Vista Dismantles Migrant Shelters on City Land : Cleanup: Men who lived in the makeshift huts are being hired as day laborers by the city to help tear them down.

The city of Vista this week began to dismantle a camp that once housed up to 175 homeless migrant workers in response to complaints from tenants of new industrial parks overlooking the camp.

In the first undertaking of its kind by the city, the cleanup of the 50 or so makeshift shelters started Monday in a city-owned southeast canyon, which industrial parks have encroached upon the last four years.

“Over a period of time, we’ve received numerous inquiries from property owners surrounding the site asking why the city hasn’t taken action to clean it up,” said Bob Campbell, the city’s economic development manager.

“This is the first experience we’ve had in dealing with this,” Campbell said. “After we’ve finished with this particular situation, we want to reevaluate the result and the benefits before considering other sites.”

“What we don’t want to do is to force people west, and then clean up the west, and (then) they’ll move back east,” Campbell said.

The camp, which extends for about a mile parallel to Poinsettia Avenue south of La Mirada Drive, was scheduled to be dismantled by Wednesday, but it is apparent that the job won’t be finished until the end of next week.

The canyon, which is dense with bushes and trees, is an open-space easement that the city may use as part of the proposed Buena Vista Park and Trail System, Campbell said.

Because of the canyon’s open-space designation, the area must be cleared without machinery that would injure the environment. The migrants’ shacks of lumber and corrugated fiberglass are being carried up the hillside by Bob Graham, owner of Target Systems, and his 11-man crew of migrant workers. The city hired the firm to dismantle the camp.

“I hired some of the guys that lived here,” Graham said, aware of the irony. “Basically, it’s work. It’s a job and a big one, and they need the work.”

“I’m going to sleep under the sun,” said one of Graham’s workers who used to live in the canyon when asked where he was going to live now.

The creek that runs through the camp was littered with tin cans, bottles, cardboard boxes, shoes and bicycle parts. On Thursday, about 10 shacks remained standing, with the others already reduced to mounds of lumber and cardboard.

Clothing and papers were found strewn across the floor of one of the shacks, including a Spanish version of an employee manual from PI Industries, a Greyhound bus schedule and an envelope from a local landscaping firm.

“These are good places for them to build homes,” Graham said. “Some of them you can’t even see from above.”

Jose Taide Castaneda, Graham’s field supervisor, said some people return to the camp at night. Others have gone to look for alternate homes.

“They’re looking for other canyons or other hills,” Castaneda said. “Some people go to Los Angeles, some go back to Mexico because they have lived here too many years.

“Working two or three days a week, they can’t pay rent. Some people earn good money, and they don’t want to pay rent.”

Campbell said interviews conducted by the city with people living in the canyon showed that some camp residents “were relatively well-employed in construction and landscaping and in fact had a decent enough income that they could acquire more conventional housing, but were satisfied to stay in the canyon and send money back to their country of origin.”

The camps have been in the canyon for at least five years, according to Graham, and they border the Vista Business Park and the proposed 68-acre Rancho Vista Industrial Park.

“It’s a matter of taking on the biggest, most troublesome problem first,” Campbell said, explaining why this site was chosen for dismantling.

Campbell said about 50 migrant workers from the canyon gather at nearby Poinsettia Avenue and La Mirada Drive every morning to be picked up by employers, a situation that is “intimidating to a number of employers and prospective tenants of the industrial parks.”

The city began posting signs on the shacks two weeks ago in both English and Spanish warning that the city would remove the shacks and all possessions in the canyon, Campbell said.

Anything of personal value was collected by workers and stored in a sanitary steel shed at the edge of the canyon to be retrieved by their owners, Campbell said.