Proposal for Anaheim Development : Renovation Plan May Force Families Out of Apartments
Benita Casas’ living arrangements are typical of other families’ in Anaheim’s Chevy Chase neighborhood: She and her husband sleep in one bedroom, three daughters use the second bedroom and two sons spend the night on a roll-away in the living room.
Her apartment is similar to many others in the largely Latino area in north Anaheim. It is clean and tidy, with old furniture. It’s no utopia, but her family has been happy there for the last 10 years.
Then there are the apartments like the one directly below hers: a floor ashtray overflowing with cigarette stubs sits by one of two torn, dirty couches that serve as beds. And standing in the middle of the stained living room rug is a dusty lawnmower.
But the residents of the deteriorating apartments, well-kept or not, will be forced to move if the city goes ahead with a unique proposal to help a developer buy and renovate the entire mile-square area of apartments. On July 1, the city approved a memorandum of understanding with the Karcher/Barry Co., a development firm owned by hamburger magnate Carl Karcher and Anaheim developer Terrance K. Barry. And on Tuesday, the Anaheim Housing Authority is scheduled to consider the second step of the project--and plan to relocate at least 200 families.
And while the city looks to the $25-million project as a clean start for a run-down, overcrowded neighborhood, some Latino activists say that the project will eliminate cheap housing for the immigrants that have settled here.
“It’s part of an overall plan to gentrify the . . . area. To get rid of the minorities, have the place redone under the auspices of beautification and raise rents. That’s where it’s going,” said Amin David, president of Los Amigos of Orange County. “This is the undercurrent. We’re petrified at the thought this is the way they’re going to do it. They are going to get rid of the people.
“These people (the city) are trying to stop the inevitable. They are trying to stop the concentration of immigrant families in the county,” said activist Nativo Lopez. “Anyone just has to go take a ride around Disneyland to find Disneyland is living in a sea of immigrants.”
But a neighborhood group that vehemently protested any renovation of the neighborhood in 1983 says it is awaiting more input on the project before taking a position.
In December, 1983, when word got out that a city report would recommend, among other options, single ownership of the Chevy Chase neighborhood, Familias Unidas in Accion (Families United in Action) protested, saying it would evict families.
Spokesmen for the group--most of whom belong to St. Boniface Catholic Church in Anaheim --recently declined comment on current plans and said they are awaiting more information.
The Rev. Conrad Pytlik, who was part of the protest when he was assigned to St. Boniface, said he hopes the plan does not “break up the community.”
About 3,000 people live in Chevy Chase, part of the larger Patrick Henry area of north Anaheim, directly south of the Riverside Freeway, according to a city-commissioned report released in September, 1984. The average one-bedroom apartment has five people and the average two-bedroom apartment has eight people, according to the 1984 Patrick Henry Neighborhood Planning and Design Study.
About 200 families will have to be moved, said David A. Stadler of Long Beach-based Pacific Relocation Consultants, but that’s only a guess. More families living in the almost 400 units--sometimes two and three families to one apartment--may be relocated to ease overcrowding and other housing code violations such as broken plumbing, loose wiring and deteriorating walls.
Relocation does not mean Chevy Chase residents will be given “$500 and a 30-day notice,” Anaheim Housing Coordinator Larry J. Cabrera said, emphasizing “no one will be placed on the streets.” Barry said the needs and concerns of the community will be addressed. Karcher was out of town and could not be reached for comment.
Stadler said his firm’s relocation plan would include interviewing families, assessing their needs, helping them find adequate housing and paying moving costs.
It also would include giving tenants up to $4,000--possibly more--to help subsidize rent payments if the new apartment is more expensive than their home in Chevy Chase, Stadler said. For example, if a tenant pays $400 in Chevy Chase but must pay new rent of $480, the Karcher/Barry firm or the city, or both, would pay that additional $80 for a four-year period, Stadler said.
The city also would set aside 25% of the units as affordable housing, which means it will be available to people who earn 80% of the Orange County median income, (for example, $31,760 instead of the median $39,700 for a family of four,) Cabrera said.
Some housing experts said the Chevy Chase developers and the city have a difficult task before them. It’s no secret that there’s a shortage of affordable housing in the county.
