COLUMN ONE : Quake Jolts Poor Onto the Streets : Recent immigrants and others had been living uncomfortably close to the edge. Now, they have lost everything. Officials fear that the city may face a new generation of homeless.

By turns stalwart and stubborn, they have sought refuge from the shaking earth under leaky tents and gymnasium rafters, most of them recent immigrants from Mexico and Central America without the safety net of insurance or credit.

Even before the disaster, they were living uncomfortably close to the edge, many toiling as day laborers or unlicensed vendors to scrape up the money for a cramped apartment shared with relatives or friends. But when the violent 6.6 earthquake shook their precarious perch, thousands of working poor were knocked off that long, last rung onto the streets.

“We don’t have money, we don’t have an apartment, we don’t know where to go or where to start,” said Mirna Hernandez, a 35-year-old seamstress from El Salvador, who was camped with her two teen-age daughters in a green Army tent pitched on a baseball diamond at the Winnetka Recreation Center.

Although the Jan. 17 quake has been widely viewed as a catastrophe for the San Fernando Valley’s middle-class, it has delivered an especially fierce blow to the region’s burgeoning immigrant population, many of whom are marginally employed, some without legal documentation.

In a county that has been criticized for having the nation’s least affordable housing, the fate of the displaced promises to be among the most intractable legacies of a disaster that has posed daunting hurdles for almost every aspect of Los Angeles’ civic life. With nearly 6,000 people still in shelters Saturday and more than 21,000 housing units deemed uninhabitable, experts fear that many of the quake’s homeless could wait months or even years before finding a permanent dwelling.

“This is a real nightmare,” said Jim Johnson, director of UCLA’s Center for the Study of Urban Poverty. “Those who are well off will probably get their lives together relatively quickly. But for the renters, the people living on the edge, this is going to be a real long-term and difficult crisis.”

To be sure, some probably will revert to the strategies that kept them off the streets before the quake, doubling or tripling up with relatives, renting converted garages, or, if all else fails, packing their bags and returning to Latin America.

But sociologists and community activists worry that those without such options may get lost in the shuffle of a cumbersome bureaucracy. Before the disaster, they say, Los Angeles was not well-equipped to absorb either its growing immigrant or homeless populations--and the sudden displacement of thousands of low-income quake victims will only exacerbate the problem.

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry G. Cisneros acknowledged the challenge of trying to serve “two populations”--one that has quickly accessed the federal bureaucracy and another that may not have the understanding or inclination to seek government help. To bridge the gap, “reassurance teams” of Spanish-speaking relief workers--including Cardinal Roger M. Mahony--are visiting shelters and parks, urging victims to begin thinking about the transition to more permanent housing.

“We (must) act expeditiously,” Cisneros said, “or there will be a new class of homeless people who become homeless as a result of the earthquake. And, unfortunately, many of those are going to be families if we don’t act strongly.”

For anyone accustomed to thinking of the San Fernando Valley as America’s quintessentially middle-class suburb, one violent shudder revealed just how profoundly the region has changed. The earthquake underscored the tenuous status of thousands of low-income Latino renters in an area still widely stereotyped as a haven of white homeownership.

White residents, who made up 92% of the Valley’s population in 1960, left in droves; in the 1980s, more than 250,000 immigrants took their place. Today, Latinos account for more than one-third of the Valley’s 1.2 million residents. According to the 1990 census, 62% of the Valley’s adult Latinos say they are not U.S. citizens. Of those, half have less than a ninth-grade education and only about 15% earn more than $20,000 annually.

“One of the things that’s become pretty clear is that there’s more than one Valley and it’s not just lily-white and it’s not just single-family homes,” said Jacqueline Leavitt, a professor at UCLA’s Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning. “The ideal of housing as an entitlement really was sort of an anomaly that existed there in the postwar period. For working-class people and people of color, it’s been very hard to make it.”

For five years, Jose Luis Guzman has struggled to make it in the Valley.

He was a gardener in the day-labor pool, waiting every morning at a street corner in hopes that a landscaping crew would pass by offering a few hours of work. His wife, Maria, also wanted to find a job--maybe doing piecework in a factory or selling tamales on the curb--but realized she would spend more on a baby-sitter for their two small children than she could ever hope to earn.

