Right to Live in Development Pits the Young Against the Old

The neat houses and fastidiously kept yards at Peacock Hills in Oceanside disguise a bitterness between young and old residents that is echoing through the courts and the state Legislature.

A long and emotional legal dispute over whether younger residents have the right to live in what’s argued to be a 920-unit duplex project strictly for senior citizens has descended to personal attacks and reported vandalism.

For 34-year-old Karen West, a key figure in the conflict, there are angry phone calls and unsigned letters telling her and husband Richard, 32, to take their 2-year-old son, Jeremy, and get out.

One anonymous note, signed by a person who identified herself only as an 84-year-old grandmother, reads: “We get enough annoyance when we go out to grocery stores (and) when we go out to eat and restaurants have squalling, fighting kids to disturb our meals when we look for a quiet interlude.”

“So take your kids where there are other brats and leave us alone,” it concludes.

West put down the note and said,, “They have such contempt for young people and children, it’s incredible.”

But the handful of Peacock Hills residents under the age of 55 aren’t the only ones who have been bruised by years of controversy and accusations over who may live in the 1970s-era project near Oceanside and College boulevards.

Older residents like Jean Doktor say they’ve been hurt, too, by harsh media coverage, young outsiders who disdainfully race their cars through the neighborhoods with blaring boom boxes, and vandalism to signs and mail boxes.

“It seems we are being turned into ogres,” Doktor said. “It’s a shame this quiet community has been rocked like this.”

In cases being watched throughout the state, the Peacock Hills Architectural Committee is suing the Wests and another young couple, Kevin and Stephanie Bell, who are in their late 20s, to force them from their purchased duplex units because they don’t meet the project’s age requirement.

Last October, a Vista Superior Court judge enforced the age restriction and ordered the Wests to move from Peacock Hills, a ruling that is now under appeal. A trial in the Bell case is scheduled to begin in July.

Meanwhile, special legislation to keep the Wests and the Bells in Peacock Hills goes before the state Senate’s Housing and Urban Affairs Committee on Tuesday. It has already passed the Assembly on a 74-0 vote.

Although the legislation won’t be the definitive word on the issue of age restrictions, the West’s case is believed to be the first of its kind to reach the appellate court. So an appellate decision would influence similar cases in the lower courts.

“We’re the guinea pig case,” West said.

That’s not what the Wests say they had in mind back in 1986 when the couple were trying to find an affordable house to buy with their modest $31,000 annual income. They found Peacock Hills, where each half of the duplexes is a tidy 900-square-foot home and a patio. Their unit cost $74,000.

The Wests knew there had been past legal troubles at Peacock Hills, but when they bought their home, they were armed with a fresh legal decision favoring another young couple, Michael and Marion Rhines, who lived in the project.

That decision held that the 55-year age restriction was invalid because the plaintiff, the Peacock Hills Architectural Committee, was a business-like entity subject to the state’s Unruh Civil Rights Act that bans discriminatory business practices.

Further, the ruling said the part of the project where the Rhines lived, called Phase 2, wasn’t even designed for seniors or the elderly. The committee didn’t appeal its defeat in the Rhines case.

So the Wests moved into their unit in Phase 4, confident the Rhines decision protected them and applied to all phases of Peacock Hills. Ten months later, in July 1987, they were sued for violating the age restriction.

Although technical legal questions are involved, there is an emotional side to the conflict.

Doktor holds a typical view among the seniors who want Peacock Hills exclusively for themselves.

She and her husband, John, are retired and bought their unit in 1979, longing to live out their years in tranquility and among friends and neighbors their own age.

“I have kids and grand-kids and I love them,” Doktor said. “But I feel when I get to this age, I do want a little serenity.” The Doktors had moved from other residences “where there’s no care and respect and the kids just run around.”

But here, at neat and well-maintained Peacock Hills, “it’s Shangri-La for us who had been searching for an ideal place.”

She’s especially comforted by the fact that seniors “seem to help one another with emergencies. Whether that would happen with the younger people, I don’t know.”

