TIMES POLL : Santa Ana Life Just Fine With Santa Anans

There is the city that residents overwhelmingly say they like, with a rich ethnic fabric and neighborhoods with character, a real downtown and easy access to other parts of the county.

Then there is the Santa Ana that residents believe outsiders see: a crime-ridden place where gangs roam streets crowded with non-English speakers.

A Times Orange County Poll found that residents believe that, in the case of their city, image and reality have parted company. In the poll, residents overwhelmingly said they like their city, but at the same time, that it gets a bum rap from outsiders.

That sentiment, said pollster Mark Baldassare, whose company Mark Baldassare & Associates conducted the poll, borders on an inferiority complex.

“Santa Anans appear to be defensive about how the rest of Orange County sees them, but this doesn’t really affect how they view life in their own city,” he said. “What we’re seeing for the first time is evidence that there is indeed a fairly high quality of life in Santa Ana and for a very diverse population.”

“Across the board, from the affluent to the non-affluent, Hispanics and non-Hispanics, young and old--all groups gave their neighborhoods a very high rating,” Baldassare said. “This says that despite its reputation for being a magnet for urban problems, you see that people living there rate it very favorably.”

Residents said in the poll that Santa Ana--Orange County’s second-largest city--faces serious problems with gangs and drug and alcohol abuse. But they also said they are optimistic that their city is becoming a better place to live. And what they like best about living in Santa Ana, they said, is its location, affordable housing and good neighborhoods.

“Santa Ana is the underdog of cities,” said Guy Ball, a spokesman for the Wilshire Square Neighborhood Assn. “People tend to paint it with one brush. But where else can you have such diversity of people and cultures?”

There was a time, Ball said, when he would tell co-workers at Hughes Aircraft that he lived near South Coast Plaza, so he wouldn’t have to say he lived in Santa Ana. But five years ago he moved to the Wilshire area near McFadden and Flower streets. Now he said he would not even consider living in a more suburban community such as those in South County, which he labeled as “homogenized as white bread.”

The poll of 600 adult Santa Ana residents, conducted Feb. 15 through 18, used a random sample of listed and unlisted telephone numbers within the city, and Spanish-speaking interviewers were available for those households with non-English speakers. The margin of error for a sample of this size is plus or minus 4%.

“The results,” said pollster Baldassare, “indicate that Santa Ana’s not a bad place to live, contrary to some of the popular stereotypes.”

In the poll, 68% of the respondents said they considered Santa Ana a “favorable” place to live, but almost as many--62%--said they thought the rest of Orange County views the city as “unfavorable.”

Some of those who agreed to talk about their answers said they believe their city’s negative image is undeserved.

“The majority of outsiders and people who don’t want to associate with (Santa Ana) think it’s all Hispanics and gangs and drugs,” said poll respondent Nancy Inglehart, who is active in a neighborhood group that works with Santa Ana police to prevent crime. “They fail to realize that Santa Ana is the county seat and has nice historical areas and neighborhood associations trying to preserve the integrity of the city.”

While residents do not deny some of the problems, they say outsiders fail to look at the entire city, and don’t realize that its positive features outweigh any negatives.

The poll indicates that Santa Ana is a series of contrasts. More than half of the respondents said they have lived in the city 10 years or longer, yet it has a huge population of newly arrived immigrants, many of them young and just starting families. Housing stock ranges from low-income apartments in crowded downtown complexes to luxury homes, mostly north of 17th Street, including one that sold recently for $1.7 million.

The poll also revealed a stark contrast in the way of life for Anglos and the Latinos who make up about 55% of the city’s population, according to projections by the National Planning Data Corp., a private consulting group that conducts population estimates. The Times Orange County Poll showed that the average household income for the city’s Latinos, for example, is only slightly more than half that of the Anglos, and the average Latino household is almost twice as big. English is only half as likely to be the primary language in Latino homes in Santa Ana, and Anglos are twice as likely to vote in elections.

Santa Ana is the only city in Orange County where Anglos are in the minority--they make up 36% of about 252,342 total population, according to the National Planning Data Corp. The city is home to the county’s largest concentration of Latinos, but it also has a sizeable Asian community--7% of the total population, most of them Vietnamese.

Respondents were asked if they viewed the city’s growing ethnic diversity as a “positive” or “negative” feature of the city, or neither. While 30% said it was a negative feature, another 26% said it was positive and 37% said it was not one or the other.

“We have a good bunch of people here,” said poll respondent Steve Batchelor, 26, a student at Cal State Fullerton who has lived in Santa Ana four years. “Everybody is different, so we can learn about each other. . . . People in Santa Ana know people as people and not as stereotypes.”

Said respondent Ruth Bellows, 68: “There’s more of an influx of minorities in Santa Ana than the rest of Orange County. People who live outside of the city think that’s negative. But they don’t realize that’s what adds a different perspective to Santa Ana.”

Mayor Daniel H. Young said the biggest mistake people make about Santa Ana is to judge it by the same measuring stick they use on newer Orange County cities.

