Pressures Build With Navy’s Return : Quiet Revival in Long Beach Puts Strain on Housing, Service Families

Once the home of the Pacific Fleet, Long Beach is again an emerging Navy town, home port for 12,900 sailors and 15,000 Navy wives and children.

The local Navy community has nearly doubled in size since the Long Beach Naval Station was recommissioned in 1979, and more than $100 million in new Navy construction is complete or planned for the near future.

An additional 12 ships and 4,000 sailors are expected by 1990.

But obvious signs of the Navy’s return are curiously absent.

“It’s like we’re the invisible fleet out here,” said Chief John Chadwell, a public information officer at the naval station on Terminal Island. “You go outside this gate and it’s like nobody even knows we exist. I get calls all the time where people say, ‘Now where are you guys located?’ ”

Robert Paternoster, city planning director, also said “you no longer have a strong feeling of the presence of the Navy here. It’s not like those towns that you often consider Army towns or Navy towns. You don’t see people in uniform or the tattoo parlors.”

‘Less Visible Force’

That the public can no longer spot sailors on downtown streets, wending their way from bars to tattoo parlors to the Pike amusement park does not bother the Navy brass at all.

“We are a less visible force from that aspect,” said Capt. Kevin M. Healy, commander of the naval station. “Those days are gone forever.”

The Navy was a force in Long Beach affairs for decades, and San Pedro Bay became the Pacific Fleet’s home port during the 1930s. But in 1974, the Navy pulled 63 ships and 20,000 sailors out of the naval station and transferred most of its operations to San Diego. That left the Long Beach Naval Station virtually unused as a support facility until it was recommissioned.

The impact of the Navy’s return has been felt a number of ways: It has pumped millions of dollars into the local economy, aggravated an already critical housing shortage, and to a limited extent made extra demands on community services, such as schools.

It has also brought to this community thousands of young Navy families that are low-paid, often poorly housed and subject to the emotional turmoil of long separations.

The naval station stresses its $128-million annual military payroll and its employment of about 1,300 civilians. It also notes that the Navy spends $787 million each year in the Los Angeles and Long Beach area, not counting the $300-million budget of the Long Beach Naval Shipyard.

Long Beach city officials, Navy backers since they first helped bring it to town in 1919, are also upbeat. “The Navy has nothing but a positive effect economically and socially,” Mayor Ernie Kell said. “They’re good neighbors and with them they bring a tremendous amount of economic power.”

But in many ways, the Navy keeps to itself. About 5,000 sailors live aboard ship, another 1,000 live in naval station barracks, and nearly 2,000 Navy families live in Navy housing communities scattered through Long Beach, San Pedro, Seal Beach and Los Alamitos.

Navy Offers Conveniences

The Navy has its own stores, bowling alley, Burger King, parks, police, theaters, chapels, child care, social workers, relief agencies and hospital. “There is a tendency to live behind a fence when things are convenient,” Healy said. “And you could conceivably shop at the commissary and go to school at Hudson School and just never have any reason to go into the community.”

The increased size of the Navy community may also be overlooked because its numbers are small compared to the 2 million people who live within a 15-mile radius of Long Beach. “In Norfolk, where I was stationed, when the battle fleet came in with 20,000 sailors, they’d clog the freeway for an hour and a half each morning,” said Chadwell, the public information officer.

The Navy’s increased presence can be seen at City Hall. The city and Navy officially address common concerns through the municipal Armed Forces Commission. And the Navy participated in the city’s Year 2000 long-range planning process last year, focusing particularly on the area’s critical shortage of low-cost housing.

Healy, 47, who describes himself as a “promoter” of the Navy, also sits on several local boards, including those of the Chamber of Commerce, the American Cancer Society and United Way.

Community exposure to the Navy has come, too, through frequent weekend public tours of ships and participation in local charities.

The Navy’s return, however, may be felt most in the local housing market.

The market, especially apartments renting for less than $500 a month, was already tight before Navy families began to return in force five years ago. An influx of thousands of Latino and Southeast Asian families had lowered the vacancy rate to less than 3% by the late 1970s, and it has remained close to that ever since.

Housing experts say at least a 5% vacancy rate is needed for a housing market to offer much choice to tenants, Paternoster said.

Increased Housing Costs

Increased competition for too few apartments has increased housing costs for both military and civilian households. The monthly fee for Long Beach’s average apartment has about doubled since 1980, city and census figures show.

That has forced young Navy families, many with incomes so low they qualify for food stamps, to live in virtual slums while awaiting Navy housing. Or they’ve had to separate, with wives and children returning home to live with relatives, and husbands living aboard ship to save money, Navy officials said.

