Can’t See Ocean for the Trees? Down They Come

After 30 years of horizons blocked by treetops, Ken Dyda now can wake up, walk into his Rancho Palos Verdes living room and behold a panoramic vista of Santa Monica Bay and the top of Mt. Baldy.

The only drawback: Padam Singh, his newly treeless neighbor downhill, has stopped speaking to him.

The feud began a year and a half ago when authorities showed up at Singh’s house, armed with chain saws and a controversial ordinance that aims to protect residents’ sight lines. They cut and trimmed half a dozen trees in Singh’s backyard to give Dyda a room with a view.

Singh was not pleased, to say the least, to find himself losing a type of neighborhood war being waged with growing frequency in California. The rights of homeowners to gaze upon the horizon from windows are being pitted against their neighbors’ rights to nurture greenery to its full and leafy potential.

Voters in Rancho Palos Verdes, a wealthy suburb of 47,000 set on a plateau with postcard vistas of ocean and mountains, approved the View Restoration and Preservation Ordinance in 1989. Although several suits challenging the law have lost in the lower courts, another case has reached the state Court of Appeal.

Meanwhile, as development spreads over California’s hills and valleys, breathtaking views are increasingly seen as a selling point as crucial as a two-car garage or a swimming pool. So, many California cities are watching Rancho Palos Verdes closely, trying to draw lessons on how to balance green thumbs and hungry eyes.

Ken Willis, president of the League of California Homeowners, said it is obvious why cities are being asked to protect views. “No matter how pretty a tree is, if it knocks out your view, that could cost anywhere from $10,000 to $100,000,” he said. “You can plant all the trees you want to, but if it affects your neighbor’s property values, you’ve got a problem.”

One of the nation’s first, the Rancho Palos Verdes view law also is considered one of the strictest. Homeowners can have their views “restored” to what the lots offered when the houses were built. They can do so even if that was 30 years ago and their windows were shrouded with leaves when they bought their homes just last year. That can defy another philosophy in environmentally conscious suburbs: protecting trees at all cost.

Dyda, a resident of four decades and a former mayor of Rancho Palos Verdes who sits on the city’s appointed View Preservation and Restoration Commission, said it still looks good to him: “We bought . . . for the view,” he said of his unassuming ranch house on a steep slope facing north. “We paid a premium for a view. And then, the views were lost. I got the view back, and I must admit . . . I am very happy, finally.”

But the view from the property down below is different: “They butchered our trees,” said Dyda’s neighbor Singh, who bemoaned the fact that his nemesis can now see straight into his bedroom.

“You cannot buy the atmosphere around your house. Trees also have life. It is against humanity,” he said. “Those trees added value to my property.”

Homeowners like Dyda have taken photographs to register their views with the city or rely on aerial shots taken in the 1960s. If neighbors cannot see eye to eye, city officials and tree experts inspect, often sitting on couches and reclining on beds to assess vistas from a variety of angles.

Then, a case can be argued before the city’s view commission. Its ruling can be appealed to the City Council.

View seekers pay up to $2,000 in administrative fees plus tree-trimming costs and money to buy replacement vegetation, but do not have to compensate for the value of a 40-year-old pine about to be felled.

All that peering and talking can take months and even years and cost a lot. In 1998, administrative costs to the city alone were an unacceptable $300,000 above what the $2,000 fees raised, Mayor Lee Byrd said.

Yet, city officials stress that the ordinance has encouraged many calm settlements that didn’t enter the bureaucracy. Hundreds of residents have sat down over a cup of coffee and happily agreed to a little trim here and a little compromise there.

And fighting over the view ordinance is nothing compared with the civil war waged in the decades before the law, officials recalled. Reports then abounded of otherwise upstanding professionals sneaking around at night with cans of poison to kill neighbors’ trees, as did stories of nasty tricks like calling tree-trimmers to the yards of vacationing neighbors.

So in 1989, Proposition M was approved by 70% of the voters. Since then, 128 Rancho Palos Verdes homeowners have been unable to persuade neighbors to prune and have asked the city for help. In the vast majority of cases, city officials acted to restore the views.

Byrd said he and many other city officials are distressed at the pain that causes for newly pruned neighbors--even after more mediation was introduced last year in hopes of making the process more fair.

