Mall Proposed for Area City Seeks to Clean Up : Redevelopment: A retail center is planned in Santa Ana near a street that police once described as ‘the heaviest traveled for narcotics.’

One of city’s most notorious, drug-infested areas may soon become the site of an outdoor mall.

The City Council on Monday will consider a proposal for an eight-building retail center on Bristol Street near McFadden Avenue, in an area where the city plans to launch a separate, $335-million redevelopment project.

The retail mall, proposed by developers Hyun M. Youn and Donald Krotee Partnership of Santa Ana, would be on the east side of Bristol between Brook and Cubbon streets.

City staff members are recommending that the council approve the center, which would be named Bristol Village, as part of the effort to clean up the neighborhood.

Drug dealers used to speed down Brook and Bristol streets to escape police until the city blocked off the junction of the streets with a concrete barrier.

Police described Brook Street as the “heaviest traveled street for narcotics,” where dealers waited for their customers who bought drugs without getting out of their cars. Police resorted to mounted horse patrols on Brook Street in 1988, after children were reportedly playing with bags of marijuana.

The redevelopment project would be developed in three phases, according to a staff report. The first phase would replace three boarded-up houses. The second and third phases would require the developers to acquire several properties. But those buildings would be razed anyway, because they have numerous building code violations, the report said.

“Vacant land typically becomes an enforcement problem, as (it) historically (has) resulted in the collection of trash and debris as well as providing refuge for undesirables to congregate,” the report said.

Richard Spix, an attorney at Hermandad Mexicana Nacional Legal Center, said Thursday that the mall would remove needed housing from the city.

“The city is going to tell the people who currently live there that they are better off living in a mall,” Spix said.

Spix is representing two people in a suit filed Tuesday against the city seeking to block the 783-acre Bristol Street redevelopment project. The plaintiffs are Robert Gonzales, an optometrist who has worked in a Bristol Street office for two years, and Evangelina Avalos, a single parent who lives on Brook Street with her four children.

Spix said Santa Ana, in its goal to redevelop the city, has “historically failed to provide replacement housing” for residents who are displaced, or to pay relocation costs.

“Before the City Council adopts a redevelopment project, they should have had a plan to help the residents who cannot afford to move,” Spix said. “The city is taking too much away from the residents.”

City officials have said that under state law, Santa Ana must pay the fair market price for the homes taken for redevelopment and must pay to relocate anyone affected.

Mayor Daniel H. Young, who fought for the Bristol Street project, said: “I’m quite disappointed in the suit. Richard Spix has had a long record of getting in the way of a positive agenda in the city.”

Young said he has not yet studied the latest proposal for the smaller Bristol Village and has not decided how he will vote.

“The neighborhood is a very sensitive area,” he said. “If we allow anything to be built on that site, it has to be first-class.”

The 28,000-square-foot center would have an additional 100,000 square feet for parking. It would consist of single line of buildings, topped by a clock tower.

The city and the developers, who are aware of the crime problems in the area, have been working on plans for the center for three years, a spokesman for the developers said.