Avalon’s Birthday Wish List Includes Worker Housing

From the window of his home overlooking Avalon Bay, Joseph Guion, 90, can see his entire world on Santa Catalina Island.

He can see where he got his first real job in 1920, the Avalon Boat Stand Co. on Pleasure Pier, where his son, Joseph Jr., works today. Guion can see every vessel that enters or leaves the harbor, from 700-passenger cruise ships to paddle boats for two. He can see sunbathers on the beaches and golf carts tooling along Avalon’s narrow, Mediterranean-like streets.

And he can see the changes.

“Some things are better now and some are not,” he said recently at the 11-room home where he and his wife, Frances, 83, have lived since 1930, when they bought it for $10,000.

“It’s practically impossible now for a young couple to come up and buy a house the way we did.”

75th Anniversary

Housing is just one of the challenges facing Avalon as the town of more than 2,400 people celebrates the centennial of its founding and the 75th anniversary of its incorporation this year.

The town is struggling to maintain an isolated, small-town way of life, but welcomes the thousands of tourists who keep that life humming economically. Some want to build more hotels and restaurants to accommodate more tourists, but there are shortages of water and sewage treatment capacity. And even if those problems were solved, workers are scarce because reasonably priced housing is too hard to find and commuting from the mainland is impractical.

The city’s population growth is only about 3%, or about 30 people a year, but even with that small growth, permanent job seekers often can’t find a place to live, City Manager John Longley said.

“There’s just no place for worker housing,” Longley said. “Because of the housing shortage we do not have as dynamic a labor market as we should.”

Yet, Avalon’s rental vacancy rate is about 30% over an entire year, one of the highest in Los Angeles County, Longley said.

Landlords can afford to hold out for as much as $1,500 a week from vacationers and then take their units off the market in the off season. Earl Schrader, a real estate broker with the Davis-Baker Co., said his firm rarely lists apartments for rent. “The landlords don’t need us,” Schrader said. “Word of mouth is so fast. Things disappear quickly.”

So quickly, in fact, that island newcomers like Keith Lefevre, a district superintendent for Southern California Edison Co., can’t find housing despite having a job in Avalon.

Finding a place to live has been an “almost insurmountable” problem, Lefevre said. “I knew the housing (situation) would be difficult but I didn’t know it would be as difficult as it really is.”

Since Lefevre arrived on the island in March, he has spent much of his spare time tracking down dozens of dead-end leads searching for a home for his wife and two children, whom he left on the mainland in West Covina.

In the meantime, he is living in a spare room at the home of Angelo Kedis, an Edison district manager and a longtime housing activist in Avalon. Lefevre visits his family twice a month on alternating weekends, and they come to the island to visit him on the other weekends.

Kedis, chairman of the Affordable Housing for Avalon Committee, a private citizens group, helped put a measure on last April’s ballot that would have allowed the Avalon Community Improvement Agency to allocate a portion of its funds to build low- and moderate-income housing.

Lost by 11 Votes

The proposition was narrowly defeated--534 votes against the idea, 523 for it--and Kedis contends that absentee voters who are registered on the island but spend most of their time on the mainland helped shoot it down.

Mayor Hugh T. (Bud) Smith contends that the city’s $6.5-million budget is too lean for the city to build its own moderate-income housing.

“The city will never be able to provide subsidized housing as such,” Smith said. “We don’t have the money to do it.” A possible alternative might be working with private businesses to build employee housing, with the city providing sidewalks, street lights and other infrastructure, with businesses taking on the cost of constructing new buildings, he said.

Assistant City Manager Pete Woolson, who is also Avalon’s planning director, said the city has been trying to put together a housing project. But Woolson said the city has no vacant land available for building housing projects and would have to lease land from the Santa Catalina Island Co. Even with a discount the city could get on leasing the land, the proposition is too expensive for the city to tackle alone, he said.

The Santa Catalina Island Co. is a corporation whose seven presidents have descended from William Wrigley Jr., who bought controlling interest in the company in 1919 and was its first president. The company’s current president, Paxson (Packy) Offield, is Wrigley’s great-grandson. The company owns about 13% of the island, including 70% of incorporated Avalon, said Ron Doutt, executive vice president of the company.

86% for Conservation

Avalon’s development beyond its present city borders is limited because a 50-year easement agreement between Los Angeles County and the Santa Catalina Island Co. set aside 86% of the land on the island for conservation purposes. The 1974 agreement gives the county rights to share with Santa Catalina Island Co. more than 40,000 acres of the island’s coastline and rugged interior for conservation and recreational purposes. There are 36 years remaining on the agreement.

