Social Service Cases Swamp Once-Bucolic South Orange County

By LESLIE BERKMAN

March 8, 1992 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

As orange groves and rolling hills where cattle once grazed have become blanketed with houses and condominiums, southern Orange County finds itself grappling with a variety of social ills many residents thought were reserved for more urban areas.

Orange County officials and private agencies are now scrambling to provide relief in a region once perceived as a problem-free paradise.

“We went from being rural to being urban in a blink,” said Ken Friess, a member of the San Juan Capistrano City Council for nearly two decades.

During the 1980s, the region’s population jumped 67% to 383,000, contrasted with a 25% rise for the county as a whole. Those sheer numbers--coupled with the growth of a low-paying service industry, the influx of poor immigrants from south of the border and the national economic recession--have greatly increased South County’s need for social services.

The area now has a medley of social problems, ranging from teen pregnancies to juvenile gangs, homelessness and communicable diseases such as tuberculosis.

In 1991, the county’s southern flank received 4,555 reports of child abuse, up 18.3% from the previous year. The region also had 10,664 individuals who were receiving aid for dependent children, food stamps or Medi-Cal benefits during October, 1990, a startling 40.5% increase over the same month in 1989.

Last year, referral calls handled by the South Orange County Community Services Council jumped 66%, the biggest annual increase in the council’s history. During the Gulf War, calls relating to child abuse rose 30%.

“You have this image (of the) South County as so affluent,” observed Dee Lief, a longtime Community Services Council volunteer. “But income does not protect you from a child who was born retarded or a marriage that is falling apart or an aged parent who suddenly must give up his independence.”

Friess contends the county was slow to recognize the problems.

Just four or five years ago, he learned that the two-person welfare office in San Juan Capistrano--the only welfare operation in South County at the time--was going to be shut down.

Eager to save the facility, Friess and his council colleagues took extraordinary steps.

The city paid rent for a year on office space for the county welfare workers. In the meantime, local charitable organizations began culling statistics in hopes of convincing county officials that there was a need.

It worked.

Not only did the Orange County Social Services Agency decide to stick it out in South County, but in March of 1990 it opened a new, 4,000-square-foot office in Laguna Hills. That office, tucked in the rear of a commercial center off La Paz Road, has since more than doubled in size to accommodate 46 workers and is “bursting at the seams” with an expanding clientele, said Bob Griffith, the agency’s chief deputy director.

In October, the county opened a clinic for low-income families in San Juan Capistrano. Just last month, various dignitaries gathered to celebrate the debut of an 18-room center in Laguna Hills to handle children who are victims of sexual abuse.

Private charitable agencies are also expanding their services in the county. United Way of Orange County opened a southern regional office in Laguna Hills in April, 1990, and has subleased office space to 11 other charitable organizations seeking to become more active in the southern part of the county.

And early this summer the state Employment Development Department will open its first South County office in Mission Viejo that will take applications for unemployment benefits and offer job placement services. It will no longer be necessary for South County residents to make the trek to the crowded state office in Santa Ana.

Although the South County has long had its share of social ills, some elected officials in the region were reluctant to admit that some of their neighbors needed help. The first reaction of communities leaders was in many cases denial, according to Friess.

Five years ago, an official from another South County city “told me he couldn’t support more services in this area because it would be bad for his city’s image. I was incredulous,” Friess said.

The first tiny social service office in San Juan Capistrano wasn’t established until 1985, when Supervisor Thomas F. Riley responded to the pleas of residents tired of braving the trip to Santa Ana to get help.

“It was pretty challenging to make the other supervisors’ offices aware of the needs of South County,” recalled Susan Hinman, Riley’s executive assistant, who searched for funding and lined up support for the office.

Lee Steelman and the organization she helped start, the South Orange County Community Services Council, are given much of the credit for changing public and government opinion about the importance of facing up to the new problems.

The group formed 15 years ago when a handful of women gathered in Steelman’s San Clemente dining room and decided over coffee to do something about the lack of services in south Orange County. Focusing at first on the shortage of child care, the organization eventually expanded to other issues.

“We have done a lot of speaking,” said Steelman, president of the group. “Every time there is a public hearing (about social services) we try to appear and say, ‘Don’t forget South County.’ ”

Over the years, the South Orange County Community Services Council grew to include 150 social service agencies, ranging from hospitals to senior citizen centers and day-care providers joined in a network that spans South County.

Steelman said the council “pestered” the County Social Services Agency and the Health Care Agency for the opening of children’s mental health clinics, the new South County public health clinic and the Laguna Hills welfare office.

Gratified by the county’s recent allocation of resources to the region, she said, “I think there is a new awareness that everyone in the South County does not own two cars and live in an elegant home, that we have needs like everybody else.”

