Catalina: Tight Little Island Bursting at the Seams

From the window of his home overlooking Avalon Bay, Joseph Guion, 90, can see the past and present of 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-style 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.”

Housing is just one of the challenges facing Avalon, which this year is celebrating the centennial of its founding and the 75th anniversary of its incorporation.

The town of just over 2,400 residents is struggling to maintain an isolated, small-town way of life, but welcomes the thousands of tourists who keep its economy humming. Some want to build additional 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 increases only about 3%--or about 30 people--a year, but even with that slow growth, permanent job seekers often cannot find a place to live, City Manager John Longley said.

“Because of the housing shortage, we do not have as dynamic a labor market as we should,” he said.

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 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 such as Keith Lefevre, a district superintendent for Southern California Edison Co., cannot find housing despite having a job in Avalon.

“I knew the housing (situation) would be difficult but I didn’t know it would be as difficult as it really is,” he said.

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

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 said that with a $6.5-million budget, “The city will never be able to provide subsidized housing as such. 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, he said.

Assistant City Manager Pete Woolson said the city has no vacant land available for building housing projects and would have to lease property from the Santa Catalina Island Co., which owns about 13% of the island, including 70% of incorporated Avalon.

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.

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.

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

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

“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.

Lita Mulvihill, owner of a boutique on Crescent Avenue, Avalon’s main street, and an appointee to the committee studying the housing problem, 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. . . . 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.

The housing market has been further crippled by the limited amount of 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, five gallons for 15 cents.

Today, the island’s water for sanitation and firefighting comes from a salt-water desalination system that removes about half the salt, while drinking water is piped in from the Middle Ranch Reservoir in the interior, which has a 330-milliongallon capacity.

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

The shortage has prompted an unofficial building moratorium.

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, said Woolson, who is also planning director.

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?”