COSTA MESA : Deadline Nears for Victoria St. Families

For the first time in 23 years, the yellow and white home of Billie Jo and Bob Hamilton on Victoria Street shows no evidence of the Christmas season.

In about a month, the couple and their 25-year-old son will pack up and move to a new address, under city orders.

“It makes no sense to put up all those decorations and have to turn around and take then right back down and put them in boxes,” Billie Jo Hamilton said. “We’ll just celebrate Christmas at my daughter’s house. She has a tree and all the trimmings.”

The Hamiltons are among 68 Victoria Street households forced from their homes so that the city can widen the heavily traveled thoroughfare.

The $25-million project, approved by the city in 1987, will widen a 1.3-mile stretch of Victoria from two lanes to four, between Harbor Boulevard and Canyon Drive.

City planners say they hope the project will be completed by 1992.

The project will include the demolition of about 30 condominiums and apartments along the strip, but will leave in place the one church and three schools on the street.

Residents were notified of the city’s plans last January, and soon afterward Costa Mesa officials hired appraisers to determine a fair market value of the properties.

“The city certainly offered the residents top value for their homes,” said Robert Brock, assistant city engineer. “We worked carefully with each resident to assure limited complications.”

But Orange County’s escalating housing costs created problems, Brock said.

“There were incidents where doing our negotiations to buy the property, we would have to up the price a few times during a matter of weeks,” he said. “We picked a time when property value in the area was at an all-time high.”

Victoria Street residents also are eligible for $15,000 in relocation fees, Brock said. Despite a profit on their home, Billie Jo Hamilton says she and her husband don’t like the idea of leaving 23 years of memories behind.

“If this hadn’t have happened, I am sure we’d have lived here for the rest of our lives,” said Hamilton, who raised three children in the house. “We hate to do it, but what can you do if the city says move?” Hamilton said the heavy traffic rarely bothered her, though city officials say that the 15,000 to 20,000 cars that now travel Victoria Street daily are far too much for a two-lane road, and that the traffic will probably double in the next 20 years.

Unlike the Hamiltons, Leon Sofro’s family looks on the move as a welcome change. the Sofros have lived on Victoria Street for 5 years.

“The traffic was getting progressively worse,” Leon Sofro said. “It was at the point that my kids couldn’t even play in the yard because we were afraid that any day a drunk driver or something would run into our yard.” The new four-lane corridor will include medians, 6-foot-high sound walls and frontage roads, as well as sidewalks and bike paths.

Though most of the other Victoria Street residents are gone, neither the Hamiltons nor the Sofros have found new homes. Their deadline to move is Feb. 1

“We just wanted to wait until the last minute and enjoy our home as much as we could,” Hamilton said. “We got our 90-day notice the other day, and I guess that finally finalized it in our heads.”