Downtown Living--the Attraction Is Growing : Redevelopment: Some residents are discovering the pleasures of ocean views at housing prices that are low by beach town standards.

Scott Walker has spent a good deal of his real estate career and a lot of advertising money telling people how wonderful their lives would be if they lived in a new housing tract in some far-flung bedroom community. These days he has a new tune--downtown.

Walker, vice president of a real estate marketing firm, is selling the pleasures of living among the office towers and shops of downtown Long Beach and walking to work. “Every time I read about gridlock, I jump for joy,” chortled Walker, whose company, CoastCo Inc., is based in Long Beach.

He is not the only one. Although downtown’s tawdry past of Navy dives and X-rated theaters is not that distant, the area is attracting a growing, if still small, number of middle-class residents. They are drawn by ocean views, five-minute commutes to work and housing prices that are--by Southern California’s inflated standards--relatively cheap for a beach town.

Developers who five or 10 years ago would have hooted at the thought of $500,000 condos on Ocean Boulevard are now building them, professionals are painstakingly restoring Victorian houses in the Willmore City area on the northwestern edge of downtown, and inexpensively built condos in the shadow of the World Trade Center are being snapped up by first-time buyers.

“There is clearly a trend developing,” observed Mackey Deasy, a local architect whose firm is designing a couple of mid-sized condominium projects in the greater downtown area, which stretches from the Los Angeles River channel on the west to Alamitos Avenue on the east and from Anaheim Street south to the waterfront. “If you look at what’s happening in downtown Long Beach, there’s a lot of new housing under construction.”

City planners have wanted to boost downtown’s population as part of their decade-long redevelopment efforts. If people live downtown, the theory goes, they’ll shop there and fill the streets at night. “We are looking to approximately double the population downtown,” from about 25,000 to 50,000, said Robert Paternoster, city planning and building director.

To encourage developers to build housing in an area that had not seen new residential construction for decades, the city has increased density limits and in some cases sold land assembled by the Redevelopment Agency at below market value.

Moreover, as the fruits of commercial redevelopment become more evident with towering new office buildings and a brightening restaurant scene, putting up downtown condos and apartments no longer seems quite the risky venture it once did.

“I think there is continuing developer interest,” said Long Beach real estate broker Elaine Hutchison. “Although with the present economic situation, there will be caution.”

On the still largely poor and rough west side of downtown, $100,000 to $150,000 condos are selling out while still under construction. The renovated Breakers Hotel just reopened as a residential complex for senior citizens. Nearby on Ocean Boulevard, the 225-unit Harborplace condo high-rise is nearing completion and several other similar projects are planned in the vicinity, including one on the site of the razed Pacific Coast Club. Another 1,000 residential units are planned for the sprawling seaside development approved on the site of the old Pike amusement park just south of Ocean Boulevard.

Whetting developer appetites is the recent success of the beachfront Ocean Club high-rise condos just east of downtown, as well as the conversion of the International Tower, a round-shaped downtown high-rise, from apartments to condos four years ago. “Two high-rises back to back that were sellouts . . . so far it looks like there’s (buyer) acceptance,” remarked Walker, whose firm handled sales at the 116-unit Ocean Club on Ocean Boulevard and is also the agent for the 22-story Harborplace, where condos will sell from $150,000 to $500,000.

“In Southern California, mentioning the word downtown doesn’t necessarily invoke a great feeling,” conceded Walker. But talk about “village” life and walking to the beach or your boat slip, he continues with a wave of his salesman’s wand, and “all of a sudden that sounds good.”

Bob Treese, a member of the city Redevelopment Agency board, first moved into International Tower at the corner of Ocean and Alamitos Avenue a decade ago. In 1987, when the tower was converted to condos, he and his wife bought two apartments and combined them into a 2,700-square-foot condominium on the 19th floor.

“The view along the ocean front in the high-rises here is spectacular,” declared the 49-year-old manufacturer. “Fortunately, a lot of people don’t know that yet.”

During his early years in the tower, Treese recalled, “There wasn’t much downtown that was appealing to me. I would drive in and I would drive out and I would never walk around.”

