Safety Zone : YWCA Child Care Center Becomes an Oasis for Innocents in a Santa Ana Neighborhood on the Skids

In broad daylight, there was nothing mean about the streets outside the incessantly bright and cheerful YWCA Child Care Center.

But across the street, three men stood in a peculiar huddle, talking quickly and nervously, one of them staring constantly over his shoulder.

“They’re dealing in drugs,” said center director Vicki Stewart, watching from the center’s entryway. “You see it all the time over there--the same knots of people coming and going, any time of day.”

At night, the drug trafficking mounts--dealers and customers shifting from block to block, car to car, apartment to apartment. And the outdoor stairwells at the center itself, which is open only during the day, become a favorite overnight hangout.

But since the YWCA South Orange County opened its Child Care Center for 60 infants and toddlers here 10 months ago, the center has been spared the vandalism and other urban scars that blemish the neighborhood.

And during center operating hours, encounters with drug dealers and street people--who seem to regard the center as a children’s sanctuary--have been relatively few.

“Maybe, it’s because we’re a place for little kids and families,” Stewart said, pointing to the building’s playful exterior of oranges, blues, reds, yellows.

“Maybe,” she suggested, “it’s because everything else is so grim out there, and we’re a symbol of what’s good and harmless.”

The child-care facility is at the intersection of Durant Street and Washington Avenue, roughly the center of a 12-block residential corridor in central Santa Ana bordered by Civic Center Drive, Ross Street, 17th Street and Broadway.

Even though this sector is just north of the downtown government buildings and a block west of the law and medical offices, it remains a forgettable, nondescript urban pocket of small homes and large apartment buildings.

But the dwindling number of homeowners who still live there say their once-safe area is on the skids, struck by the kinds of blight found in other high-density sections of Santa Ana.

Police said that although there is little violence around the child-care center, there are an alarmingly high number of drug-related arrests.

Last year, police handled 336 “criminal investigation” cases nearby, which included assaults, burglaries, public drunkenness and trespassing.

Sixty-eight of those cases involved narcotics use or sales, but police said drug trafficking in that kind of residential area is difficult to stop because of the tightly packed buildings and sheer mobility of drug dealers.

“It’s a very elusive situation. Once we clean up one street, they take their business to another,” said Lt. Collie Provence. “And we believe a lot of them hang out in some of the (apartment) complexes.”

When the YWCA decided on the Durant/Washington site in late 1989, it was fully aware of the area’s notoriety.

But the two-level, 5,200-square-foot property, then used for medical clinic offices, offered certain bonuses. It was large enough for a 60-child facility, centrally located and the owner agreed to an attractive price--$425,000, or $70,000 off the listed figure.

Mostly, YWCA officials maintained, it was simply a matter of meeting social problems head on.

“Our mission has always been to reach out to areas--and to people--with the greatest need,” said Mary Douglas, executive director of YWCA South Orange County, which opened its widely praised Hotel for Women, a 38-bed facility for the homeless, at its Santa Ana headquarters in 1987.

As for the drug-ridden Durant/Washington neighborhood, “I don’t think we even seriously considered not moving into that area,” she added. “And whatever the problems or risks, we felt we would be able to cope with them.”

So on July 2, after a $475,000 wall-to-wall renovation, including a fully equipped back-yard play area, the day-care center opened.

“We like to think that the people in this neighborhood are glad we came, that we are serving a need, that we are here to stay,” Douglas said, noting that at least a dozen of 60 participating families are from the surrounding homes and apartments. “If nothing else, just by being here, we hope we can be a catalyst for saving this neighborhood.” City officials have the same desire.

They recently launched a neighborhood cleanup campaign that includes not only increased police patrols, but also efforts to combat apartment overcrowding, control on-street parking problems and improve housing maintenance.

But the people who live there say the challenge seems insurmountable.

“Our neighborhood has been taken away from us,” said one homeowner, who requested anonymity, as did most of his neighbors. “We can’t even walk our own street anymore without a feeling of fear.”

Helen, 81, remembers when the neighborhood was sweetly familial, when they could leave the doors to their houses unlocked.