Too much of the city’s money and time is being spent on the law, Byrd said. But he added that council members cannot make too many reforms because the law was passed by voters, and voters would have the choice of repealing it.

“The unfortunate part of the ordinance is when neighbors ended up in real disagreement. . . . There would be terrible arguments, to the point that neither one would be able to discuss it rationally,” said Byrd.

Two years ago, one man collapsed with heart trouble during an impassioned plea before the City Council to save his trees and was hospitalized for several weeks, Byrd said.

Many planners elsewhere say they look at Rancho Palos Verdes as an example of what not to do.

“That’s where we don’t want to go,” said Jaime Limon, senior planner for Santa Barbara, where city officials are considering a view ordinance but do not want to enforce it with court orders and chain saws.

Laguna Beach Law Has No Teeth

Laguna Beach is, like Rancho Palos Verdes, a town of expensive houses scattered across ocean bluffs. After heated debate, its council passed a view ordinance in 1997. But, because of concerns about its constitutionality, Laguna Beach’s law is nonbinding. That means city officials can recommend but not force tree trims.

Laguna Beach has hardly become a peaceful oasis of trees and ocean views, said the city’s assistant planning director, John Montgomery.

“I’d give us a B- or a C+,” he said. “There’s been some resolution, but there are many people who are still fighting.”

Tiburon, which spreads over the hills just north of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, passed what many city planners consider the granddaddy of view ordinances in 1970. But then, in 1991, overwhelmed by lawsuits and distressed by all the staff time and money being spent, city officials replaced rules that allowed forced cutting with nonbinding guidelines that urge mediation.

Other experts questioned whether Rancho Palos Verdes’ ordinance is constitutional. “You can’t just come in and use someone’s property without compensating them,” said Stuart Meck, a research specialist at the American Planning Assn. in Chicago. View ordinances, in essence, give a homeowner the right to use the air space above their neighbors’ property, Meck said.

“You wouldn’t try that in the Midwest,” he said, noting that California’s state Constitution tends to give local governments more power than in many other states.

So far, the courts have come down on the side of bright picture windows. Prior cases that sought to have the Rancho Palos Verdes law declared unconstitutional either lost or were dismissed in recent years. In a case against Tiburon’s old ordinance, the state Court of Appeal ruled in 1997 that cities have the right to pass laws protecting views.

However, another lawsuit against Rancho Palos Verdes, filed by tree owner Jon Echevarrieta, is before the state Court of Appeal. Echevarrieta, who has so far staved off the chain saws, declared the law “a cancer” and “an infringement of property rights.” In an unusual tack, Echevarrieta plans to argue that cutting down a 40-year-old tree constitutes a wrongful taking.

“My neighbors claim they own the airspace around my property,” he said. “After 35 years of watering and cultivating, it just makes you crazy.” Echevarrieta has organized tree-loving homeowners in Rancho Palos Verdes into a lobbying group to fight the ordinance.

Ted Commerdinger, an expert on policy and legislation with the California Chapter of the American Planning Assn., said view ordinances have never been fully tested in the courts, because no property owner has ever appealed a case to the California Supreme Court or the federal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

“It’s going to be a very interesting issue. There’s all kinds of arguments all over the map on this, but the fundamental question is, where do your property rights end?” he said.

In Rancho Palos Verdes, the answer to that question has tended to be way beyond the horizon. Ninety-seven of the 128 cases brought to the view commission have been resolved, and in all but a handful, city officials ordered trees trimmed or cut.

Six other challenges, including Echevarrieta’s, are tied up in court, and 23 are still pending resolutions in the city, said Emmanual Ursu, a city official who works on the view ordinance.

In some cases, the emotions linger after the trees are gone.

Resident George Boss, who voted for the ordinance, cut down 37 of his 38 backyard trees after his neighbors petitioned the city to have their views restored. Many of the view blockers were pine trees, which would have died if trimmed back to the height mandated by the city, he said.

Others would have required pruning every year. With a limited pension and a bad back, Boss decided he couldn’t manage that. So he had the trees removed.

His wife burst into tears when she saw the denuded yard. The couple remain so distressed that they plan to move to San Diego County. “In our next house, we’re gonna be the ones on top,” Boss said.