City Plans Aid Renters

Tuesday’s Costa Mesa’s City Council meeting went long into the night with a three-hour debate on a skate park at Lions Park, followed by a debate to reopen the Fairview Park master plan for a dog park or another skate park. One issue was an appeal of the Planning Commission’s forbidding an Eastside apartment to convert to a condo.

It was clear not everyone understood the condo conversion issue or how it affects property owners’ rights.

For decades, property owners nationwide have tried to convert apartments into condos. It is not a complicated business model to buy apartment buildings for $200,000 per unit and convert them to condos that sell for $450,000 or more. Even with extensive upgrades costs, the profits are sizable. This is what was happening until the condo-conversion moratorium, now over, here in Costa Mesa.

During the last two years, unlike the rest of the county, Costa Mesa had a surge of applications for conversions. This started with the city’s thinking that it could turn renters into homeowners.

To achieve that goal, we allowed condo conversions to be granted without the units adhering to current standards. Most people at the time thought we would get some 20- or 25-year-old apartments whose standards would be close to current. Nobody expected applications from ’50s and ’60s properties, which were way out of standard.

Because the city had no real code, the decision to approve a conversion was at the complete discretion of the Planning Commission and city council with no guidelines to follow.

Besides health and safety issues of older properties, the city was getting applications for ’60s projects that had 40% less parking than was needed. These parking codes were set in a time when families had one car. Now, families have two or more cars. Neighborhoods that had older apartments had no parking for residents. People would have to drive around the block several times to find a space. Single-family residences close to these apartments had cars from apartment residents who lived blocks away.

Over time these issues usually take care of themselves. As buildings get older and lose their economic value, developers buy these properties, raise them and build new homes or condos with adequate parking in their place.

Remember that every other city in the county would never allow a conversion unless the property was up to current standards.T

o help bring more homeownership without hurting neighborhoods, the city adopted a condo-conversion ordinance that would allow apartments to be converted with standards between the old and new ones. Except for health and safety issues, a property could be approved if it met minimum standards. For example, when you figure in guest parking on a two-bedroom unit, the existing standard is 3.5 parking spaces per unit. If it is a conversion the ordinance now allows 2.5 spaces per unit. What will not be approved are older properties that sometimes had 1.5 spaces per unit.

Some may say that it is impossible to bring a 1962 property up to 1985 standards, let alone 2007 standards. That’s the point. When an apartment building was built in 1962, it was built as an apartment, not a condo. The owners of the property have an apartment building not a condominium project. Not allowing an under-parked, over-crowded apartment building from converting to a condominium is not taking away any of the owners’ property rights — they never had that right.

Property owners should know that the city will not hurt their values by prolonging the economic life of a building that, in any other city, would be torn down to make room for a new development. On the other hand, we need to have flexibility to rehabilitate older properties. The new conversion ordinance does both.