U.S. Hit on Quake Relief Role : Disaster: Watsonville officials assail Federal Emergency Management Agency. They blame it for the 600 people still living in parks, shelters and cars.

Almost two months after Northern California’s deadly 7.1-magnitude earthquake, more than 600 people in this small farming community are still living in tents in a city park, sleeping on cots in Red Cross shelters or spending nights in cars or on lawns behind their condemned houses.

Many of those who became homeless after the quake are still waiting for federal relief officials to open temporary mobile home parks. Although a few families will begin moving into one mobile home park this weekend, some families must wait almost two more months until the other five mobile home parks in the area are built.

Local officials say they pleaded for the trailers immediately after the Oct. 17 earthquake, but that the Federal Emergency Management Agency stalled about three weeks before authorizing the trailers.

“We really wish we had those three weeks that FEMA wasted twiddling their thumbs,” said Luther Perry, a Santa Cruz County administrator in charge of emergency housing. “With the cold weather here and the rains coming, a lot of families could have already been moved in by now.”

Throughout Northern California, in communities battered by the earthquake, there are symbols of renewal, from the reopening of bridges and highways, to the building permits issued to merchants hours after their businesses were demolished.

But as cities rebuild and recover, Watsonville is still reeling from the earthquake that destroyed 40% of its downtown businesses and left thousands homeless. Budget officials had to dip into a capital reserve fund to keep the city of 30,000 running.

Many of the newly homeless in Watsonville are Latino farm workers or low wage-earners who had previously crowded into small apartments, sometimes two and three to a unit, near downtown.

After the earthquake, FEMA issued checks to these families so they could rent other apartments. Local officials advised FEMA against relying solely on this means of housing because of the shortage of housing in the Watsonville area, Perry said.

“These FEMA officials were coming from Washington saying they knew what was best for us,” Perry said. “But a few days after the earthquake I could look out my window and see 1,500 people homeless, and I knew there weren’t that many apartments.”

The vacancy rate in rental housing in Watsonville before the earthquake was less than 1%. But after the earthquake, which destroyed almost 10% of the city’s housing units, the shortage was so critical that eight families competed for every vacancy, Perry said.

And some homeless families have had difficulty qualifying for FEMA assistance. Because so many low-income families shared apartments, some were unable to produce rent receipts or other proof of residence, a FEMA requirement.

“We’ve always been a poor family, but we’ve always had a roof over our head. . . . Now we don’t even have that,” said Gloria Sanchez, who has been living in a tent with her two children in downtown Callahan Park since the earthquake. Sanchez and her family, who hope to move to a trailer next week, have been showering at the nearby YMCA. Her children rush home from school and do their homework on park benches before it turns dark. And Sanchez and the other 20 families living at the park eat their Red Cross meals on picnic tables.

The number of families still living in parks and shelters a week after the earthquake persuaded FEMA representatives in Watsonville to consider alternatives to rental checks. But it took another two weeks before local politicians could persuade FEMA administrators in Washington that the community needed trailers.

Watsonville is two-thirds Latino, but six of the City Council’s seven members are Anglo.

Community activists complained that the city has not responded to the needs of the newly homeless, most of whom are Latino. The City Council rejected a proposal that would have frozen rents for a year to prevent gouging. And right after the earthquake, Latino community leaders complained they were not consulted by the city.

As a result, Latino activists said, they bypassed the City Council and asked local senators and congressmen for help. State Sen. Henry Mello (D-Watsonville) spent the night in a tent at Callahan Park to dramatize the plight of the 75 people living there since the earthquake. And Rep. Leon Panetta (D-Monterey) said he “had to go to the White House to get FEMA’s decision (not to rent trailers) reversed.”

“FEMA had been burned in the past after disasters; they’d put in trailers and not enough people used them,” Panetta said while touring a small tent city on the outskirts of town. “But I told them that’s not the case around here. You put a trailer on the ground here and it’s worth $100,000.”

In other areas of the country, after disasters, FEMA usually can simply move additional trailers into existing mobile home parks without any previous planning. But in Santa Cruz County mobile home parks are filled to capacity. So after FEMA decided trailers were needed, it had to begin the time-consuming process of building mobile home parks. Federal officials had to find sites, pave lots and install plumbing and electricity.

Immediately after the earthquake, FEMA officials determined that although there was a rental shortage in Watsonville there was sufficient housing within a 25-mile radius of the city, said Frank Kishton, a deputy assistance officer for FEMA. But many of those left homeless were reluctant to relocate because they did not have cars, or did not speak English or had young children in neighborhood schools.

“Our first thought after the quake was to get money out to the families so they could rent their own places, and some did,” Kishton said. “When we found that some people did have legitimate reasons for not wanting to relocate 20 miles away we got started with the trailers to take care of them. But putting in trailer parks can be a complicated process, so it’s not the first thing we do.”

There are six mobile home parks scheduled to be built in the area: three in Watsonville, and in small parks in Santa Cruz, Pajaro and Hollister. Residents can stay in the trailers up to 18 months while looking for permanent housing, and are required to pay only utilities, federal officials said.

But until the trailer parks are complete, families must continue to endure crowded shelters or rugged conditions in tent cities. The Red Cross shelter at the Santa Cruz County Fairgrounds has housed and fed about 200 people in two exhibit halls. Some families said they preferred to stay in tents closer to town because they had more independence than in the shelters and because they wanted to watch over their belongings, which still were at their condemned apartments. A few local business owners suggested that some were using the tents to embarrass the government in order to parlay their loss into a coveted mobile home.

Sandra Perez and her family have been staying at the Red Cross shelter for about seven weeks. They sleep on four cots, side by side, with sheets of plywood separating their tiny cubicle from their neighbors. Perez said she has a brief message for federal officials: “ Arriba “--Spanish for “get going.”

“It’s very hard with babies and sick children to live like this,” Perez said. “We don’t know when we’ll ever be out of here. We’d like a trailer but we haven’t heard anything yet. All we can do is wait . . . we have nowhere else to go.”