Coastal Living at Inland Home Prices : Oceanside: Influx of middle-income newcomers is bringing changes to San Diego city, still heavily influenced by nearby Marine base.

Earlier this year, Matt and Yvonne Brunet faced a dilemma. They could either stay in their Newport Beach apartment and continue to write rent checks, or they could try to buy a home.

The Brunets decided to buy and figured they would have to give up coastal living to get a house they could be happy with. They found out otherwise.

After considering Rancho California and Menifee in Riverside County and Santa Margarita in southeast Orange County, the Brunets decided on Oceanside. It was a happy compromise.

“The big lure was attractive prices and the ability to get a house instead of a condo,” said Matt Brunet, a flight attendant for Delta Air Lines. The family paid $174,000 for a new house in the Lakeview Estates development in northeast Oceanside.

What they got was a two-story, three-bedroom, detached home with 1,560 square feet. Their pie-shaped back yard looks out on hills and mountains and is cooled by year-round ocean breezes.

“You can’t beat the climate here,” said Yvonne Brunet, a former flight attendant who quit working to take care of the couple’s two children.

Other home buyers have discovered Oceanside’s allure too. The city’s population soared from about 76,800 in 1980 to 117,600 at the start of 1989. This influx, especially of middle-income folks, is helping transform San Diego County’s third-largest city from a blue-collar Marine town to an increasingly prosperous bedroom and resort community.

A large number of the newcomers hail from--and continue to work in--Orange County.

“Your average buyers today are a married couple with one or two children who made enough money on an Orange County condo to buy a 2,000-square-foot home for $200,000,” said John F. Merwald III, an agent with Century 21 Aactive Realty in Oceanside. “These people can buy their dream home here, but they must make a sacrifice in their commutes.”

Brunet, for example, leaves the house around 5 a.m. and generally covers the 55 miles to Orange County’s John Wayne Airport in about an hour. If he starts out after 5:30 a.m., he runs the risk of encountering traffic around Mission Viejo. But he’s not complaining. “In the airline industry, you get used to getting up early; I’ve done it for 10 years.”

Besides, as commutes go, the 20-mile run through Camp Pendleton offers relatively little traffic and a nice view of the ocean.

Buoyed by home buyers such as the Brunets, prices for Oceanside residences have climbed steadily over the past couple of years. Yet they’re still considered reasonable compared to other Southern California coastal communities.

For example, in the northeast quadrant of the city--an area of new development bounded by El Camino Real, Oceanside Boulevard and Camp Pendleton--detached homes recently fetched a median price of $159,900. Even in the highest-priced southwest quadrant--between El Camino Real, Mission Avenue, the ocean and the city of Carlsbad--the corresponding figure was just $229,500.

In some parts of Oceanside, lower-middle-class neighborhoods lead to wealthy beachfront homes after only a few blocks.

According to Merwald and fellow Century 21 agent Kenneth L. Leone, Oceanside’s southwestern coastal strip features the most expensive housing, such as a four-bedroom, 2,500-square-foot home on the sand for $1.6 million.

But just a mile and a half to the north and a dozen blocks inland, a three-bedroom house with a detached studio apartment on the same lot was recently offered for a mere $139,000.

The market has cooled from the torrid pace of 1988 but remains sound.

“If a home is priced right and it’s a good property, it will sell,” Leone said. Thanks to the large number of Marines in the area, buyers seeking favorable financing will find a high concentration of assumable Veterans Administration loans, Merwald added.

A slow-growth measure passed by local voters in April, 1987, has tended to support prices, Leone said. The law limits construction to 800 residential units a year until 1999, with certain exceptions. Developers are still battling the city in court over the restrictions.

Most of the new building has taken place in the eastern half of the city. About 40 housing developments have opened within the past two or three years, and a number of the Southland home builders are working in Oceanside, including Barratt, Fieldstone Co., Kaufman & Broad, Leisure Technology, Lusk Co., Shea Homes, UDC Development, Warmington Homes and Watt Homes.

Ironically, the eastern part of the city was also the site of Oceanside’s first building--and for a while, California’s largest structure--the Mission San Luis Rey, founded in 1798. The mission fathers saw little value in the cactus-covered coastal mesa, so they settled 3 miles inland, on a small river.

The western, downtown parts of Oceanside didn’t attract settlers in meaningful numbers until after 1882, when a north-south railroad was built through the area. By 1888, when residents voted to incorporate, the town had a wharf, a hotel, a newspaper and a population of 1,000.

