Student Parking Squeeze Spills Beyond Schools

They were born to the Southern California car culture, these kids, and its lessons were reinforced through regular exposure to freeways, luxury cars and sport utility vehicles: Having your own wheels is all. Commuting by bus is a pain. Carpooling is possible, but not attractive.

And walking? That ‘80s pop anthem says it all: “Nobody walks in L.A.”

So many suburban high school students have been driving themselves to school in recent years that campus parking lots are jammed and the cars spill over onto surrounding streets.

Now, the neighborhoods surrounding the schools are teaching their own Southern California lesson to those kids in cars: Not in My Front Yard. Residents have been taking their complaints about crowded streets, rude teenagers and blocked driveways to city council chambers, where they have succeeded in getting restricted-parking designations to keep out the high schoolers.

Last week, the Dana Point City Council--moved by what one councilman called an “extreme burden” on residents near Dana Hills High School--expanded the number of nearby streets off-limits to nonresidents during school hours.

Schools, in turn, find themselves in the unlikely position of playing transit authority: pushing for more carpools, repainting their lots to squeeze in more spaces, charging for parking that used to be free. They even send out parking patrols.

Not that this is going to pry teenagers from their cars.

“It’s just another obstacle we can climb over,” said Paul Carrero, 18, a senior at Dana Hills who steers his red ’96 Acura Integra to school each day. “The will to drive is strong.”

Meanwhile, residents near El Camino Real High School in Woodland Hills, tired of overflow parking from the campus, also are trying to get a so-called preferential parking district passed in their neighborhood.

It’s not that there are more teenage drivers; according to numbers from the Department of Motor Vehicles, California actually has fewer licensed teenagers now than 10 years ago, largely because of more restrictive laws.

But those driving teenagers seem to have readier access to car keys; at least one school that used to allow all students into its parking lot now must restrict parking to seniors and a handful of juniors.

“Driving is their rite of passage,” said David Schlesinger, a vice principal at Dana Hills. “Many students just don’t want to carpool or walk or take public transportation or school buses.”

As well as a rite, many teenagers see driving as a right.

“I need a car,” said 16-year-old Erin Hulon, a Dana Hills sophomore who commutes in “a real momma’s car,” a Volvo station wagon. “It makes it easier for me to leave on my own time.”

It must be the boom times, some experts and school officials speculate. Parents have more money to buy their children vehicles.

“Nowadays, it seems the minute you have your 16th birthday, you get a car,” said Catherine Barker, a proctor at Capistrano Valley High School in Mission Viejo.

Everyone Erin knows owns a car, the teenager says, and “hardly anyone takes the bus” because, she adds knowingly, “we live in a major car country.”

In addition, open enrollment policies mean many Southern California students drive to schools far from home. And at a number of schools, the extra cars simply mean extra students. Capistrano Valley, which was designed for about 2,000 students, now enrolls 2,990 and next year will have 3,200.

In any case, don’t blame the kids, one scholar says. Their parents and our entire culture have set them up for this.

“It’s such a silly problem, but that’s Southern California for you, with its crazy car culture,” said Tom Larson, a professor of economics at Cal State Los Angeles. “We live in a permissive society that allows us to have these bizarre problems.

“Europeans . . . would laugh their heads off that anyone would care whether high schoolers have parking,” Larson said. “Instead of driving these gas-guzzling cars to school, they should take a bus, or walk--get some exercise.”

Certainly, almost all of the car-cramped schools are in middle-class or affluent neighborhoods--much like the coastal town of Dana Point.

There, homeowner Tim Hack says teenagers need to rediscover the beauty of walking or taking public transportation.

“Yeah, it’s nice to drive your new car, but sometimes you can’t,” said Hack, 40. “I think students should have to get permits to park on the streets, not residents. . . . We have a bunch of spoiled brats in southern Orange County.”

A woman who lives across the street from El Camino Real High said students there have let the air out of a tire on her truck and broken one of her sprinklers. Because of her problems, she asked that her name not be published.

“They’re the worst. They’re dirty, they move my trash barrels, they use my side yard to make love, they block my driveway,” said the woman, a 27-year resident of the neighborhood.

Caught in the middle are school officials. They say some residents are too proprietary about public streets, but in trying to keep the peace, they are willing to impose parking restrictions.