“Oh, it was like any nice neighborhood then. We had such wonderful block parties. All our homes dated back to the 1920s or 1930s. We raised our kids here and expected to live out our lives here,” said Helen, who moved into the neighborhood with her husband and two daughters in the late 1940s.

But eventually, the neighborhood began to come apart. Helen and other homeowners say they can pinpoint exactly the time: It was five years ago, when the first wave of the apartment boom arrived.

One of the most profound changes took place along a three-block stretch of Durant Street, from 17th Street south to Washington Avenue, where the Child Care Center now stands. Nearly a dozen complexes were erected in five years, ranging from 30 to 80 units in size and overshadowing the 10 surviving little houses.

“Actually, I didn’t mind at first, even when they put up those big ones right near us,” recalled George Aguilar, 58, who lives with his wife and four children in the house he purchased 11 years ago. “We figured they were nice looking and, besides, this was progress--and what can you do, right?”

But homeowners throughout the overall 12-block corridor argued that with the bigger complexes--whose rents ranged from $500 to $800 a month--came hundreds of new, transitory dwellers. Many units were filled to overflowing. Tenant turnover was rapid and constant.

“You had absentee landlords who weren’t very choosy, who just wanted bodies to fill up their units,” said another homeowner, Carol, 34, who moved into another part of the corridor with her husband and two children eight years ago.

“After that, our streets got inundated and dumped with some pretty awful social problems,” she said. “There’s been a real parade of sad humanity ever since--right outside our front windows. It’s a nightmare.”

Cars were parked at night and weekends, bumper to bumper, on every street. Trash was piled up in the alleyways. Noise levels soared. Prostitutes strolled the area. Transients slept in back yards, garages and vacant houses.

But, homeowners said, it was the audaciously wide-open drug trafficking that really took over. “You saw people shooting up, right on the front lawns,” Carol said. “You saw all kinds of cars drive up for a quick sale. It’s a circus out there.”

Carol described one particularly harrowing encounter at her house. “Around 4 a.m. we heard this tremendous crash. Some guy, stoned out of his mind, had tumbled right through our living-room window,” she said. “My husband grabbed his baseball bat and chased the guy right out of the house and down the street.”

So, homeowners said, they had no choice but to retreat behind their own barricades--behind their triple-locked doors, barred windows and big guard dogs.

They seldom went visiting in the neighborhood, even with the few old-timers they still knew. Those who had young children let them play only in the fenced back yards and under extra-close supervision.

And even if they wanted to flee, even if they could find buyers for their homes, most could not afford to live in the far more reputable sectors in Santa Ana or elsewhere in Orange County.

Said another longtime homeowner: “How else can I explain it? We all felt trapped inside our own neighborhood.”

It was nearing 6 p.m., closing time for the YWCA Child Care Center, when Amy Aguilar arrived to pick up 8-month-old Christina.

“This is a wonderful center--so bright and clean, a very kind staff,” said the 24-year-old Aguilar, as she sat in the hallway, holding her daughter, who was busily toying with her mother’s hair.

Aguilar, a medical technician, works only a few blocks away. Nearly all the other parents work in central Santa Ana, their jobs ranging from county office aides to warehouse laborers.

Aguilar pays $85 a week, the fee for children under 2 (the fee is $65 for ages 2 to 5). While many parents reside in Costa Mesa, Garden Grove, Fountain Valley and Anaheim, others, like Aguilar, live right in central Santa Ana.

In fact, she lives right in this neighborhood, just down the street, where she and her family have stayed the past 11 years.

She said that on occasion she’s been approached outside the building by drug dealers and panhandlers. “But now, they don’t seem to bother us all that much. Besides, they know the staff is always quick to call the police,” she said. “I feel real safe for my daughter here.”

As she stepped outside to put Christina in the car parked close to the center entrance, Aguilar caught a glimpse of yet another huddle of men at the corner across the street.

“Out there, things haven’t changed too much, I don’t think. I still don’t go out alone at night. Even if I walk to the supermarket--only a short way--my father always goes with me. Out there, you still have to be very careful.”