According to the Fair Housing Council of Orange County, Home Is Where the Trouble Is

Landlords are better about not discriminating against LGBT individuals now, but such residents can still be targets of harassment and hate crimes by their more homophobic neighbors, inhibiting their freedom to choose where they live. Late last year, a gay couple was forced to move from an Aliso Viejo apartment community after more than three years because of harassment from some of their neighbors.

"We visited Orange County a few years ago and completely loved the place," says one of the men, both of whom requested anonymity. "We eventually decided to make the move. Everything was fine for a few years, but about six months ago, some new tenants moved in below us.

"It was little stuff at first," he continues. "Once, when they were outside, one of their friends yelled up at us, but even then, some of them told her to quiet down. Then, out of nowhere, someone left a note on our front door. A month later, someone posted even more notes."

Cesar Baxin

Protest at Chatham Village

Dustin Ames

FHCOC office

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More About

• Cesar Baxin
• Khoi Pham
• Denise Cato
• Politics
• Local Politics

The couple eventually contacted the Center Orange County, who informed the Orange County Sheriff's Department. A deputy visited them, but no one got back to them after that. They ultimately decided to not pursue legal action and to leave the apartment early for their own safety, paying two separate leases for two months.

In similar cases, FHCOC has worked with apartment managers to educate and inform tenants, as well as to make sure that offenders know that LGBT harassment is grounds for eviction. The Sherrif's Department, Cato says, failed in its duties. "That's a hate crime," she says. "It's the department's duty to make sure that those people are safe, not just to take a report."

New immigrants are also susceptible to unfair housing practices because they don't understand American laws. "I came here in 1975," says Khoi Pham, a Tustin resident who currently serves on FHCOC's volunteer board of directors. "We didn't know anything about the law, about the relationship between landlords and tenants, because in Vietnam, we didn't have that kind of law."

Before the fall of Saigon, he worked as an air-traffic controller at Saigon International Airport. He was working in the control tower with an American adviser during the night of the 1968 Tet Offensive. Five minutes after he left the building, it was hit by rockets and collapsed. When Saigon fell in 1975, he was a member of the first group of Vietnamese Americans to leave the country, airlifted by C-130s to military bases in Guam and the Philippines instead of leaving by boat. He made arrangements for more than 300 people to leave the country at the same time he did.

When he arrived in the States, he volunteered at Camp Pendleton to help situate refugees in their new lives. He began working for the FHCOC in the mid-1990s.

"I volunteered to work at the Fair Housing Council because they needed a Vietnamese speaker. At the beginning, I just volunteered, but then they offered to pay me, so I said, 'That's fine,'" Pham says with a quick laugh. "Normally, people would have problems with their landlords keeping their security deposits or not making repairs. We mediated. We would call landlords to tell them what they had to do. Some were okay, but some, not so much. We had to refer them to the courts.

"It wasn't just the Vietnamese community," Pham continues. "Hispanic, Korean, black. All kinds of people, and they all had the same problems."

After a 20-year career at the FHCOC that saw Pham oversee tenant/landlord relations, mediation services and HUD programs, he retired in 2009. But the calls didn't stop. Pham still received requests for aid as his reputation spread throughout the community by word of mouth and name recognition. In addition to his volunteer board membership at the council, Pham is also an adviser to the Vietnamese American Federation of Southern California, a collection of nearly every Vietnamese American organization in Orange County.

"I was the only Vietnamese person who could help [in 2009]," says Pham. "People heard about me from friends, and they would call me. I would refer them, but because of language difficulties or because they knew my name and who I was, they still called and asked for help. . . . It was a lot of people. In 2013, I completed helping four or five families that were really in need. In two cases, the family had a member who was mentally disabled. One lost their housing; I got them to return to the house they had already lost."

*     *     *

Despite its community service, the council's reputation isn't spotless. In 2008, FHCOC's board of directors had a very public legal spat with the nonprofit's then-executive director, D. Elizabeth Pierson. When the board requested $5,000 to hire an outside investigator to independently audit the organization's finances, Pierson refused on the advice of Ramon Diaz, a board member who supported her. Diaz made that recommendation because he believed that fair-housing funds could not be spent in that way.

Pierson's refusal prompted a lawsuit by the board, which Pierson responded to by filing a countersuit alleging the board acted in bad faith, didn't inform her of complaints against her, and should have gone to a mediator, as per her employment contract, instead of filing a lawsuit. The board eventually put her on unpaid leave, declining to renew her contract when it ended in June 2008.