“We’re in a position where we have to do everything we can to please the neighbors,” said Nate Goodman, transportation coordinator for Buckley School in Sherman Oaks, a private school. Under pressure from a local homeowners association, many students there have to park in a structure a mile off campus, where the school has leased about 100 spots.

Homeowners exercise de facto veto power over decisions related to school expansion, Goodman said, because they can persuade city officials to revoke the school’s conditional-use license. “We’ve been making a lot of concessions,” he said.

Some Students Park a Quarter-Mile Away

Parking is so tight at Capistrano Valley High, which has been surrounded by preferential parking districts for years, that more than 120 students pay $40 a year to park at nearby Saddleback College and walk a quarter-mile to school. Only seniors and a few juniors get the privilege of on-campus parking, and school staff members patrol residential streets to make sure that students aren’t parking there or causing problems.

And when Marlborough High School in Hancock Park applied for a new conditional-use permit last year to expand the school, residents used the opportunity to persuade school officials to patrol their neighborhood streets and keep out student cars.

As a result, security staff members armed with customized Marlborough ticket booklets now patrol the neighborhood to make sure that cars are parked only on campus-adjacent streets. On-campus parking is limited to students in carpools. The school even set up a hotline to deal with residents’ parking complaints, said Denise Gutches, Marlborough’s director of finance and operations.

To manage large events like open houses, school officials came up with a quintessentially L.A. solution: valet parking. In fact, many schools hire valet services for special events that can cause traffic jams in residential streets, said Daniel Ziv, president of Z Valet and Shuttle Service.

All these things add up to “a huge cost,” Gutches said. “We’re diverting educational resources to manage street parking.”

At El Camino Real, construction trailers have supplanted 30 to 40 parking spots on campus. Principal Ron Bauer said he routinely fields complaints about students’ littering or loitering in the neighborhood, and he disciplines the guilty parties.

However, both Bauer and students noted that many residents have moved within the boundaries of the Academic Decathlon-winning school because of its reputation.

“These people’s property values are going up because of things that we’re doing,” said Dory Babarsky, 18, an El Camino senior. “If they have to deal with kids messing around for 20 minutes a day, it’s not that big a deal.”

Nader Massoudi, 18, who drives his black VW Jetta to school, took a more understanding tack.

“I don’t blame residents, but what are we going to do?” he asked. “We’re going to park by somebody’s house. We have no choice.”

L.A. Councilwoman Laura Chick said she hopes permit-only parking is averted near El Camino Real.

“I think all sides need to be thoughtful,” Chick said, “and often people who push hard for permits do so only to find that it’s very inconvenient for them, too. . . . Working together, we can find other solutions.”

Even some affected residents oppose permit-only parking.

“We all chose to purchase homes on public streets,” Lisa Thykjaer, 32, told the Dana Point City Council on Tuesday night before it voted 4 to 0 to create more preferential parking near Dana Hills High. “I don’t want my street turned into yet another private street, and even if I did, I don’t think it’s right.”

Fortunately, she added, the kids have nice cars. That keeps the streets from looking rundown.

School officials readily admit that some students have wrought mischief wherever they parked.

“They have emptied ash trays on streets,” said Schlesinger, the vice principal at Dana Hills. “They have moved one disabled lady’s trash cans to make space. They threw trash.”

One resident near Dana Hills High School, who wished to remain anonymous, said her children were recently “terrorized” by some teenagers who came into her backyard, cursed at her husband and then swaggered into a red sport utility vehicle parked on the street before speeding off, still hurling insults.

And then there was young Carrero, who after parking his red Integra before school one recent day helped himself to some roses at a nearby house.

But householder and high schooler aren’t always so much at odds.

In places where parking is restricted, teenagers have taken to knocking on doors, introducing themselves and asking residents if they can borrow guest permits to use on the restricted streets. To the great surprise of Barker, the proctor at Capistrano Valley, some residents actually let students use the permits.

And at a corner house across from the school, on Country Canyon Road, three expensive-looking sports cars were parked in a spacious driveway, courtesy of a sympathetic homeowner. They were all student vehicles.

“That’s really nice of the neighbor,” Barker said. “And that’s very clever of those kids.”