‘Adults Only’ Rentals Illegal-- and Widespread

In neighborhoods across the Southland, apartment owners are openly breaking the law.

Stuck in their lawns are signs advertising “adults only” apartments, “adult living” or simply a terse “adults.” Other landlords place newspaper ads with the same messages.

These practices are illegal under a pair of state Supreme Court rulings in 1982 and 1983 that held that discrimination based on age is unconstitutional in the renting of apartments and condominiums.

In Los Angeles, the City Council acted five years ago to ban adult-only apartments.

Nevertheless, government officials and fair-housing advocates in Orange County, Los Angeles and across the state say discrimination against children remains a serious problem.

“It’s like any type of discrimination,” said Irma Rodriguez, chairwoman of the housing committee of the Orange County Human Relations Commission. “Just because you pass a law, or there’s a Supreme Court decision at the federal or state level, that does not mean that it’s eliminated.”

Carol Schiller, the regional administrator of the state Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) in Southern California, said that her “gut feeling” is that discrimination against children in housing “is much more prevalent than racial discrimination.”

Statistics compiled by the Orange County Fair Housing Council support that view. During the 1983-1984 fiscal year, the private, nonprofit agency received 1,307 discrimination complaints, of which 707 concerned alleged child discrimination and 157 alleged racial discrimination, according to an agency report.

The California Assn. of Tenants estimated that it receives 1,000 reports of child discrimination each year from families, outnumbering the racial and ethnic discrimination complaints it receives.

According to a statewide survey taken last summer by the Department of Fair Employment and Housing of 866 apartments with vacancies, only 53% of the landlords were willing to state flatly that they accept children in their buildings. A random survey by The Times of 20 Los Angeles apartment buildings with vacancies produced similar results.

Both fair-housing advocates and landlords said the state court rulings and the Los Angeles prohibition of child discrimination had an immediate but far from complete impact. The major reason the problem remains is that both the state fair-housing agency and the Los Angeles city attorney’s office have declined to enforce the laws.

By its own admission, the city attorney’s office washed its hands of child discrimination cases in 1981, classifying them as a low priority because of a manpower shortage.

Fair-housing advocates said the lack of prosecution has made it difficult to cope with techniques developed by landlords to get around the Supreme Court ruling.

Also, with scant child-discrimination case law on the books, it is often difficult to distinguish between apartment house regulations designed to harass families with children and valid rules intended to protect tenants’ children from safety hazards.

Consider the case of Barbara Dellerson, a tenant at the Warner Willows I complex in Woodland Hills.

She said she was threatened with eviction last summer when one of her teen-age sons ran down to the pool to tell her that he had chipped his tooth. She said the manager reminded her that no one under 18 was allowed in the pool area.

James and Deborah Hansen, a couple at the same complex, said they received the same admonition from the management when they sat beside the pool with their infant daughter while chatting with neighbors.

Denies Discrimination

Eva Elam, who manages the apartment complex with her husband, Bill, refused to discuss the incidents much beyond saying, “There is no discrimination against children in this building.”

Apartment owners contend that their house rules are necessary to protect children and to keep their insurance carriers happy. This is especially true, they said, in apartment complexes originally designed for adult-only living where, typically, there are balconies and unfenced swimming pools.

However, officials at major insurance carriers said their policies are being misrepresented.

“There are no restrictions,” said Susan Schneider, a spokeswoman at Allstate Insurance’s corporate headquarters in Northbrook, Ill. “When we write them (apartment policies) we don’t even ask if families live there.”

Some apartment owners rely on the Los Angeles city ordinance’s provision that allows owners to limit children’s freedom on apartment grounds when it is “reasonably necessary” to protect them. But interpretations of that provision vary tremendously.

Oakwood an Example

The Oakwood Apartments complexes scattered throughout the Southland present an example of how the city’s law has been interpreted.

No one under 18 is allowed to use an Oakwood complex’s tennis courts or to enter the clubhouses, where adults can play pool or table tennis, watch television, lift weights, play cards or relax on the sofas.

Larry Carlin, senior vice president of marketing for R&B; Enterprises, which operates 18 Oakwood apartments in the Los Angeles area, said the restrictions are “all geared toward safety considerations.” For instance, he said, on a tennis court a child could fall down or get hit by the ball machine.

Assistant City Atty. Colin Chiu, who wrote the city ordinance in 1980, said he had swimming pools in mind when he inserted the safety provision. “I never saw a tennis court jump up and bite a child,” he said.

The city ordinance and state court rulings prohibit the eviction of a family when a woman gives birth to a child if the occupancy standard is not exceeded. There are women, however, who contend that they have been evicted merely because they have given birth.

Concealed Pregnancy

Harriet Englander, for example, said she concealed her pregnancy from her apartment’s owner for eight months because she feared that he would not permit a child in the building.

Englander, who has lived in the same one-bedroom apartment near downtown for seven years, said that on the day building owner Harold Gartner learned she was pregnant he asked her to leave. Gartner moved to evict Englander after her daughter was born last year, Englander said.

