The City Council’s Planning and Land Use Management (PLUM) Committee voted 3-0 Tuesday to recommend an ordinance that would regulate sober-living and group homes in residential neighborhoods. Now it will go to the full council for a vote. In addition to the three City Council members on the committee (Ed Reyes, Jose Huizar and Paul Krekorian), the Community Care Facilities ordinance has the public support of at least three others on the council, including Greig Smith, the District 12 representative who initiated the regulation in 2007. Smith’s move was prompted by constituents’ complaints of panhandling, foul language, traffic congestion and excessive noise in connection with these types of residences. The Pacific Palisades Community Council has voted its unanimous support of the proposed ordinance. Chair Janet Turner and fellow members Jennifer Malaret, Jack Allen, Barbara Kohn and Chris Spitz have urged city officials to approve it, and have met with other local councils to garner their support. The two-pronged ordinance would require state-licensed group homes that serve seven or more recovering addicts, alcoholics, senior citizens, parolees or developmentally disabled residents to meet certain parking, noise and lighting standards. However, sober-living homes’groups of recovering alcoholics and drug addicts who live together in a support network’are not subject to state licensing because they don’t provide treatment and counseling. There are three known sober-living homes in Pacific Palisades and more are planned. In order to address objections to the transient nature of some sober-living homes in single-family neighborhoods, the ordinance changes the definition of boarding houses to rentals involving more than one lease. Boarding houses are already prohibited in residential areas zoned R1 and R2 and, under the ordinance, would also be blocked from those zoned RD. Advocates for sober-living and group homes argue that the new rules would virtually outlaw these homes in low-density residential neighborhoods, where drugs and other temptations are less readily available and successful recovery is more likely. ’Pushing [recovering addicts and alcoholics] out of single-family neighborhoods (where evidence shows they are most effective) with insufficient capacity in multi-family zones is not a plan,’ sober living advocate Paul Dumont said in an editorial for CityWatch. ’People are not upset about what I call ‘true sober-living homes’ where small groups of people live together as a family,’ said Turner, the PPCC chair. ‘These have been around for many years and are welcomed into our neighborhoods because they have stability and commitment, not transiency. ’What people are complaining about is’a business that seems to be more concerned with making money’than keeping control over its tenants and being good neighbors,’ she said. Project Director Jeff Christensen of the nonprofit Sober Living Network argued that city officials should use nuisance abatement laws to punish bad operators instead. ’Sober-living homes have been operating in this city for decades,’ Christensen told the Palisadian-Post. ‘For every single problem house, there are hundreds that are not problems. Many people do not even know they are there.’ Palisades resident Rebecca Lobl, who lives next to a sober-living home on Muskingum Avenue, co-founded the L.A. Coalition for Neighborhoods to advocate for the restrictions. ’Nobody wants to see people with disabilities prevented from finding a better way,’ Lobl said. But when operators start running a sober-living home ‘like a small hotel, it’s not appropriate in a low-density neighborhood.’ In earlier hearings, concerns were raised about unintended consequences of the ordinance, such as restricting student or summer beach rentals, sources of income for some residents. Lobl said these concerns were effectively addressed Tuesday. This article relies on previous stories by Staff Writer Danielle Gillespie.
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