The Navy has only 1,990 housing units in the Long Beach area. All are full, and 1,143 more families are on waiting lists. “That’s not counting the people who would ordinarily sign up and just decide, ‘To heck with it. I won’t bring my family here,” Healy said.

There are 626 families waiting for two-bedroom apartments. Those at the bottom could wait 18 months, compared with an average seaman’s stay of about two years at each port, Healy said.

“We have a lot of families living in places that you and I wouldn’t want to live in. . . . in total slums,” he said.

Undesireable Quarters

Phil Brady, the Navy’s housing officer, estimated that more than half of the families of sailors of the lowest three Navy ranks live in places “most people wouldn’t want to live in.” Those three ranks include about a third of all sailors. Their base pay ranges from $639 to $849 a month, plus a housing allowance of about $450 for those with families.

Navy counselors say low incomes and poor housing in bad neighborhoods are just part of a cycle of frustration and despair that too often develops when teen-age brides marry their high school sweethearts and move from small towns to big cities with the Navy.

“This is a high-risk population for family violence because of separations of families and the financial stress,” said Valerie Long of the Navy Family Service Center, which provides a variety of counseling and referral assistance. “These families come to a horrible situation: The housing list is so long. They have to live in high-crime areas. We have situations, I think the Police Department calls them Westpac (sea duty) widows, and she is a vulnerable person. There have been rapes.”

Lori Essman, 23, mother of an 18-month-old son and pregnant, has twice returned to her parents’ home in New York rather than stay in Long Beach while her husband, John, was at sea. “I wouldn’t stay here by myself,” said Essman, who lives in a $430-a-month apartment on Magnolia Avenue, near Anaheim Street. “I didn’t feel safe at all.”

The Essmans, however, have twice turned down placement in the Navy’s 1940-vintage Savannah duplexes on the west side of Long Beach. “We looked over there and we didn’t like it,” she said. “The Navy calls it ‘inadequate’ housing (because of size), and I heard they had a lot of burglaries and rapes and stuff there too.”

Crime Problem

Healy confirmed that crime has been an increasing problem at the 1,000-unit Savannah and Cabrillo projects north of Pacific Coast Highway and west of Santa Fe Avenue.

Those neighborhoods had 267 crimes in 1985, including one rape, Healy said. Most of the crimes were petty and bike thefts, he said. But there were 54 family disturbances and 24 assaults.

Military police now patrol the area 24 hours a day, and a foot patrol officer has been assigned to the area, he said.

“I’m going to put a fence around it over the next few months. I’m tired of the bad actors walking through there,” Healy said. “People arrested over the last few weeks are professional criminals.”

But Elaine Lopez, a thin 21-year-old who looks years younger, and her husband James, 24, say their life at Savannah is far better than it was on the “outside.”

Returned to Hometown

After months of trying to meet a budget while living with an infant son in a tiny San Pedro studio apartment, Elaine returned to her small Arizona hometown last January. She lived with her parents and worked as a clerk until she saved enough money to return to her husband here. By then, the Lopezes had Navy housing.

“This is the closest thing I’ve had to a home since I was married,” she said, glancing around her 700-square-foot apartment. “Some people say it’s bad, but I don’t think it is. I don’t put it down.”

Like Elaine Lopez, Navy wife Catherine Antley points out other advantages to Navy housing.

“For Navy people on the outside, it’s like they’re out there by themselves,” said Antley, 30, who is raising seven children and stepchildren. “Here we lean on each other, but when you’re outside that doesn’t happen.”

Antley’s husband, Douglas, was one of the 1,500 crewmen aboard the battleship New Jersey during its 11-month sea duty in 1983 and 1984. That experience drew the wives and their little community closer, she said.

Broken Marriages

But it also broke a lot of marriages and made Douglas Antley consider leaving the Navy, he said. “During the deployment guys were getting ‘dear John’ letters and divorce papers and you just don’t want to push it any more,” he said.

Still, the Antleys consider themselves lucky. Their marriage survived and their family is together in Navy housing. They figure a comparable apartment elsewhere would cost hundreds of dollars more.

“The lady across the street sent her children home to their grandparents,” Catherine Antley said. “You might be able to sleep in a truck or car while you wait (for a Navy apartment), but you hate to have your children do it.”

Responding to the housing shortage, the Navy built 200 apartments in Seal Beach last year, plans to build 300 more in San Pedro this year and hopes it can persuade private developers to build hundreds more on Navy-owned property at the Navy Hospital and at Hudson Park and nearby Savannah within the next 18 months. The developers would get the land for free for 25 to 40 years if they would build, said housing director Brady.

Paternoster said the city, which has projected a need for 3,000 new Navy units by 1989, is encouraged by the Navy’s efforts.

“Even though we’re not satisfied with the amount, we understand that there’s more housing being built in Long Beach than at any other Navy home port in the country,” he said.