Far From Happiest Place on Earth : Disneyland Neighbors Wonder Where They’ll End Up

An odd assortment of drug dealers, down-on-their-luck families and teen-age castaways live side by side in the tiny tourist motels that crowd the streets around Disneyland.

These are the working poor who have found stable refuge in the little rooms--a last resort for some, for others just one of many makeshift homes over the years. For a variety of reasons, they have come to rely on the what they call the “strip” for housing.

Now the Walt Disney Co. is buying up land to expand its aging Anaheim park. Since February, dingy motels such as the Dunes, Princess, Lamplighter and Muskateer have been shutting their doors, closing more than 150 rooms and displacing hundreds of residents.

On Wednesday, the company unveiled its long-awaited addition to the area around Disneyland, detailing plans to build a separate theme park and high-rise tourist hotels.

Disney officials said they are unaware the motels are home to anyone but tourists. “This is the first time I’ve ever heard of that,” said Alan Epstein, vice president for corporate development of the Disney Development Co. So far, just those four motels have closed to accommodate the plans, but the company has its eye on land where up to 10 more are situated.

Between 300 and 700 motel rooms could be lost if the company buys the land on which those motels sit.

Residents watch as their friends are evicted at a moment’s notice, neon “No Vacancy” signs flash on the marquees and hired security guards block the entrances of the former homes.

These mom-and-pop business once catered to tourists and traveling salesmen but have long since given up that role and now cater primarily to the otherwise homeless.

At about $150 a week for a cramped room and shoddy kitchen facilities, the motels are no bargain. But no deposit and no credit check means anonymous, affordable shelter in a county where monthly apartment rents average $795 and move-in costs run about $1,200.

Tenants have built communities in the motels that resemble neighborhoods. Veterans warn newcomers about the drugs and the troublemakers. Parents help steer kids clear from the sandbox plagued with lice and glass chards. One single mother earns money baby-sitting, another picks up the grade-schoolers every day at 2:20 p.m.

They now worry incessantly about being forced to leave. Since most are weekly tenants, by law, that is all the notice they need receive to be evicted.

Susan Oakson, executive director of the Orange County Homeless Issues Task Force, said that these people are already essentially homeless and that the dingy motels offer at least some shelter.

“There’s very little low-income housing in Orange County,” said Oakson. “They will have to move to cars, to the streets.”

VICKIE and DEBBIE

Vickie Harbour and Debbie Parsons are raising their children in a motel room across the street from Disneyland.

After bouts with drugs and the police, they say they have lived soberly and safely for the past six months in the tiny room, where the children’s perfect attendance certificates from the Anaheim City School District are proudly displayed on the dingy walls.

“I wouldn’t appreciate them tearing my house down. There ain’t no place else to go,” says Vickie. “A lot of people say they would move, but I wouldn’t. Anaheim’s my home.”

Vickie, 33, comes from a farm family in Michigan that she says she fled after a relative raped her. Debbie, 34, who says she has been gay since her teens, came from Florida to get away from cocaine, only to get hooked on heroin within a few weeks of her arrival.

A mutual friend introduced the two, and they became friends. Harbour had been divorced from her abusive husband for a few years and says she often considered a female mate. When Parsons fell in love with her and her children, Vickie decided to give gay parenting a try.

For the past six months, they’ve built a stable home in the motel room at the Caravan Inn, where the women chain-smoke as they plan the family’s future and the kids play Nintendo in the closet that serves as a den.

The boys--Rory Carter, 9, Dustin Harbour, 6-- are model kids who do well in school and whose politeness bares none of their young street smarts. Heather Carter, 13, is a witty teen-ager who has attended more than a dozen schools and knows the county’s social workers as well as she can name the members of her favorite bands.

The couple don’t know what they would do or where they would go if the motel were to suddenly close. After months of trekking the kids to school after school, this is one home that is both safe and affordable.

“I told (the school officials) we’d be here until the end of school,” says Vickie, “and we will.”

When other motels started closing down, the couple applied for federal rental assistance through Housing and Urban Development. They hope their commitment will qualify them as a family.

“My kids have never had to live on the streets, and I’m real proud about that,” says Vickie. “That’s why I applied for HUD, real quick.”

Debbie, who was laid off in January from her job as a silk-screener, has been trying to find new employment but won’t accept minimum-wage work. Vickie relies on welfare money and cares for the children. They’ve also been talking with another couple down the hall about renting a house together, pooling that couple’s money with Vickie’s $824 monthly government check.

