Santa Clarita Starts Night Patrols to Find Illegal Housing : Dwellings: Inspectors hope to ferret out substandard residences in the barrio. Rights groups protest the action.

Santa Clarita has begun an unusual series of nighttime inspections in the city’s barrio, using municipal code inspectors to ferret out illegal dwellings in an effort to force landlords to stop renting garages and sheds.

The City Council started the program to eliminate substandard housing, but two council members said they also hope it will drive out illegal aliens, which drew protests from immigrant-rights groups.

Between 5 and 8 p.m. three times a week for the next three months, a code enforcement officer accompanied by a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy will walk and drive through the largely Latino neighborhood of East Newhall, primarily looking for signs that garages and other substandard buildings are being used as residences.

If an inspector determines that a garage or shed is illegally occupied, he will notify the landlord, who will have three days to evict the tenants, said Rich Henderson, the city’s principal planner. Some extensions will be granted, he added.

Inspectors also will look for abandoned vehicles, animals kept in unsanitary conditions and faulty wiring, he said.

The City Council initiated the program this week hoping to improve conditions in the 12-square-block area bounded by Race, Park, Market and Pine streets, said Councilwoman Jo Anne Darcy. Residents and merchants have been complaining about substandard housing in the area since the city was incorporated in late 1987, city spokeswoman Gail Foy said.

“We’ve had so many complaints about conditions there that if we don’t do something, there’s going to be a fire down there,” Darcy said.

But council members Jan Heidt and Jill Klajic said they also hope the program helps rid the area of illegal aliens, who solicit jobs from passersby in nearby downtown Newhall. In April, the council rejected establishing a hiring hall for the laborers and instead urged the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service to deport illegal workers in the area.

“If we make housing more difficult to find for these people, hopefully, they’ll move on,” Heidt said.

Klajic, a strong proponent of establishing a hiring hall for the workers, said she also finds herself hoping the program forces out day laborers, who she says sometimes pay $20 a week to live in tiny dwellings without bathrooms.

“We’ve got to do something--you can smell the urine in the gutters when you walk down the street,” she said. “But I don’t think it will really work as long as contractors and housewives keep hiring day laborers.”

Immigrant-rights advocates criticized city officials for attempting to drive away day laborers by cracking down on substandard housing.

“It’s outrageous, and it’s not going to work,” said Linda Mitchell, a spokeswoman for the Coalition for Humane Immigrants Rights of Los Angeles. “All it’s going to do is terrorize a community that is already being victimized.”

Some housing officials predicted that the program will result in worse overcrowding in the area as displaced residents double up with friends or family members.

Ninety percent of East Newhall’s 1,485 residents are Latino, according to the 1990 census, and the city has spent about $196,000 in federal funds over the past 3 1/2 years to provide services for the poverty-stricken area. Another $271,000 in federal funds will be spent this summer to build curbs and gutters there because residents have complained that rain and water runoff from sprinklers do not drain properly in the low-lying neighborhood.

“The motivation of the city might be to reduce the health or safety risk to occupants or others, but there’s the issue of whether you’re just shifting the problem or actually solving it,” said Joe Carreras, a planner for the Southern California Assn. of Governments.

“Sometimes you push down on one spot and the problem pops up right nearby.”

Although other cities in California have also mounted aggressive campaigns to eradicate illegal rental units, Santa Clarita’s program is one of only a handful in the state to be conducted at night, said Fred Cullum, vice president of California Building Officials, an association of government building department personnel.

City workers conducting daytime inspections in the past have found it difficult to determine whether buildings are occupied because residents are at work, Foy said. At night, they can observe and interview residents near buildings they suspect are illegally occupied because of such telltale signs as extension cords and second television antennas.

Landlords will probably evict tenants from illegal dwellings as a result of the program, said Assistant City Manager Ken Puhlskamp, but he could not estimate how many people would be displaced.

“We’re not trying to get people thrown out of their houses, but we certainly can’t stand by and tolerate people living under these conditions,” he said. “If it were me, I would rather get thrown out than stay there and have my house burn down on me or get some disease because of substandard conditions.”

City inspectors will also visit other neighborhoods during the three-month pilot program. But a city-commissioned survey of the Santa Clarita Valley identified East Newhall and the unincorporated community of Val Verde as containing the largest concentrations of substandard housing in the valley--about 132 units.