By 1920, a paved road linking Los Angeles and San Diego passed through the area. But Oceanside’s growth remained modest until 1942, when the federal government purchased 196 square miles of coastal land to the north and established Camp Pendleton. Construction workers streamed into the area, followed by military personnel and their families.

Even today, the Marine base exerts a large influence on the city, for both better and worse. Service personnel pump an estimated $37 million into the local economy each year, Merwald said. But some of that business isn’t desired by local residents.

Most notably, the downtown section around Hill and 3rd streets has a high concentration of nondescript bars, along with a couple of pawn shops, adult bookstores and at least one club featuring exotic dancers. A handful of prostitutes still ply their trade in the area.

Residents say the downtown district has generally improved since 1978, for example, when the city of Oceanside identified 58 adult-oriented businesses in the area. Increased police pressure and the changing nature of Oceanside’s population have helped.

So has a downtown redevelopment plan, which succeeded in having a nearby railroad switching yard moved a couple miles north to Camp Pendleton. As a result, the downtown section has another 22 acres available for redevelopment, residents and tourists have easier access to the beach, and police find the area easier to patrol.

Crime in Oceanside jumped 18% last year compared to 1987, reported the San Diego Assn. of Governments. But even with the increase, the city’s crime rate was just slightly higher than that of the county as a whole.

All in all, longtime residents remain loyal to Oceanside and like most of the changes they see occurring.

Earl Rountree, who was born in a military hospital at Camp Pendleton in 1960, believes redevelopment has succeeded in boosting the city’s image and cutting down on crime. “I can go to the store and feel comfortable leaving the garage open, the door unlocked and the windows open,” he said.

Rountree lives with his wife, Suelyn, a native of Trinidad, and their two children in Rancho del Oro, a sprawling master-planned community in northeast Oceanside. He describes his neighborhood as a place straight out of “Ozzie and Harriet,” where the schools are good and the people are friendly and concerned about one another.

Rountree, who works for a local defense contractor, also likes the area for another feature: appreciation potential. He and his wife bought their four-bedroom, 1,836-square-foot house a year and a half ago for $136,000. Rountree figures it’s worth $230,000 today--not that he’s planning on moving. “I love it here. I’ll probably stay till I retire.”

Chuck and Erika Hall, teachers in the Oceanside school district, view the changes with more mixed feelings. She came to the area in 1957 from West Germany. He arrived in 1964 from his native Mississippi. In those years, the city had only about 15,000 people and was dwarfed in size by Pendleton. It had a definite small-town flavor.

“There used to be shacks and little ma-and-pa hotels down at the beach,” she said.

The Halls purchased their three-bedroom, 1,700-square-foot home in central Oceanside, just east of the San Diego Freeway, for $26,950 in 1970. At the time, open space flanked the neighborhood on two sides. There were commercial fields of tomatoes and flowers to the east and an 18-hole golf course to the south.

Today, the fields are gone and the golf course has been sliced to nine holes. The neighborhood lies just a short walking distance from the new civic buildings going up on Mission Avenue.

“We’re close to downtown but don’t have any real problems concerning noise or crime,” Erika Hall said. They figure their home’s worth about $220,000 today.

The Halls praise the local school system and speak highly of city services, including a trash collection program that features curbside recycling of metals, glass and newspapers. But they would also prefer to see the city and commercial leaders pick up the pace of redevelopment.

“And I’d like to see more tourists in Oceanside,” Erika Hall said. “Their presence can’t help but upgrade the city, because tourists won’t go where there are sleazy little businesses and a lot of crime.”

The Brunets like the housing values in Oceanside, along with the local school system and the friendliness of the people.

Still, they complain about crowding in the schools, a lack of quality shopping, along with an inability to walk to the local attractions, as they could do in Newport Beach.

“Our hope is that this area will reach a price parity to, say, Costa Mesa in a few years,” Matt Brunet said. “Then we would probably move back to Orange County.”

But he’s not sure. After all, eastern Oceanside is growing up, and the western part of town is upgrading. At long last, Oceanside seems ready to join the ranks of the many affluent communities lining the Southern California coast.

If everything works out as planned, the Brunets might just decide to stay for good.

AT A GLANCE

Population 1989 estimate: 111,644 1980-89 change: 45.6%

Median age: 31.7 years

Racial/ethnic mix White (non-Latino): 64.2% Latino: 22.7% Black: 7.2% Other: 5.9%

Annual income Per capita: $12,962 Median household: $27,058

Household distribution

Less than $15,000: 24.4% $15,000 - $30,000: 30.8% $30,000 - $50,000: 24.8% $50,000 - $75,000: 13.4% $75,000 +: 6.6%