But if the motel were to send around eviction notices tomorrow, forcing them out with a few days to pack as the other motels did, they wouldn’t have much choice but the streets.

“We don’t really know what we’d do,” says Debbie. “Even if I was working, I don’t know what we’d do.”

On his way to the closet for a quick game of Nintendo while his frozen burrito heats up in the microwave, Rory asks his mom if he can go to summer school because “it’s fun, and I’ll learn more.”

Vickie doesn’t give him a straight answer, not knowing where the family will be in summertime.

Heather confides that she hates the motels.

“I’ve been living in them ever since I’ve been back with my mom; that’s 2 1/2 years,” she says. “It’s horrible.”

But she says the other temporary homes and shelters they’ve stayed in are worse, and she fears having to move out.

Vickie hopes the government housing aid will come through before the demolition crews arrive and seems almost afraid to venture a guess on what will happen if it doesn’t. “Right now, we’re just going to play it by ear,” she says.

THE MORIN FAMILY

Kathy Morin is “Grandma Kath” to many of the children who run and play in the parking lot of the Golden Forest Inn, even though just two in the boisterous clan are actually her grandchildren.

She enjoys the extended family of neighbors in next-door motel units as much as the closeness of living with her own children and grandchildren in one tiny room.

“Oh, we have our fights. You know, when they’re not doing their share, keeping up,” says Kathy, 43. “I’m sure it’s just as hard for them to live with us as it is for us to live with them.”

Kathy and Bob Morin, 45, have been living in the Golden Forest for three years with their two daughters, Vickie, 22, and Jennifer, 19, who each have a child, Leslie, 5, and Anthony, 2.

The four adults and two children live in the cramped apartment where colorful toys brighten the dingy interior, baby clothes are folded into little stacks around the room and dishes are piled high in the tiny nook that serves as a kitchen.

Kathy still keeps her furniture and other things from their old apartment in storage, planning for the day she will put them up in a new home.

“Eventually we’ll get out of here,” says Kathy, who spends much of her day shuttling her grand-kids and other motel kids to and from school and doing other errands for the family.

The Morins’ journey to motel living is typical--one lost job derails the delicate financial balance. Bob was laid off as a machinist, and the salary Kathy earned as a bookkeeper at a local bowling alley couldn’t support the family.

Within a few months, they were forced out of their three-bedroom apartment in Anaheim, and ensuing marriage problems dispersed the family, sending each member off to different, temporary homes with relatives and friends.

Eventually, Bob and the older daughter, Vickie, moved into the “Forest.” In a short time family matters cooled, and Kathy and the younger daughter, Jennifer, 19, moved in, too.

“We always lived in apartments. My dad always had a job,” says Jennifer, remembering the pre-motel days when she and her sister would visit mom at the bowling alley. “We were pretty much a typical family.”

The Morins were never well-off. These are parents who worked and raised families for years as the county grew around them, but whose just-above-minimum-wage jobs 20 years ago never offered them the money to buy a home then, or the security of a retirement pension.

“That was always out of our reach,” Kathy says of the family’s prospects of owning a home when times were better.

Sitting in kitchen chairs that pose as patio furniture near the parking lot that serves as a playground, Jennifer and other young mothers talk and sip sodas as they watch their children playing nearby.

“We should be out of here before he’s old enough to remember this place,” Jennifer says of her toddling boy whose cropped hair ends in a punkish-tail down his neck. “Leslie, she’s old enough to remember. She knows the name and everything.”

Jennifer, whose boyfriend is in jail on drug charges, hopes that Disney development won’t churn into motion until at least this summer, when her newborn is expected and her mate will have returned.

She and her boyfriend lived on their own for a few months last summer but soon bumped into the difficulty of two teen-agers without high school diplomas trying to make ends meet with a baby to feed. This time, they would like more time to save and plan so they don’t end up back in a motel.

“Everybody knows that if something happens to where they are staying, you can always stay here,” says Jennifer. “I hate coming back here every time I do it. Most people don’t like it here, but it’s somewhere to go.”

ELIZABETH WILSON

Elizabeth Wilson thought she had just about beaten the bad karma that seemed to keep encircling her life. She had settled into a room at the Princess Motel, down the street from the Monorail station that drops Disneyland Hotel guests off after a day at the park.

But two months later, she and two of her adult sons were given two days’ notice to move out.

“Besides being devastated and dehumanized . . . first you cry, and then you get angry,” she says in her room at Rip Van Winkles Inn, her second motel room since being evicted from the Princess.

“It seems like each time, it takes something out of you. You’re like an unwhole person, a broken person,” says Wilson, 45.