Now he says, the downtown scene has improved considerably with concerts at the Convention and Entertainment Center, new restaurants opening on Pine Avenue and the arrival of the light-rail transit line to Los Angeles.

Still, downtown continues to be known more for its urban problems than its urban pleasures.

The homeless sprawl across its few parks, streets empty after dark, and crime remains a nagging problem.

For some, the lack of hustle and bustle is even part of the attraction. “Frankly, I guess one of the reasons I like living there is because it’s fairly quiet,” said Dick Etherington, who last fall moved into an $800-a-month, one-bedroom apartment in the new Bellamar apartment building just two blocks from his City Hall office. “I’m not the kind of person who looks for a vibrant street scene to live in.”

As a city transportation planner who spends his days worrying about traffic problems, Etherington, 54, also enjoys avoiding them on the way home. “I don’t even walk home for lunch. I stroll home.”

His one big complaint is “that I don’t have a good supermarket.” He also confesses that when he wants to do some serious shopping, he is apt to drive to the Lakewood Mall.

Janss Corp. has plans for a project that could do much to liven up the commercial district. The developer of a successful mixed-use complex on the Third Street Promenade in downtown Santa Monica, Janss has won city approval to build a similar project on Pine Avenue that would include a 16-screen movie theater, shops and 142 apartments.

The commercial growth and now the rise of middle-class housing are not without their casualties. The poor are losing their apartments in old buildings as blocks are cleared for office developments and condos far out of their financial reach.

“Once a house is torn down, it’s gone forever and those people will never be able to afford the new housing,” complained Alan Lowenthal, president of Long Beach Area Citizens Involved, a citywide citizens group that has long criticized the city for not doing enough to maintain and develop low-cost housing.

City building figures demonstrate the extent of demolition in the past decade. Despite the construction of hundreds of new units in recent years, overall there were only about 140 more residential units downtown in 1990 than in 1980.

Indeed, as part of its plan to improve the area, the city has actively encouraged the demolition of dilapidated apartments west of the downtown commercial district by offering density incentives to developers who assemble large lots for new buildings.

Responding to complaints about the loss of low-cost housing stock, the City Council a year ago passed an ordinance requiring developers who knock down low-cost apartments to either replace them or contribute to a housing fund.

But the requirement came under withering attack from builders and developers who claim that the definition of low-cost units is absurdly broad and that the replacement fees are making new projects too expensive to pursue.

City officials consequently retreated, delaying enforcement of the ordinance and also placing a moratorium on the demolition of low-cost units while they try to work out a new proposal acceptable to both developers and housing advocates.

While city policy has fostered the destruction of many older buildings, it is also encouraging preservation of Victorian houses in the Drake Park and Willmore City Historic Districts on the northwestern edge of downtown, which dates from Long Beach’s earliest days. There, low-density zoning has been maintained to provide some protection from development pressure.

“This is the cutting edge. In some places it’s the ragged edge,” joked Scott Ringwelski, president of the Willmore City Heritage Assn. Five years ago he moved from Belmont Heights to buy an 1897 house that had been chopped up into a rooming house and was ready to be bulldozed.

“This house had 11 refrigerators, five stoves, eight sinks and three bathtubs,” recalled Ringwelski, 36, who was preparing to sand the kitchen ceiling as part of the renovation job that consumes his free time.

“Nobody wanted these houses five, six, seven years ago. Now it’s almost becoming trendy,” continued Ringwelski, who says he and his partner turn down weekly offers that are as much as four times what they paid for the house in 1986.

With less than half the homes restored in the district, life in Willmore City has its challenges. “On the one side we have the urban problems of crime, drugs and transients. And on the other side we have the developers who would love to come in and turn this area into a canyon of condominiums,” Ringwelski commented.

“If someone on the (affluent) East Side doesn’t mow the lawn for five weeks, one call to City Hall takes care of it. As I’m talking to you now, I’m looking out my window. There’s an illegal home for transients. There are two couches and a bed in the front yard and they have not been moved even though I have tried several times to get them moved.”