couples venturing out on weekend house-buying expeditions to this Contra Costa County community 60 miles east of San Francisco, along the outer limits of Bay Area growth.

“They buy over the weekend when everything seems fine. Then they face the nightmare Monday morning commute and they say, ‘Oh my goodness,’ ” said Rocha. “Many live with the drive for a while, but then they finally decide it’s really cutting into their life. They say, ‘Maybe this wasn’t such a good choice after all.’ ”

Under a proposed city ordinance that experts say might be the first of its kind in the nation, real estate agents in Antioch would have to disclose to home buyers hidden truths of local life: nightmarish commuter traffic and schools so overcrowded that children might well be shipped across town.

While city officials say the law would provide a new level of buyer protection, critics contend it’s a misguided attempt to expand such disclosures to areas they were never designed to cover. Real estate agents say it is designed to scare away newcomers from a city with growing pains.

“Don’t even call this the newest wrinkle in real estate disclosures,” said James Fabris, executive vice president of the Greater San Francisco Assn. of Realtors. “This is a not-so-clever technique to slow the pace of a city’s growth, a ruse to scare new people away. . . .”

Academics say the ordinance would constitute a new level of government intrusion and would not hold up in court. “I’ve never heard of such a thing before,” said John Landis, a professor of city and regional planning at UC Berkeley.

Real estate agents say home sales in California are already full of disclosures covering everything from geological conditions to lead-based paints.

There are even disclosures “on a property’s square footage boundaries,” said June Barlow, vice president and general counsel for the California Assn. of Realtors. “You can’t just look at the backyard fence and assume that’s the boundary. You’ve got to disclose that that’s all been checked out.”

California in 1987 toughened disclosure requirements after a court case involving a Bay Area real estate broker who was sued for not telling a buyer about soil conditions.

Barlow said disclosure requirements were expanded to cover even such arcane areas as whether there has been a murder at the house.

In recent years communities have gone beyond state requirements to cover airport noise and factory air pollution, Fabris said.

Some jurisdictions include disclosures for timber harvest production zones or “right-to-farm ordinances,” alerting buyers that nearby farmers are entitled to spray their crops and kick up some dust while tilling the soil.

And the Bay Area community of Fairfield recently required a developer to notify buyers of upscale new housing that golf balls from a local course could come flying over their backyard walls.

“That one makes sense,” said Fabris. “Someone might get hit by a golf ball. But to use the disclosure law as a scare tactic to keep people out of your community just isn’t fair.”

Mayor Rocha said the Antioch City Council would vote next month on whether to adopt the measure in this town of 83,000, where the median housing price is about $200,000.

The disclosures would alert home buyers that rush-hour traffic could double the time it takes to drive to nearby towns. “We’d say that while it usually takes a half hour to reach nearby Concord, you’ll have to double that during rush hour,” Rocha said.

Buyers would also be told that their children might not be able to attend the nearest school. More likely, they would be bused across town.

Rocha said it is still too early to gauge local support for the proposal.

“We’re not trying to scare people away from Antioch,” she said. “But the reality is that while you once just bought a house, nowadays you buy a community as well. And part of that is looking at overcrowding on the roads and in the schools.”