Beyond the Magic : Some of the motels around Disneyland are home to hundreds of people who can afford nothing else. Now, the park’s expansion plans are forcing them out.

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 what they call “the strip” for housing. They have built communities in the motels that resemble neighborhoods.

Now the Walt Disney Co. is buying up land to expand its aging Anaheim park. Since February, several dingy motels have closed more than 150 rooms, displacing hundreds of residents.

The company recently detailed plans to build a separate theme park and high-rise tourist hotels around Disneyland.

Company officials said they are unaware that 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, 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 that land.

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.

Residents worry incessantly about being forced to leave. Since most are weekly tenants, a week is, by law, all the notice they need receive before eviction. Here are some of their stories:

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 last 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 Harbour. “A lot of people say they would move, but I wouldn’t. Anaheim’s my home.”

Harbour, 33, comes from a farm family in Michigan that she says she fled after a relative raped her. Debbie Parsons, 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, Parsons decided to give parenting a try.

For the last 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 video games 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 can name the county’s social workers as well as the members of her favorite bands.

Harbour and Parsons don’t know what they would do or where they would go if the motel were to suddenly close. 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 Harbour, “and we will.”

When other motels started closing down, the couple applied for federal rental assistance through the Housing and Urban Development department. 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 Harbour. “That’s why I applied for HUD, real quick.”

Parsons, 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. Harbour 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 Harbour’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 Parsons. “Even if I was working, I don’t know what we’d do.”

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.

Harbour hopes the government housing aid will come through before the demolition crews arrive and seems almost afraid to venture a guess about 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 Morin, 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.

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

“Eventually we’ll get out of here,” says Morin, who spends much of her day shuttling her grand-kids and other motel kids to 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 Morin 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 Jennifer 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 or the security of a retirement pension.

“That was always out of our reach,” Kathy Morin 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 kids 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.”

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, he hopes the wild days of his youth are 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 has the history it would take to get an above-minimum-wage job or the savings needed for even the cheapest of security deposits for 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), I thought: ‘That’s not cool.’ ”

If this motel shuts 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 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 one in 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 any more,” he says. “I try, but I can’t.”