Dana Point Councilwoman Judy Curreri, who has worked for 12 years as a public health nurse in South County, contends that while population growth has increased the area’s demand for social services, “the need was always there; it was just not recognized by people in power.”

One reason, she said, is that most of the county bureaucrats lived elsewhere.

Curreri said she and other public health nurses employed by the county had to lobby hard to persuade authorities to open a clinic for the poor in the south.

“It took five years of gathering statistics to document the need,” Curreri said. Two years ago, she recalled, the county arranged for a medical van that on alternate weeks made stops in San Juan Capistrano and San Clemente.

“The first day we drove into San Juan,” she said, “there were people standing in line at 8 a.m.” to see the doctor.

Because of the demonstrated demand for medical attention, she said, the county finally agreed to open a facility last October in San Juan Capistrano that offers immunizations, tuberculosis testing, nutritional education, family planning, pregnancy care, a well-baby clinic and an adolescent clinic.

While service providers agree that there are still far fewer needy people living south of the Costa Mesa Freeway--the county’s unofficial Mason-Dixon line--than in older northern cities such as Santa Ana and Anaheim, they say the demographics are rapidly changing, pushed by a flood of Latino immigrants and the growth of low-paying jobs in the burgeoning service industries.

“The South County seems to be creating a whole strata of low-income people such as nannies, gardeners, laborers, fast food and hotel workers and janitors,” said Larry M. Leaman, director of the County Social Services Agency.

As the region matures, he added, the higher-income professional families, who two decades ago led the settlement of south Orange County, are producing children with a range of social and economic problems that more closely match those of the general population.

Welfare workers also say the increase of the poor in South County has been propelled by a former county policy that required residential developments to include a segment of housing affordable to lower-income families. In some cases, they say, indigent families move to South County to escape gang-ridden neighborhoods, but bring with them teen-agers who begin to create the same problems. Service providers say the poor in South County are not as visible as in northern cities because they are not concentrated in aging neighborhoods of deteriorating housing.

Instead the poor scatter throughout South County wherever they can find landlords willing to let more than one family share the rent. They can be found in attractive new apartment and condominium complexes, where families double and triple up, sometimes subleasing even the garages.

The lingering economic recession has also played a major role in swelling the ranks of the needy in South County, as throughout the rest of the Southland.

Shelley Lopez of San Juan Capistrano, the mother of three young children, was at the social services office in Laguna Hills on Thursday to apply for cash assistance.

“I need help because my husband is getting laid off tomorrow,” she said.

Lopez, 23, was not new to the welfare office. She said that even when her husband was employed as a warehouse worker at $6.75 an hour, the family needed Food Stamps to survive and relied on a federal housing subsidy program to help pay the rent.

But welfare workers and other service providers say they are also seeing more first-time applicants who have lost well-paying jobs.

“In the South County we have more applicants who are rejected as not eligible” for a variety of assistance programs, said Bob Griffith, chief deputy director of the County Social Services Agency. “In their mind they are desperate. But under the system, they are not desperate enough.”

Fanny Gomez, an intake worker at the Laguna Hills welfare office, agreed.

“A lot of new welfare applicants have a car or boat or a little savings and are not eligible until they lose everything,” said Gomez, who is forced to refer them to various private nonprofit charities.

Gary Lewis, director of programs for the Episcopal Services Alliance, said the nonprofit agency has seen a marked increase in demand for its help of food, clothing, furniture and shelter in South County.

In January the alliance’s San Clemente office served 1,771 individuals or families, up from 1,341 during the same month last year, and the Laguna Beach office served 530 individuals or families, which was a more than threefold increase from the 171 a year earlier.

Responding to the growing need and with financial assistance from an anonymous donor, Lewis said, the alliance in February expanded its operation in Laguna Beach from three to five days a week.

Lewis said the alliance has seen “a tremendous increase in the number of Hispanics in the South County requesting services in the last year.”

He also said there has been a sharp rise in requests from people who have lost engineering and middle-management jobs because of the downsizing of companies. Those who thought that the equity in their homes would protect them from destitution, he said, are finding that the properties won’t sell in the current market.

“It is a real tragic thing that is going on,” Lewis said. “South Orange County kind of used to be immune from this. But that is not so anymore.”

Correspondent Leslie Earnest contributed to this report.

South County Strains

Social strains in south Orange County are increasing. Indicators include a rising number of welfare demands and child abuse reports.

Welfare Demands Up

Percentage increases from October, 1989, to October, 1990, for recipients of Aid to Families with Dependent Children and food stamps.

AFDC

Countywide: 21%

South County: 32%

Food stamps

Countywide: 16%

South County: 35%