Sitting in the spotless room she now shares with her son Jeffrey, 24, and his girlfriend, Mary Kay, 19, Elizabeth’s beautiful, long red hair fixed into a neat ponytail, her clean and pressed clothes, and bright, cheery smile bare none of the turmoil of her soul’s past.

It wasn’t always motel hopping as it has been for the past two years; at times it was better, at others it was worse.

Fifteen years ago, she hopped a Greyhound bus in Pennsylvania to flee a bad marriage and ended up in Anaheim.

After living for two weeks in a gas station bathroom on Beach Boulevard, she finally saved enough as a chambermaid to move into an apartment.

She eventually won custody of her five boys, now aged 20 to 29, who then moved out to California, where she was waiting tables.

Things were going well--at one point she even rented a house in Garden Grove--but she started having problems with alcoholism.

She eventually sobered up and has stayed clean for the past seven years, but health problems cut back on the family income, and they were soon on the street.

“We have hit every motel from here down to West Street, and from Katella (Avenue) over to Ball (Road),” she says of the past two years. “We did a park trip for a while, too, trying to save money to get into a place.”

Now, the three share one of the larger rooms on the motel crawl, one that is decorated with plants, flowers and pictures. They squeeze by to make ends meet; she works part time at a day-care center, and Jeffrey paints the motel woodwork.

She cooks on an electric skillet in the bathroom and considers herself lucky to be working. Jeffrey, though, is still angry that the Walt Disney Co. expansion plans have forced so many out of their housing.

“I think Disneyland should put up (in temporary housing) everyone they’re putting out on the streets,” he says. “They say it’s the Happiest Place on Earth, but for who?”

THE GUYS

Allan King left home--part runaway, part throwaway--at 12 to begin a life of homelessness, drug addiction and satanism that found him in and out of jail, juvenile hall, Orangewood Children’s home and eventually back onto the streets.

Now, at 16, the wild days of his youth are pretty much behind him. He is sober, except for a few beers at parties, talks of one day going to college and has the most permanent home he’s had in years at a motel room down the street from Disneyland.

Only a few tattoos on his arms and wrist scars from failed suicide attempts remain as reminders of those earlier times.

He thanks his friends, other teen-agers with pasts that mix together and begin to sound like his own, for giving him a hand out of the loneliness of homelessness and into the straight life he leads today.

“Friends like these, there’s none of us who wouldn’t give up our last dollar for someone,” he says of the teen-age boys flopped around on the dingy checkered couch, their feet on the table that is littered with soda cans, overflowing ashtrays and Ninja Turtle Hostess Pie wrappers. “We all try to keep each other strong. . . . We all came from environments where we weren’t wanted, and here, we’re all welcome.”

Two of the boys, brothers Matt and Shad Luvano, 19 and 15, live in a motel down the street, and the three have known each other on the motel circuit and the streets for years. Another, Efren Pacheco, 17, now lives in a house with his mother, who moved the family out of the Golden Forest a few months ago. Two other boys share the room and pay the rent with Allan.

These are kids who need both hands to count the parents, step-parents and their ex-spouses who formed the many broken families they at some point called home.

Few of them have high school degrees, some of them work. Kenny has been a manager at Domino’s Pizza and now does telemarketing full time. Many have swept streets and scooped ice cream at Disneyland.

But none have the history it would take to get an above-minimum-wage job or the savings they would need for even the cheapest of security deposits in the trashiest of apartments.

They don’t like the motels. They hate the roaches, the rules, the constant flow of drugs. But they keep coming back.

“The only reason I like this place is because I have a lot of memories here. I have a lot of friends around here,” says Kenny.

Caught between childhood fondness for the amusement park where they spend nearly every weekend hanging out with friends, and adulthood frustration at the company that may tear down their home and put them back on the streets, the boys are having a tough time reconciling their differences with the entertainment giant.

Says Allan, “When I found out (that other people were being evicted to make room for Disney expansion), I thought, ‘That’s not cool.’ ”

If this motel shut its doors, they’re not sure where they’ll go. They talk and dream of setting up a band in a warehouse where they could live and rehearse, but without the money, it’s still just a dream. They figure they would get another room in another motel somewhere.

The boys sit around the tiny room that looks like a college dorm and joke about making a story of their lives comparing themselves to the kids in the movie “River’s Edge” who were bound together by a macabre secret.

When pressed, they talk about losses--childhoods, educations, families. Allan, whose mother died three years ago when he was 13, says he still hasn’t come to terms with her absence .

“I don’t cry anymore,” he says. “I try, but I can’t.”