City Hall Battle Looms Over Group-Home Ordinance

Part 2

Round 2 in the battle between group homes and the neighborhoods they occupy is set to begin Thursday before the city Planning Commission, and both sides are marshaling their  forces.

More than a dozen neighborhood councils and residents groups have passed resolutions supporting a proposed city ordinance to regulate group homes. Meanwhile, organizations such as The Sober Living Network are warning their members of dire consequences if the ordinance becomes law.

City officials acknowledge it’s been a grueling 2½ years since Councilman Greig Smith first broached the subject of regulation. There have been numerous hearings and hundreds of staff hours put into the effort to produce an ordinance that helps affected neighborhoods without harming others throughout Los Angeles.

Whether they have accomplished that remains to be seen.

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Hundreds of sober living and care facilities operate in residential neighborhoods across the San Fernando Valley. This series looks at the problems caused by unlicensed homes and challenges the city faces in attempting to regulate them.

Tuesday:
Wednesday: Group Home Operators Battle City Hall
Sidebar: Group Homes—Neighbors Just Want Them Gone

Planning Commission hearing begins 8:30 a.m. Thursday, City Council Chambers, Room 340, City Hall, 200 N. Spring St. The issue is No. 8 on the agenda.
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“This is very difficult legislation,” said Mitch Englander, the councilman’s chief of staff and a City Council candidate. “We have to guard against unintended consequences. L.A. is a tale of two cities. We have families living in garages because they are so poor. We have fraternities and sororities that could be affected. That’s where the balancing act comes in.”

Who will be affected? It depends who you talk to. Englander and other city officials say they’re only after nuisance homes. For many neighbors it can be like living next to a frat house: 10, 20 or more people crammed in a home, cars taking every available space on the street, loud parties, fights and, often, police visits.

“I can’t imagine having one next door,” Englander said. “It’s frightening and dangerous.”

As part of the ordinance, the city would label houses that rent to two or more tenants on individual leases as boardinghouses, which aren’t allowed in single-family neighborhoods.

State-licensed care homes wouldn’t be affected, although other provisions of the ordinance would impose some conditions.  Also protected would be a group of related family members living together, city officials say.

“We’re treating every single-family house consistently," said city planner Tom Rothmann. "You’re either a boardinghouse or a family.”

Not everyone sees it that way.

What is a lease? asked Claude “Ike” Eichar, who owns four sober living homes on three properties in the Valley. Eichar said his clients sign an agreement to abide by the homes’ sober living rules and “pay their fair share” of the rent. It isn’t a rental or lease agreement, he said.

“The problem with this ordinance is, it’s so vague,” Eichar said. “This is a matter of semantics. I really don’t want to have to go to court and contest this.”

And what is a family? asked Jeff Christensen, project director of the Santa Monica-based Sober Living Network.

“This gives government the power to knock on your door and say, ‘What are your living arrangements here?’ ” Christensen said.

In a letter to the city Planning Commission last fall, Christensen said Los Angeles  was trying to redefine a family in a way that the state Supreme Court has already deemed illegal. A family’s members don’t have to be related to be considered a family, and targeting shared rental agreements would displace thousands of people, he said.

“Does the city seriously want to displace seniors sharing homes with friends, other companionable living arrangements shared by friends, and families that are having to double up due to economic problems?” Christensen asked.

Christensen said the city is using a mask of impartiality to take a discriminatory swipe at sober living homes. He noted in an interview with Patch.com that Smith’s original request in 2008 specifically targeted such homes.

Most sober living homes aren’t a problem, but they will be swept up in this ordinance, he said. Christensen believes the term “sober living home” is being unfairly used generically by many to describe crack houses, flophouses and groups of people living together who annoy their neighbors. And that’s unfair to true sober living facilities, he said.

“The thing that we protest is that the rights of recovering alcoholics and addicts to live together, a right they have as a disabled class, are being trampled on,” Christensen said.

Problem homes could be better enforced by strengthening and streamlining existing city nuisance laws, he said.

City officials say nuisance cases are cumbersome, forcing neighbors to put up with problem homes for months, if not years. A multi-agency task force headed by Englander needed nearly a year and several court appearances to close a house in Granada Hills inhabited by a number of parolees.

Each nuisance case can take two or three years and $40,000 worth of staff time to resolve, said Christopher Koontz, planning deputy to City Councilman Paul Koretz.

“That’s why the city is not out there filing thousands of nuisance cases,” Koontz said. “These are neighborhood issues, and to go through a long, drawn-out process isn’t practical.”

Englander said the ordinance gives the city more local control over group homes and streamlines the process for addressing problems. “There will be a lot of different trigger points that allow us to address these more quickly,” he said.

Even with the ordinance, though, some neighborhoods fear they will be stuck with group homes for a long time because the cash-strapped city will have  the resources to tackle only the most egregious cases.

The Los Angeles Coalition for Neighborhoods, while supporting the ordinance, has asked its attorney to explore possible changes that would allow residents to bring actions against homes violating city law.

“We want to give neighborhoods the right to bring a lawsuit,” said coalition president Rebecca Lobl, a Pacific Palisades resident.

Other neighborhood councils have weighed in with their ideas, such as requiring public hearings before a home can open in a neighborhood. The Old Granada Hills Residents’ Group urged the city to designate only bedrooms and guest rooms as sleeping areas with a limit of two people per room, which would limit the number of tenants.

Rooms such as living, family and dining rooms as well as kitchens, bathrooms, hallways, garages, utility rooms and stairwells are not sleeping rooms, the organization said in its resolution of support.

City officials acknowledge the proposed ordinance isn’t perfect but said it’s better than what the city has now.

“It will give us some tools,” Englander said. “It may be enough, it may not be. But I have confidence in it.”

Eichar, the sober living home owner, has a different take.

"It's discriminatory. It's illegal. All of the laws are in our favor," Eichar said.     "Every politician has to have a dragon to slay, and we're that dragon."