In 1975, the Santa Catalina Island Conservancy acquired title to 86% of the island. The nonprofit conservancy works with county officials to control access to the interior, while the Santa Catalina Island Co. continues to operate most of the island’s tourist attractions.

In Avalon’s continuing effort to solve the housing problem, the City Council has appointed Kedis and six other Avalon residents to a newly formed Housing Advisory Committee that will study the housing shortage and report to the council on possible ways to ease it.

While the housing market is shrinking, tourism, the island’s staple industry, is expanding.

The number of tourists to the island, which through May had increased more than 22% compared to May, 1987, will likely add to the housing problem, said Wayne Griffin, executive director of the Avalon Chamber of Commerce.

‘Year-Round Economy’

“We’re moving to a year-round economy, and that means year-round employees, more families with dependent children instead of college students in the summer,” Griffin said.

The upward trend is likely to increase with the arrival of two cruise ships, the Azure Seas of Admiral Cruises line and Norwegian Cruise Line’s Southward. Both ships began regular stops at Avalon Harbor this year, increasing Avalon’s chances of becoming a year-round resort, Griffin said.

Although the summer housing shortage is nothing new, it’s worsening as tourism improves.

Lita Mulvihill, owner of a boutique on Crescent Avenue, Avalon’s main street, and an appointee to the housing committee, said the combination of more visitors to the island and an inability to find employees has been a big headache.

“There has been a transition,” Mulvihill said. “Ten years ago, the summer season really began during spring break. You’d have a bunch of (job) applications and kids would come out for the summer (to work). That doesn’t happen anymore. There’s no place to live. Kids can’t earn enough to pay for a place to live.”

Consequently, Mulvihill has been unable to fill a full-time clerk’s position, even though she offers health benefits and a pension plan.

“There is no one to hire,” Mulvihill said.

Remedy an Imbalance

Kedis said he hopes the housing advisory committee will remedy what he sees as an imbalance between the town’s residential community with its tight housing market, and Avalon’s business community, which, between tourism and real estate, has substantial money-making potential.

“Right now, it appears to me that the commercial side has taken too much from the residential side,” Kedis said.

The housing market has been further crippled by constraints on fresh water, a problem in Avalon since the 1920s when the town’s drinking water was transported from Wilmington to San Pedro, then by boat to Catalina where it was sold to islanders, 5 gallons for 15 cents.

Avalon’s first water and sewage systems were constructed during a booming development period in the early part of this century.

In 1962, Avalon residents voted to allow Southern California Edison Co. to take over the island’s water and electrical systems from the city and the privately owned Avalon Public Service Co., Edison officials said.

Today, the island’s water for sanitation and firefighting comes from a saltwater system that desalinates the water about 50%, while drinking water is piped into town from the Middle Ranch Reservoir in the interior, which has a 330-milliongallon capacity.

Because of the limited water supply, the amount of water allocated to every building--residential or commercial--is controlled according to an agreement signed in 1979 by Edison, the city of Avalon and the Public Utilities Commission.

Despite the current dry weather, the reservoir’s water level is still at sufficient levels to allow water allocations to remain unchanged this year, city and utilities officials said.

Unless there is significant rainfall during the coming winter, however, officials may be forced reduce water allocations by next summer.

Sewage Problems

Avalon’s other big problem is sewage.

The city opened a new sewage plant in 1976, but by 1983 population growth had caused the system to overload, and the city began to upgrade the capacity at Pebbly Beach’s pumping facilities.

In 1984, the Regional Water Quality Board ordered further modifications to the system, and the city started a long-range $100,000 project to increase sewage capacity. The final stage of the project is scheduled for completion this August, city officials said.

For now, the unavailability of water for new construction has caused an unofficial building moratorium, putting developers on hold until water is available.

Sixty-seven people who want to build in Avalon have completed forms stating their intent to file building permits with the city when water becomes available, Planning Director Woolson said.

With the conservancy’s unspoiled interior nearby and Avalon’s cozy, self-contained isolation--including its own small hospital, Fire Department and school (part of Long Beach Unified School District)--many longtime islanders like Guion seldom find reason to leave town.

Instead, the world--in the form of hordes of pleasure-seeking tourists who arrive by boat, yacht, cruise ship, small plane and helicopter--comes to Avalon.

“I get over to the mainland on occasion, mostly for medical reasons,” Guion said. Otherwise, he said, “Avalon is sufficient. Everything is so enjoyable here. Why would I want to go?”