Save Newport Real News in Newport Beach
I was recently contacted by a concerned real estate agent asking whether or not the newly-elected Mayor-Pro-Tem Diane Dixon’s actions would require a disclosure on real estate sales in the Balboa Peninsula area. Before going into the answer, let me lay out the problem:
Dixon has repeatedly called crime on Balboa a “serious problem”, and repeatedly referred to our local and longtime businesses and their patrons as “nuisances” in both public forums and in documents generated for public consumption. She literally tasked the city staff to draw a map around the supposed problem area with the “Balboa Overlay”, and later expanded that by tripling the police patrols on the entirety of District 1, a move that even Newport Beach Chief of Police Jay Johnson said will force increases on official crime tallies.
After being presented with this question about disclaimers– and not knowing anything about real estate– I went straight to the source: The California Bureau of Real Estate.
I asked them whether or not repeated proclamations by public officials of district-wide “nuisances” and “high crime” would necessitate a disclosure from the real estate agent before selling property in the area. I was answered with a surprisingly emphatic “YES”.
The California Bureau of Real Estate representative informed me that a disproportionately high crime rate in an area of any city was something that absolutely must be disclosed. They also told me that the word “nuisance” is also something of a trigger-word that virtually guarantees a mandatory disclosure statement (see item #11 on page #4 in this document by California Department of Real Estate). Both of these have been repeatedly proclaimed by Dixon in both writing and in rhetoric.
How safe is Balboa? Well, if you include the tourist crime number and the tourist population, we are the safest area in Newport Beach. Conversely, if you don’t include the tourist crime number and also don’t include the tourist population, we are still the safest area in Newport Beach.
However, if you force the official numbers to include the tourist crime but exclude tourist headcount— and instead pretend that the crime of 10,000,000 visitors per year is committed by an 11,000-person population– things can look pretty badly pretty quickly. Dixon has taken this as the crime number and proclaimed the peninsula to be the highest-crime area in Newport Beach, generating about 4x the crime rate of other areas. Needless to say, reporting with numbers like these is both disingenuous and misleading, to say the least.
I urge Dixon to revisit these seriously-flawed crime stats, to retract her statements of the peninsula being a “nuisance area” and to reverse the increased policing we have recently been seeing on the peninsula, as this will only further inflate crime numbers.
If she chooses not to, then according to the The California Bureau of Real Estate, she will be forcing all real estate transactions in the Balboa and Lido areas to come with “disclaimer” about both high crime and nuisances.
And what do you think that will do to our property values?
Despite what Dixon may think, we are a safe and thriving area on Balboa, and our property values are high. Tell her you want to keep it that way!
Questions? Email me: michael.glenn@devion.com
