Federal judge says Costa Mesa must house residents of mental health home

Mary Helen Beatificato saw the lease sign outside a six-unit apartment building on Costa Mesas Santa Ana Avenue and knew she had found the perfect place.

She and then-business partner Dr. Gerald Grosso, co-founders of Insight Psychology & Addiction (doing business as Nsight), had been looking for a property to house up to 30 adult clients in addiction recovery, many of who had mental health problems. not receiving adequate treatment in traditional sober living homes.

The building had just been renovated, so the couple began moving clients in early 2015. By then, the business model had shifted from addiction treatment as it began to emerge a greater need for mental health housing, according to Beatificato.

We were sending them to sober living, but they had a primary mental health diagnosis, he recalled Wednesday. And those who live sober [facilities] You don’t let them take certain medications, because they are controlled substances, but our clients need these controlled substances to function. That’s what we got out of, why don’t we solve our own problem and start providing housing?

Residents diagnosed with PTSD, major depressive disorder and anxiety, even those without addiction problems, now stay 45 to 90 days in a transition from 24-hour psychiatric care to home life.

When the site first opened, Costa Mesa had just enacted a law regulating group housing in areas zoned for single-family use, but there were no such restrictions for multi-family residential lots.

That all changed in November 2015, when city leaders adopted an ordinance requiring group home operators to obtain conditional use permits and stipulating that facilities could not be located less than 650 feet one from the other.

Beatificato said he learned of the new law months later, when city staff notified him that Nsight would need to obtain a use permit. He drafted the paperwork in October 2016 and waited.

In the next two years, other sober facilities opened on nearby University Drive in unincorporated Orange County outside the city limits. Property records show transactions in November 2015 and October 2017.

Four addiction treatment businesses on three properties were within 650 feet of the Beatificatos Mental Health Treatment Center. Soon enough, the city’s development director called with bad news.

[She] said: Hey, we just found out there’s another facility in this unincorporated area. My recommendation will be to deny this CUP unless you can get a reasonable accommodation. So I did it immediately, Beatificato recalled.

When Nsight administrators sought a waiver from the 650-foot separation requirement given that their facility had been operating before the law’s passage and that other outdoor facilities had opened while awaiting approval administratively, the request was denied.

Appeals to the Planning Commission and City Council were similarly denied, as officials, aware of a growing problem with the proliferation of sober homes, openly doubted Nsights’ claim that the facility no longer focused on substance abuse.

Beatificato, a licensed attorney, realized her only chance for redress would be a court decision. In March 2020, Nsight filed a complaint in US District Court that claimed the city’s denial violated the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and other federal and state housing laws, already which denied housing to people with mental disabilities.

Alisha Patterson of the law firm of Irvine Rutan & Tucker represents Nsight and says the city has consistently viewed all residential facilities as group homes without distinguishing between different specialties or clientele.

They looked at the volume of group homes in total and said we can’t have one more, it doesn’t matter if you’re the only group home of your kind, he said Thursday. In the litigation, they tried to imply that if we shut you down, there are plenty of other group homes. But Nsight residents can’t move into a sober home.

Costa Mesas attorneys say only a reasonable accommodation for people with disabilities would be required to create parity with the rights already enjoyed by people without disabilities.

Because there is no comparable housing opportunity for people without disabilities in the R1-12 zone, no reasonable accommodation was necessary to achieve equality of opportunity in any sense, they wrote in June 2020, stating that a accommodation would constitute preferential treatment.

After years of legal back-and-forth and a judicial reassignment, both sides asked U.S. District Court Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong to rule on some undisputed facts.

The city sought a type of civil rights claim that applied to businesses and not local governments. Frimpong agreed in a March 20 ruling to summary judgment.

The ruling also favored Nsights’ request for a reasonable accommodation for the city’s separation requirement, due to the fact that similar housing does not exist in Orange County.

without [Nsights] housing, its residents are more likely to regress after leaving residential care and end up back in the hospital, or worse, Frimpong wrote. The city declined to present any evidence in dispute [Nsights] prove that your request for accommodation was reasonable and necessary. Therefore, it has failed to create a genuine issue of material fact.

Beatifico, who estimates she has spent more than $1 million and countless hours on the issue, said she was delighted to read the ruling.

I feel vindicated, she said Wednesday.

Other elements of the lawsuit will continue to be processed through the federal court system, potentially leading to a jury trial. Beatificato hopes officials can amend the ordinances to allow more mental health housing.

City Attorney Kimberly Hall Barlow, however, stood behind the city’s sober living laws.

The city has prevailed at trial each time it has defended its ordinances, it said in a statement Thursday. Juries have spoken strongly in favor of the city’s ordinances in several trials, the appeals court has upheld one of those trial results, and we expect that result to be the same.

The two sides are scheduled to meet next week ahead of a June 27 settlement conference.