“Compared to the bright, spanking-clean image of an Irvine or a Mission Viejo, Santa Ana had older houses and buildings, some decay,” he said. “It was a real stark contrast and the difference between Santa Ana and South County became entrenched in the minds of residents.”

Young concedes his city has an image problem, but it is one city leaders are trying to change.

“We’ve trimmed trees, resurfaced streets, upgraded parks and built places like MainPlace” shopping mall, Young said. “It’s only in the last five years or so that we started making a dent in that inferiority complex.”

A host of office towers and business expansions are on the city’s drawing board, as well as a proposed $70-million, 20,000-seat indoor sports arena and a monorail link that would tie the county’s heart to other mass transit systems.

Some of those who responded to the poll said they were attracted to the city by its distinct identity. Santa Ana includes a municipal zoo, a downtown that is listed in the National Register of Historic Places, a population that is diverse both ethnically and economically and the county’s oldest freeway, bearing the city’s name. Where else in Orange County, they ask, can you shop for tamale leaves at the Viva chain of grocery stores? Or drive over for pho , a typical Vietnamese noodle broth, on 1st Street? Or take a short bus ride to view the latest styles in Nordstrom’s at MainPlace near the Santa Ana Freeway? Or stroll to the Festival Marketplace downtown for a pair of Mexican iguana boots?

But residents say those are not the features outsiders think of when they talk about Santa Ana.

“Santa Ana is a very large city and I grew up in a large city as well,” said poll respondent Bob Regan, a Chicago native who has lived in Santa Ana 12 years. “They have their poor and slum areas, but unfortunately these are the ones that get the news and the attention. . . . Maybe somebody ought to be doing more to promote the positive aspects of the community.”

Some of the poll respondents who admire their city said its problems are hard to deny.

“I like Santa Ana, but it has changed,” said Teresa Hernandez, who has lived in the city three years but has been visiting it all her life because relatives lived in Westminster. “Look at how trashy it’s gotten. It seems like the city officials try, but they clean up one place and it turns into a slum again. It’s a losing battle.”

When residents were asked what they liked best about living in Santa Ana, 35% of those surveyed cited its centralized location, while 21% said they liked its good neighborhoods.

This contrasts with a countywide survey in August, where respondents ranked shopping as the best aspect of life in Orange County, and traffic as the worst aspect.

What outsiders often associate with Santa Ana is its gang problem, and indeed Santa Anans themselves said in the poll that it is also their top concern. About 28% cited gangs as the city’s biggest problem, while 23% named traffic and 22% said crime.

To lower the number of gang members in the city--an estimated 7,000--the Police Department is working closely with the school district on gang and drug prevention programs such as the PRIDE project, designed to draw elementary school youths away from gang involvement.

Still, statistics seem to bolster the notion that Santa Ana has a more significant crime problem than other county cities. A report released last week by the state Department of Justice showed Santa Ana with Orange County’s highest homicide rate, with almost twice the number of any other city.

Reports of murder and manslaughter in Santa Ana increased 39.5%, from 38 killings in 1988 to 53 in 1989, the report said. Also, violent crime rose almost 15%, from 2,021 reported incidents in 1988 to 2,318 last year. The state defines violent crime as willful homicide, forcible rape, aggravated assault and robbery.

But Santa Ana Police Capt. Peter Jensen points out that his city’s crime statistics are not out of line when compared to other cities with similar demographics. He said one explanation for the high numbers is that Santa Ana has a “hidden population” of about 60,000 transients and illegal residents who have not been officially counted before this latest census last month. If they were, he maintains, the city’s per-capita crime rates would not be as high.

Also, he said, crime tends to be concentrated in the central part of Santa Ana, the most densely populated section. There, a crop of high-density apartments sprouted up during the 1970s when the city was trying to coax developers into building in Santa Ana.

High-density apartment projects and strip commercial centers breed more criminal activity, said City Manager David N. Ream. In the future, developers will have a difficult time winning approval for such projects, Ream said, because officials have seen that they sometimes result in overcrowding and consequently to a plethora of social ills.

Poll respondents were also asked to rank their schools, which reflect the changing population more than any city institution. Most of Santa Ana is served by the sprawling Santa Ana Unified School District, the county’s largest. Most of its 43,000 students have limited English abilities and 36% are immigrants, speaking almost 40 different languages, from Farsi to Tagalog to Spanish.

With 40 campuses, including the county’s oldest and its newest high schools, the district has grown exponentially, going from the state’s ninth-largest to the eighth-largest district in one year.

In the poll, only 25% of Santa Ana residents said they would give the schools an A or B grade, compared to 42% of overall residents in a countywide poll conducted last summer.

City and school officials, who have apparently seen the links between the quality of the schools and the city’s image, recently changed the city’s logo from “All-America City” to “Education 1st.” Plans are to paint over the city’s water tower, and print stationery and lapel buttons to promote the new message.

In the poll, 86% of respondents said they like the new logo.

Those who participated in the poll were also asked if they believed the Santa Ana school district was doing enough for its “limited-English” speaking students, who make up more than 50% of enrollment.

