COLUMN LEFT : A Housing Idea That Might Fly : In Watsonville, a dogfight develops over airport land use.

Drive into this farm town in the Pajaro Valley, 90 miles south of San Francisco, and the sign says that 27,000 souls dwell within the city’s limits, a piece of solid misinformation as such signs usually are. Double the number and you’ll be nearer the truth. For years Watsonville, like other towns across the state and across the nation, has been facing and ignoring a crisis in low-cost housing. Many of the workers--pickers and packers--who help earn Watsonville its agricultural wealth cram with their families into garages or made-over chicken coops, or sleep in their cars.

It took the earthquake last October to signal just how bad Watsonville’s housing situation really is. When the red-tagging was done, it turned out that time after time, two, three or four families had been piled into the old Maybeck redwood houses. For most of them, the trailers forced from a reluctant Federal Emergency Management Agency were a step up in life.

Right now the city of Watsonville reckons it needs 2,585 more units for low-income households. Under the laggard tempo of business-as-usual, there’s no way this demand can be slaked. For a start, if land costs at least $100,000 to $600,000 an acre, how could Watsonville ever have $80,000 homes or $400-a-month rentals?

But it so happens that Watsonville does have over 300 acres of land at its disposal for low- and moderate-income housing, and a week ago the Veterans Hall on East Beach Street echoed with jagged exchanges as citizens debated the merits of using the land for this purpose.

It was local organizer Frank Bardacke back in January who, writing in Watsonville’s bilingual monthly El Andar, first pointed out that the city-owned airport, covering 331 acres, would be doing humanity a far better turn as a site for cheap housing, parks and schools than as “an aviation theme park for adults.”

Like rent control, another idea being seriously batted around Watsonville, Bardacke’s suggestion was an unwelcome arrival at the table of respectable opinion. The aviators hated it, of course, and so did developer and booster types, to whom the words “low- and moderate-income” represent a profound spiritual affront.

But in the ensuing months the idea has been pushed to and fro. At the Veterans Hall, the class geography of Watsonville was forthrightly on display: City and Santa Cruz County officials ranged at the head of the hall; trim aviators and their business allies in the center sector; off in the right rear bleachers the poor folk, mostly browner and smaller and waving signs such as “Houses not hangars” and “Why are we subsidizing rich men’s toys?”

To hear the pilot faction tell the story, you’d conclude that Watsonville airport has played the same vital municipal function as LAX and the Port of Los Angeles rolled into one--a bustling commercial entrepot, apt for civic emergency and hosing treasure into the city’s coffers. Besides, said the aviators, there were federal restrictions mandating that it remain an airport forever.

These claims wilted as the night wore on and the housing advocates made their case. As a hub of commerce, Watsonville airport keeps a very low profile. The only regular user is UPS, with a daily flight that may soon be terminated. For emergencies there is Monterey airport half an hour down the road, plus private strips and helipads nearby. The airport’s one moment of virtuous glory--when it was used to rush supplies to Watsonville after the earthquake--balances poorly against the daily social emergency of the housing crisis. Just 67 users of the airport have Watsonville addresses; the place runs at a loss, and the feds have no claim on it.

Both nature and power abhor a vacuum, and so power--pilot power, developer power--is trying to fill the dangerous vacuum of this socially marginal, economically useless airport land with bureaucratic sludge: A brand new “airport land use commission” replete with members of the airport lobby, which will answer to state guidelines about appropriate airport development, decisions to be overturned only by a two-thirds city council or county supervisor majority--you get the idea. Push elected officials as much as possible out of the picture. Ah, democracy! So much to be cherished in Eastern Europe, so much to be feared at home where, as Manuel Osorio testified that night, families live in spaces as small as 8 feet by 4 feet.

The battle will roll on. Even a couple of years ago the housing advocates would not have stood a chance and Watsonville would be shaped by respectable power into the fin de siecle contour of dormitory for the rich, slum for the poor. But Watsonville has a feisty activist population and--as do hundreds of other towns--it has a housing crisis that will never be solved by the agenda of business-as-usual.