Costa Mesa’s sober living laws don’t discriminate against the disabled, jury says

Discrimination lawsuits piled up, but the city of Costa Mesa waged a lonely, expensive battle, defending its controversial rules on sober living homes in one court after another.

To the surprise of many, Costa Mesa kept winning. And on Monday, April 18, the city’s right to regulate sober homes was confirmed once again by a federal jury — a verdict that suggests cities are well within their rights to control where these businesses are located, who can run them, how far apart they should be, and more.

The rules aren’t set only to protect the character of mostly residential neighborhoods, attorneys for the city argued, but also to protect of the vulnerable people living inside those sober homes.

“Do you find…that Defendant City of Costa Mesa engaged in discrimination because of a disability, in violation of the Fair Housing Act or the Fair Employment and Housing Act…?” asked the verdict form in Ohio House vs. Costa Mesa case, released Monday.

“No,” the federal jury replied.

Did Costa Mesa make discriminatory statements? Unlawfully refuse to make a reasonable accommodation for the disabled? Interfere with the right of disabled people to housing of their choice?

“No,” the federal jury replied.

Attorneys for Ohio House will likely appeal — they didn’t return requests for comment by deadline — but it’s looking like seven lawsuits down, one to go, for Costa Mesa.

And the issues are much bigger than just Costa Mesa.

“It’s so out of touch with reality, this idea that it’s OK not to protect people in recovery,” said attorney Seymour B. Everett, III, of Everett Dorey LLP, which handled the case for Costa Mesa. “But for this ordinance, there is no requirement, no rules, for any sober living home. There is no protection. And to subject this protected class of disabled persons to exploitation — I don’t get it.

“This is about people who are disabled, vulnerable and entitled to the protection of the state and federal governments,” he continued. “To me, it’s remarkable that our country hasn’t stood up and passed laws to protect people at the local level…. It took this little city in California to do it, and a federal jury unanimously agrees.”

Those rules

Ohio House has five sober homes clustered together in Costa Mesa, housing nine men in each. That’s eight residents and one house manager, for a total of 45 people. It’s a for-profit business owned by Brandon Stump — who also owns the homes that the business rents — and each bed costs $1,500 per month. That’s a potential $60,000 a month, or up to $720,000 a year, when every bed is full, according to testimony at trial.

There was no allegation that anything was amiss at Ohio House itself, but Costa Mesa has been California’s ground zero for addiction treatment and sober living facilities, and its regulations were an attempt to bring some order to an unregulated chaos.

Those rules prohibit sex offenders, violent felons and drug dealers from operating sober living homes. They require homes to be supervised 24 hours a day, seven days a week; that operators enforce a no-drug policy and a good-neighbor policy; that they don’t just expel and “curb” people when there’s a problem, but instead get in touch with the person’s emergency contact and ensure that the person has a ticket home.

The rules also require a separation of 650 feet between sober living facilities, “to prevent institutionalization and maintain the residential character of the neighborhood.” That’s the rule that the Ohio House case revolved around.

Simply put, under Costa Mesa’s ordinance, its homes are too close to another facility. When the city refused to grant it an exception, Ohio House sued.

“Are people vulnerable?” said Chris Brancart, attorney for Ohio House, in closing arguments, according to transcripts. “You cannot discriminate in the name of paternalism….Now, if we wanted folks to live under rules and actually help disabled people, perhaps we wouldn’t close their housing.”

Everett argued that nothing is stopping Ohio House from continuing operations somewhere else in the city — in a place that’s 650 feet from another sober living home, as per the regulations.

“The analogy is this: ‘Officer, I don’t deserve the parking ticket. If that fire hydrant was just ten feet further apart, I wouldn’t get a ticket,’ ” Everett said, according to transcripts. “These are the reasonable regulations.”

A win for California?

Costa Mesa has spent more than $10 million defending its sober living laws since it began crafting them in 2014, and city officials believe that money has been a sound investment.

“We wanted to make sure everything we needed was in place to protect not just the neighborhoods but the residents of the sober living homes, to make sure they have an experience that is going to put them on a pathway to recovery or keep them on that road,” said Costa Mesa Mayor John Stephens.

“We continue to have a number of sober living group homes in Costa Mesa, but we have fewer than we did before 2018. And it’s very infrequent that we get a complaint associated with the operations of a sober living home. I would love to see our ordinance duplicated, for it to be a model at the state level, because it has been successful. It’s a proven concept.”

The state of California hasn’t always been reading the court briefs.

Last year, the California Department of Housing and Community Development sent vaguely threatening letters to cities with ordinances similar to Costa Mesa’s, saying their rules discriminate against the disabled.

That’s nonsensical, said County Supervisor Katrina Foley, who, with Stephens, helped craft the city’s legal approach when she was mayor of Costa Mesa.

“The ordinance has been determined to be lawful,” she said. “What these businesses are doing is scooping up properties that could be used by families, artificially increasing the property values, and charging a lot of money per bed so they can justify paying nearly $2 million for a house that might otherwise sell for $750,000. That makes the affordable housing situation in California worse.”

Foley was recently walking through a neighborhood in Laguna Hills where residents told her the exact same thing is happening there.

“Back then we said, ‘We cannot get the state to listen to us, we can’t get the federal government to listen to us. So we’re going to go it alone and create a model ordinance that will work for other cities in the same situation,” she said. “Now we have to get other cities to jump on board.”

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