2,000 Poor Still Lacking Homes : Disaster: Low-income residents forced from quarters by quake face dim prospects of finding new, permanent residences soon.

More than two weeks after the Oct. 17 earthquake battered Northern California, more than 2,000 migrant workers, low-wage earners and poor pensioners remain homeless, living in tents and makeshift dormitories from the Salinas Valley to San Francisco’s shabby Tenderloin.

In upper-income areas like Los Gatos, near San Jose, and the Marina District of San Francisco, most residents have found housing, living in hotels, with friends or in rented quarters, authorities say.

But for farm workers and minimum-wage earners in Watsonville, Santa Cruz and Hollister and poor pensioners and homeless people in San Francisco and Oakland, the devastation continues.

As winter approaches, strained government authorities and relief workers say many of the poor people who were dislocated by the quake have little prospect of finding permanent shelter any time soon.

“The situation is grave, to say the least,” said Luther Perry, Santa Cruz County administrator in charge of emergency housing, adding that many families have no friends or relatives who can take them in.

The county is hundreds of housing units short of what it needs to get people out of tents and other shelters, such as a downtown auditorium and the county fairgrounds in Watsonville, Perry said.

“The population left behind doesn’t have alternatives. They don’t have a support system, and they don’t have economic resources,” said Julia Lopez, general manager of the San Francisco Department of Social Services.

The situation is compounded by a lack of low-cost housing in the Bay Area, one of the most affluent regions of the country. In San Francisco, inspectors closed three quake-damaged residential hotels that housed 250 otherwise homeless people each night.

“The issue of low-income housing in this city was bad before the earthquake. It has taken a big, big hit,” Lopez said.

On Thursday, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp met for an hour at San Francisco City Hall with Mayor Art Agnos and announced plans to spend an additional $170 million on housing in earthquake-hit areas.

The package includes roughly $120 million to rehabilitate 1,200 apartments, but Agnos and Oakland Mayor Lionel Wilson have requests pending for money to rehabilitate a total of 3,000 units.

Agnos appeared pleased as Kemp vowed to cut red tape to speed delivery of another $300 million already committed to the region. Kemp has also directed that HUD start insuring loans used to build residential hotels for low-income tenants. The money is in addition to $3.45 billion allocated by Congress last week for earthquake relief.

The earthquake forced more than 35,000 people of all income levels from their homes. Now, 500 people remain in emergency shelters in Alameda County, 400 are sheltered in San Francisco and more than 1,000 are in Red Cross shelters and tent cities that have sprung up in Santa Cruz County, Red Cross and other officials say.

In the Salinas Valley, some businesses laid off workers because of damage at workplaces. In Hollister, the unemployment rate jumped as much 5% from an average of 13% because of earthquake-related closures of some of the largest employers, including a factory that assembles campers and a major packing house, Red Cross spokeswoman Melanie Welch said.

Officials are sheltering about 90 homeless people in Hollister, a town of 16,000 people. Most of the people in the shelters “came from large families earning from zero to $6,500 a year,” said Loretta Hassler of the Red Cross.

But emergency relief officials say the number of homeless people for whom they are caring does not reflect the total number of people displaced. Many migrants, they note, fear deportation or are worried that by seeking assistance they might jeopardize their chances for amnesty.

Seventeen displaced families in Hollister found housing for a 30-day period at the San Benito County Migrant Center, a farm labor camp consisting of wood-framed cottages with concrete slab floors. The camp is normally used only in the summer because the cottages get too cold at night.

Rural Problems

In one of the cottages this week, Leonard Navarro, 69, a retired railroad worker, sat at a kitchen table, a suitcase on the sink, with a tiny electric heater close by and plastic wrap crumpled in the door jamb to keep flies out.

Navarro has emphysema and recently was discharged from a hospital after a bout with pneumonia. He and his 72-year-old wife, Augustina, have not been able to find housing other than the labor camp cottage. Landlords have told him waiting lists for rental units are three months long, he said.

“Look, I’m not special, but I can’t wait three months. I’m sick and I need a place now,” Navarro told a reporter.

Complaints are common over the way in which emergency help was handled in poor areas in rural counties and smaller towns. In the days after the quake, much of the disaster aid went to San Francisco and Oakland, leaving rural areas to the south wanting.

“It took Red Cross two days to get here,” said Lola Brambila, 46, who lives in a Latino neighborhood in Santa Cruz where 50 families spent several chilly evenings at a nearby park with only blankets and their clothes for warmth. “On the third day, they came with coffee, soup and 10 blankets.”

Once they arrived in more rural areas with large Latino populations, relief workers were unable to meet needs because of language and cultural barriers.

In Watsonville, a group calling itself the Hispanic Organization to Generate Assistance and Relief sprang up to ensure that the people housed in tents pitched at Ramsay Park got simple things, like food other than hot dogs.