Gartner’s attorney, Marvin M. Chesebro, said his client is not discriminating against a child, but believes that the baby’s father has been living in the apartment since the birth, making the apartment overcrowded.

Englander denied that allegation and, at a recent eviction hearing, produced rent check stubs from the father’s separate apartment. The eviction case is still pending.

Frank Foster, a spokesman for the Apartment Assn. of Greater Los Angeles, said many spurned tenants mistakenly believe that they are victims of age discrimination. In actuality, an applicant with a family might not be as financially qualified as another, he said.

A number of landlords questioned by The Times about their “adult” signs either pleaded ignorance or said they felt that the law did not apply to them.

“I didn’t know the sign was illegal,” said Mehdi Ehsani, owner of a 30-apartment building on Saltair Avenue in West Los Angeles. He said he thought that as long as he complied with the law he could keep the discriminatory sign on his lawn. His sign has company. On three adjacent blocks there are three more “adult” signs.

Rita Archbold, manager of the Glenwood Apartments in Reseda, said the word adult was still on her sign because “we don’t have the same color paint” to cover it over. The manager of a Valley complex listed as Tara Woods Adult Apartments in the Yellow Pages said no one ever bothered to take the word adult out of the listing.

When the state fair-housing agency ran its check on child discrimination last summer, it concluded that discrimination apparently had not declined since the Supreme Court ruling and that landlords were finding clever ways to cover it up.

Employees of the Department of Fair Employment and Housing, posing as prospective renters with families, answered every two-bedroom apartment-for-rent ad placed in 11 major newspapers, including The Times, on one day in August. In addition to Los Angeles, landlords were telephoned in Santa Ana, San Francisco, Oakland, Sacramento, San Jose, Fresno, San Diego, Bakersfield, San Bernardino and Ventura.

Results Varied

Fifty-three percent of the landlords told the undercover callers that they would accept children, 8% of landlord responses were inconclusive, 12% said they did not rent to children and 27% placed restrictions on children, which the agency concluded could discourage a family from moving in and would appear to be discriminatory.

Such practices included keeping tenants under 18 off the tennis courts, forbidding minors to use other recreational facilities, limiting children’s use of pools to school hours or other unreasonable times and only renting first-floor apartments to families.

“Starting in 1982, with the passage of the court decision, they started getting more subtle” about discrimination “and increasingly so now,” said Earl Sulloway, an assistant deputy director at the agency, who reviewed the results of the survey.

When The Times made a random telephone survey of 20 Los Angeles apartments that placed apartment rental ads, eight managers said they accept children. Two said they did not rent to families with children. Another said there was no vacancy but later, when telephoned by a caller who said she had no children, said there was a vacancy.

The other nine landlords tried to undersell their buildings when they learned that the caller was seeking a two-bedroom apartment for a couple and a 6-year-old boy. At one complex, a manager explained, children could not play on the grounds because “the tenants object to that.”

No Social Stigma

One reason why discrimination continues, some suggested, is that there is no social stigma attached to disliking children.

“It’s different in a way from a lot of other discrimination,” said Elliot Block, a counselor with the Orange County Fair Housing Council. “Some people tend to think it’s not as unreasonable to keep out children.”

“It’s OK for us as a group of people to not like kids,” said Betty Witherspoon, executive director of Fair Housing Council of the San Fernando Valley, one of several private groups in Los Angeles that monitor housing discrimination.

But by far, fair-housing advocates said, the biggest reason is government’s inability to enforce its own laws.

Historically, the state fair-housing agency refused to accept cases involving child discrimination because, it said, it does not have enough staff to handle them.

State legislators, led by Assemblyman Gray Davis (D-Los Angeles), and fair-housing organizations condemned the state’s inaction. Last November, the National Center for Youth Law filed a petition with the Fair Employment and Housing Commission, which oversees the fair-housing agency, asking it to force the agency to begin accepting cases. In December, the commission did just that.

Expected a Deluge

As of Feb. 13, the state had received 30 child-discrimination cases, a figure that surprised state officials, who expected to be deluged. Davis and other critics of the department said that many people are unaware that the agency has begun taking cases, making it imperative for the department to begin advertising its change of heart.

So far, at least five of the complainants have received relief either through a settlement or agreement. One case was dismissed for insufficient evidence.

As of Feb. 21 the department’s Orange County office had received three child discrimination complaints since beginning to accept such cases in December, according to Dorothy Davis, district administrator.

“We’d expected a lot more,” Dorothy Davis said. “We’d expected to be pretty much overwhelmed by complaints once word got out to the public.”

Dorothy Davis said her office did surveys last year that showed “there very clearly were managers and owners who stated they did not rent to children or stated they had some kind of discriminatory policy against children.”

In Los Angeles, the city’s track record is not much better than the state’s. The city attorney’s housing enforcement section stopped investigating complaints of child discrimination in 1981 after budget cutbacks took away one of its attorneys, said Susan LeFebvre, a deputy city attorney. Slum landlords and rent-control violations were considered more important problems to pursue, she said.

Consequently, enforcement of the discrimination laws has rested primarily with the neighborhood Fair Housing Councils of the nonprofit Fair Housing Congress of Southern California.