City officials have made it clear that federal guidelines prohibit them from transferring Chevy Chase residents from one overcrowded condition to a similar situation elsewhere. Asked where Pacific Relocation plans to find two- and three-bedroom apartments affordable to the low-income families from Chevy Chase, Stadler said he did not yet know.
When Garden Grove city officials about two years ago planned to help relocate nine families after razing a substandard building in the Buena Clinton neighborhood, it took a city staff member about 2 1/2 months to find them adequate housing, said Cathy Baranger, housing authority manager.
In Santa Ana, the assistance program set aside to aid families dislocated by city code enforcement does not include enough funds to have staff members actually looking for new apartments. The tenants--if they qualify--do the apartment-hunting on their own and the Feedback Foundation Inc., which runs the program, acts as negotiator between landlord and tenant. Other services provided include providing deposit money, said LaDale Dunbar, housing and community services manager. Of the 260 who were eligible--about 800 applied for assistance--the program helped 121 families since March, 1985, she said. The great majority, she added, are working families and not on any type of government assistance.
Of Anaheim’s proposal, Dunbar said, “It’s what I think about any rehabilitation or housing program. People have the right to live in decent housing. The problem is with most projects, they upgrade the housing, but they don’t upgrade the housing for those people who live there.
“They are going to be improving it for another population of people because the people living there are not going to be able to afford it. Eligible or not, they are not going to be able to afford it,” Dunbar said.
Cabrera, the housing coordinator in Anaheim, agreed that many families would be moved elsewhere under the plan, but said, “It’s not like we’re doing away with East L.A. A lot of that (Latin) flavor will be lost, but in the long run most of these families will be better off and have a better place to be.”
For Benita Casas, moving from Chevy Chase would be fine “if they help us.” But when she last went looking for an apartment 10 years ago, she spent six months searching until she landed in Chevy Chase, where the landlord didn’t repeat what she had heard elsewhere: “Tienen muchos ninos, tienen muchos ninos . “ (“You have too many children, you have too many children.”) Several residents like Casas, who had not heard of the city’s plan, said they would also be open to the idea if the promised assistance is enough.
“We would have to see what they propose,” said Gladys Martinez, 35, who lives with her husband, two daughters, mother, sister, brother-in-law and their little girl in a two-bedroom apartment.
Martinez’s well-kept, sparsely furnished home, which includes a crib and roll-up bed in the living room, is good enough for the Salvadoran family who arrived in Orange County because “the situation in our country was intolerable.” Martinez doesn’t complain about her cramped quarters--which pale in comparison to the homes she and her sister’s family each owned in El Salvador. They’re happy to live here, she said, “because we have jobs.”
The project has the blessings from the Neighborhood Improvement Program of Anaheim, said President Joe Caux, who as housing programs manager with the Community Development Council labels himself a tenant rights advocate. Caux called the Anaheim proposal “one of the most sympathetic and reasonable” attempts to “improve low-income neighborhood in Orange County.”
Word of the proposed project has not yet reached all tenants, city officials said, but all landlords have been contacted.
In the Karcher/Barry proposal, the city agrees to lend its power of eminent domain to acquire 15% of the properties within the neighborhood if the company can acquire 85% of estimated 400 units from willing landlords. So far, one landlord has agreed to sell his 168 units, Barry said earlier this month.
The buildings’ rehabilitation under single ownership plan is the latest step taken in the neighborhood. The city earlier this year rid the area of street vendors, which some residents complained had brought noise, litter and traffic congestion to Chevy Chase.
Police also have cracked down on crime. During a three-month special program in both Chevy Chase and the Lynne-Jeffrey neighborhoods ending last month, police made 310 arrests.
“That place is totally different today than in November or December,” said Frank Morales, a consultant with the Neighborhood Improvement Program of Anaheim.
Brigett Saylor, 28, whose home abuts an apartment complex and marks the entrance into the single-residence portion of the neighborhood, agreed. Now, when she rides her car in the morning, she is no longer accosted by bands of youths trying to sell her drugs.
“It was so bad, you wouldn’t believe it,” Saylor said. “I had to slow down, close my windows--every day.”
When her landlord asked her and her husband if they wanted to make their rental house a permanent home for themselves and their 15-month-old son David, Saylor said they refused to even consider buying the house.
“We said, ‘Not in this neighborhood.’ ” But now, with the decreased crime and the proposal to renovate the neighboring apartments, Saylor said they might change their minds.