Although Doktor said she’s sorry about the hostile calls and letters to the Wests, she believes the couple took a clear risk by bucking the age restriction in seeking the affordable housing of Peacock Hills.

“Why should we be responsible for the lack of affordable housing for the young?” Doktor asked. “Why do we have to sacrifice our community in order to supply the young people with affordable housing?”

West sees things differently.

She believes Peacock Hills is illegally discriminating against younger families, denying their right to live and invest where they want. “This is something I never encountered, this militancy and this hatred for young people,” she said.

West spent eight years as a registered nurse in an intensive care unit before a back injury put her on disability. She stays at home, raising Jeremy, while Richard works as an assistant service manager at an automobile dealership.

She spent years nursing sick and injured elderly patients and wants to live in an affordable neighborhood where people of all ages get along and help one another. “I like old people. I’ve held their hand. I’ve helped them die and I helped them live,” she said.

But West doesn’t understand why so many seniors are against them and pass them off as offensive yuppies.

“We’ve got used cars and garage-sale furniture. We don’t drink and we don’t party. That’s a yuppie?” she said.

West believes that seniors are less motivated by a desire to live together than “attempting to exclude children.” That, she argued, “is discrimination purely on the basis of age.”

The couple are set on digging in to protect the investment in their home, which they now value at more than $100,000.

“We decided to fight this, not only to help ourselves, but hundreds and thousands of people across the state of California,” West said.

She and Stephanie Bell feel they get along well with neighboring seniors and are silently supported by many of them. “We don’t cause any sort of disturbance at all,” said Bell, who blames the opposition on a band of seniors who “don’t have anything better to do.”

But passions aside, the fate of the Wests, the Bells and potentially others depend on the courts and the Legislature.

Here’s how the legal and legislative fight has developed:

In the 1986 Rhines case, which invalidated the 55 age restriction, a Superior Court judge held that Peacock Hills didn’t offer design features and amenities to qualify it as a senior housing project.

However, in 1989, the Legislature relaxed the Unruh Civil Rights Act by giving exemptions to certain elderly housing projects. To qualify as a seniors project, a development need only show it offers lower-cost housing to the elderly.

“You don’t always need special facilities for seniors,” said Alan Burson, the attorney for Peacock Hills.

Confident it could enforce age restrictions, Peacock Hills pushed aggressively with litigation to oust the Wests and the Bells, even though both couples bought their homes before the 1989 exemption became law.

Burson said the Wests became the focus of the legal attack because they asked for it by challenging Peacock Hills. “They were just defiant about it. They moved in said ‘we’re here,’ ” he said.

Defending themselves, the Wests contend Peacock Hills still isn’t a legitimate seniors project, that age discrimination is illegal, and that they should be allowed to stay because they bought their home before the 1989 law.

Their attorney, Jack Turner, said, “seniors feel they have the right to discriminate against others so they can be together.”

In October, after a two-day trial, Superior Court Judge Franklin Mitchell found that Peacock Hills was now clearly for seniors only and ordered the Wests to leave within 90 days.

Further, the judge said the Wests had made a “legal and political” decision to buy their home despite the controversy over the age restriction. Turner commented, “The judge said, in effect, they should have anticipated the change in the law. That’s baffling to me.”

When the ruling was made, 60 seniors in the courtroom burst into cheers.

While the West case is under appeal, and a trial is pending in the Bell case, the special bill, AB125, is before the Legislature. It would grandfather the Wests and the Bells into Peacock Hills because they bought their units before the 1989 law.

The bill’s author, Assemblyman Robert Frazee (R-Carlsbad) has been a champion of senior housing, but said the 1989 law relaxing the Unruh Civil Rights Act failed to safeguard existing residents like the Wests.

AB125 is basically a “grandfather” clause that would “correct an oversight,” Frazee said. He added that his measure is proceeding through the Legislature without serious lobbying to stop it.

If the bill passes and becomes law, the Wests and the Bells believe they’ll be safely ensconced in Peacock Hills until such time as they decide to sell and move elsewhere.

But Burson, the lawyer for Peacock Hills, maintains the bill won’t make a difference because there are other legal grounds to use to expel the young couples.