“This area was devastated probably worse than anywhere, but it was the last to get attention,” said Carol Ivelich, a spokeswoman for the ad hoc group.

Red Cross officials acknowledge that there were mix-ups.

“We all regret some of those people did not get the help they needed right away,” said Hope Tuttle, a Red Cross spokeswoman for San Benito, Santa Cruz and Monterey counties.

The Red Cross and the Federal Emergency Management Agency are offering to house people temporarily in motel rooms. But 200 people in a Watsonville tent city at Ramsay Park were hesitant to leave this week, fearing that if they disperse, they will lose what they see as political strength in numbers. They hope to force state, local and federal authorities to come up with long-term solutions to their housing problems.

“We’re willing to put them in a room with heat, but they don’t want to go,” a frustrated Federal Emergency Management Agency worker said, adding that only a handful of the Ramsay Park residents had applied for assistance.

Nights on Cots

At Ramsay Park, people spend their nights on cots set up in more than 20 military tents, a dozen people per tent. On Monday, workers placed plywood under the cots to keep the people warmer and drier.

“The feeling is that once we’re out of sight, they’ll forget about us,” said Ed Sandoval, 23, who with his wife and baby are tent-dwellers at Ramsay Park.

Besides, he noted, a family that went to one of the motels paid for by the Federal Emergency Management Agency returned complaining that it was cockroach-infested.

Before the quake hit, Sandoval had been getting his life on track. He went to Cabrillo College during the day in the hope of becoming a police officer. His wife went to the junior college at night to become a nurse. To make ends meet, they managed a small motel. But the quake damaged the motel, perhaps beyond repair.

“It’s weird: You sit down to watch HBO on a big screen television, and 15 seconds later you’re homeless. . . . I got my last paycheck, and that’s it,” he said.

Like many others, Sandoval is awaiting emergency rental payments from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. But he is not certain that the check will do any good. The earthquake cut into the stock of low-cost housing in Watsonville. The check might allow him to pay the first month’s rent at a more expensive place, he said. But noting that he has lost his job, he asked, “Then what?”

All across the hard-hit areas, stories are told of failures in the system of emergency help. In Santa Cruz, Carmen Brambila tells of being turned down for Red Cross shelter. Brambila said the request was denied, initially, because city building inspectors discovered that her home--a converted shed--was not up to code even before the quake.

“There was that fine line between being an earthquake victim and not being one,” Brambila said.

Before the quake, the 29-year-old mother of five children, ages 3 to 10, had a $900-a-month job as resident manager of two apartment complexes in Santa Cruz. It was her “ticket out of welfare,” she said. But the earthquake damaged one building beyond repair and knocked out utilities at the other.

Desperate for shelter, Brambila wound up sharing two tattered tents, pitched on a sidewalk along a nearby street in the Beach Flats section of town, with her children, her mother and three of her sisters for nine days.

There, they pooled meager resources to make things as comfortable as possible for the children. Still, they had little more than sandwiches for food and slept with pants, shirts and jackets on.

On Monday, building inspectors declared Brambila’s mother’s tiny $238-a-month apartment safe, so the entire family moved in. Given Carmen Brambila’s circumstances, however, she had to improvise on Halloween.

“I told my kids, ‘There’s no money for costumes. All I’m going to do is paint your faces,’ ” Brambila said. She used a mixture of toothpaste, flour and hand lotion, with dashes of Kool-Aid for coloring.

Not Safe

In San Francisco, the city used to house 2,200 people each night in residential hotels. The hotels are in old masonry buildings, mostly in the Tenderloin District. Now, half of those rooms no longer are habitable because the buildings are not safe.

“The stock of really low-cost housing is gone,” said Lopez of the Social Services Department. Officials are counting on the Red Cross to keep shelters open until long-term solutions are found.

A few days before the earthquake, Paul Lewis, 32, found his way to an Episcopal sanctuary in an effort to get himself off drugs. The Red Cross recruited him to provide security at a shelter in the Tenderloin. Because of that work, Lewis was finding hope in the midst of the disaster.

“By me helping these people, I’m helping me,” he said on what was his 23rd day of being sober. “ . . . I haven’t been this happy in years.”

Thomas Bays, 26, sat on the steps outside a Red Cross shelter in the Tenderloin. He had been sleeping in a park across from San Francisco City Hall when the earthquake hit. Social workers visited the shelter and helped him sign up for disability payments. He hopes to use the pay for an apartment, if he can find one. In the meantime, he was pleased to have a warm place to sleep.

“The food here is pretty good,” he said. “It’s cold. But it’s good.”

Morain reported from Watsonville, San Francisco and Oakland. Sahagun reported from Santa Cruz and Hollister.