More than a third, or 36%, said the school district was not doing enough to assure that these children received the same education as everyone else. But another 30% said they thought the schools were doing enough and only 9% said they were doing too much.

But it was concern over Santa Ana’s image that most unified poll respondents. The best strategy for turning that around, some neighborhood leaders say, is for Santa Anans themselves to believe in their own city.

In a recent newsletter sent to 21 neighborhood groups, Guy Ball wrote about having recently asking a store clerk if he stocked picture postcards of Santa Ana.

“What do we have in Santa Ana we’d want on a postcard?” Ball said the clerk answered. His initial reaction was anger at the clerk, but then Ball said it occurred to him “that clerk wasn’t alone in his thinking.”

In the rest of his column he ticks off, pep rally-fashion, some of Santa Ana’s good points, and the progress the city has made in redeveloping its historical areas, lowering housing density and increasing resident awareness.

“It’s OK now to hold your head up and say, ‘I live in Santa Ana,’ ” he said.

How Poll Was Conducted

The Times Orange County Poll was conducted Feb. 15-18 by Mark Baldassare & Associates. The telephone survey of 600 adult Santa Ana residents used a random sample of listed and unlisted telephone numbers. Spanish-speaking interviewers were available for households with no English-speaking members, and about 10% of the interviews were conducted in Spanish. The margin of error is plus or minus 4% but could be higher for subgroups.

Santa Ana: Image vs. Reality Orange County’s Urban Heart A seat of government and budding job center, Santa Ana is a city with a historic downtown, diverse neighborhoods and 252,000 residents, half of them Latino. Neighborhoods: Some suffer from blight and gang graffiti. But French Park is trendy, and home prices near Victoria Street “north of 17th” can reach $1 million. Recreation: 4 bike trails, 3 golf courses, 10 tennis courts, 3 pools, 38 parks. Centennial Park hosts Cinco de Mayo, Tet festivals. 3 libraries hold 403,142 books. Government: The county seat, with 5, 151 employees in a 16-building complex. Civic Center also includes federal, state and city offices. Business: Major employers include ITT Cannon, Ricoh Electronics, McDonnell Douglas Computer, Nordstrom regional headquarters, Cherry-Textron, Microsemi. Diversity: 12,000 Central Americans, Mexicans, Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians and Anglos live in the 15-block Minnie Street corridor, highlighting city ethnicity.

Times Poll Finds City of Contrasts While the city has the most severe crime in Orange County, 81% of residents polled gave police high marks and 60% said they neither fear crime nor live near gang graffiti. While residents polled say traffic congestion is among the city’s biggest problems, the main reason they gave for choosing to live in Santa Ana was its convenient location. While minorities make up 64% of the city’s population, 88% of residents polled said they had never been a target of racial discrimination on the job or in housing.

How Santa Ana Sees Itself “What is your overall view of Santa Ana as a place to live?” Favorable: 68% Unfavorable: 30% Don’t Know: 2%

“How do you think the rest of Orange County views Santa Ana?” Favorable: 30% Unfavorable: 62% Don’t Know: 8% Source: Times Orange County Poll

The Times Orange County Poll Do you favor or oppose having a 20,000-seat indoor sports arena built in Santa Ana at Edinger Avenue and Lyon Street? DK**:17% Favor: 56% Oppose: 27%

What is the biggest problem facing Santa Ana today?

N.L.* Total Latino Whites Gangs 28% 42% 23% Traffic 23% 15% 27% Crime 22% 18% 22% Negative image 9% 4% 10%

How much of a problem are these issues for Santa Ana?

Big Some No Problem Problem Problem Drugs and alcohol abuse 76% 18% 2% Gangs and violent crimes 75% 20% 3%

The homeless 53% 33% 7%

Overall, what grade would you give the public schools in your area?

A B C D F DK** Santa Ana 5% 20% 37% 12% 4% 22% vs.Orange County Santa Ana residents 9% 25% 40% 11% 6% 9% with children attending public schools

Santa Ana’s population is becoming more diverse ethnically and racially. Do you see this as a positive feature or a negative feature of life in Santa Ana, or is it neither?

N.L* Total Latino Whites Positive 26% 38% 21% Negative 30% 19% 35% Neither 37% 33%39

More than 50 percent of students in Santa Ana schools are considered to have limited English-speaking abilities. Do you think Santa Ana schools are doing enough, not enough, ordoing too much to provide these students with the same education as everyone else?

N.L.* Total Latino Whites Enough 30% 39% 24% Not enough 36% 40% 34% Too much 9% 5% 11%

PROFILE OF THE TWO SANTA ANAS N.L.* Total Latinos Whites Median Income $37 $23 $44 Average number of 3.4 4.8 2.8 persons in household Child at home 37% 59% 27% Child at Santa 18% 41% 7% Ana school English at home 81% 41% 99% Born in U.S. 77% 41% 93% Citizen of U.S. 88% 62% 98% Registered to Vote 78% 50% 91% Democratic Party 27% 28% 24% Republican Party 41% 17% 54% 10 Years in Santa Ana 56% 56% 58% * Non Latino whites ** Didn’t know Source: Times Orange County Poll