At least they had a nice apartment, a two-bedroom place in Northridge, which they shared with another family, splitting the $670-a-month rent. “I’ve always felt that, in this country, you can achieve anything,” said Guzman, 25, who came from a small town on the outskirts of Mexico City.

But when the earthquake rocked their building, he discovered just how fragile their world was. As he secured a plastic tarp over his leaky canvas tent at the Winnetka Recreation Center last week, Guzman explained that the apartment had been deemed safe by inspectors, but he still could not return.

The family with whom he shared the unit was granted a Section 8 housing voucher by relief officials. Under federal guidelines, they must remain the apartment’s sole occupants, leaving Guzman and his family out in the cold.

“They tell us here that we have to go back to the apartment, but we can’t,” said Guzman, who has seen his gardening work disappear since the quake. “We’re in a critical situation.”

Although he is unsure if he qualifies for federal aid, Guzman has applied for a housing voucher and hopes for the best. He was encouraged when an official delegation, led by Cisneros, visited the camp last week. Guzman cornered the housing secretary and, in Spanish, asked whether his application would be accepted without a valid Social Security number.

“He told me, ‘Don’t worry, this isn’t an immigration problem, this is an emergency,’ ” Guzman said. “He wouldn’t trick us, especially being a Latino himself, would he?”

So far, the Department of Housing and Urban Development has distributed more than 5,000 vouchers, which are valid for 18 months and cover 70% of a family’s rent. The Federal Emergency Management Agency also has mailed more than 8,900 checks, totaling $27.6 million, for temporary rental assistance.

But many of the newly homeless, who also must spend their days searching for work and caring for sick children, still say they are bewildered and discouraged by the long lines, delays and red tape.

Some of the displaced, having lived through devastating quakes in their native lands, concede that they are unwilling to return to debris-strewn apartments, even if inspectors have deemed them sound. Others who might qualify for emergency aid, which is doled out without regard to immigration status, have been reluctant to come forth for fear of deportation--especially now that two Southern California legislators have urged that quake relief be cut off to illegal immigrants.

“This kind of problem just doesn’t go away easily,” said Oscar Rios, a city councilman in Watsonville, where it took nearly two years to find housing for several thousand mostly poor Latinos forced into tents and trailers by the 1989 Loma Prieta quake. “Some people are going to get left out and fall through the cracks.”

In the wake of Hurricane Andrew, tent cities dotted South Florida for more than two months. Officials had to reopen another one six months later after realizing that 5,000 people were still without a home. Even today, nearly 18 months after the disaster, more than 3,000 people live in FEMA trailers in the hard-hit town of Homestead.

Authorities in Los Angeles say they are trying to move swiftly in hopes of avoiding that scenario. Even before the earthquake, the shortage of low-cost housing throughout the city was among the working poor’s most troublesome problems.

Federal guidelines consider a dwelling affordable if it consumes no more than 30% of a household’s income. But a 1992 study by the Washington-based Center for Budget and Policy Priorities found that the typical poor household in Los Angeles spends 77% of its income on rent.

More than 20,000 people are waiting to get into the city’s 21 public housing projects, where the vacancy rate is less than 0.5%. The waiting list for the city’s Section 8 program has been closed for four years and still has 45,000 names on it. Another 85,000 people are waiting for the county’s Section 8 subsidies.

“Just in normal periods, we’re behind the 8-ball when it comes to affordable housing,” said Anne Murphy, programs coordinator for the Southern California Assn. of Non-Profit Housing, which represents about 450 developers of low-income projects. “Now with the quake . . . this is going to be devastating.”

Ironically, there is no dearth of apartments in Los Angeles, although most of them are out of reach of the poor. Since 1990, the stagnant economy has pushed up the citywide vacancy rate from 5.7% to 12%, according to a survey by the Apartment Owners Assn. of Southern California.

Using the most recent city housing estimates, that would mean as many as 26,000 units were vacant in the San Fernando Valley before the earthquake. Citywide, more than 80,000 residential units would have been on the market.

But as vacancy rates have climbed, so have density rates in some parts of the city, suggesting that families are being forced to double up despite the apartment glut. As many as 100,000 families in Los Angeles County are believed to be living in bootlegged apartments or illegally converted garages. It is estimated that another 100,000 Los Angeles families have to share quarters with relatives or friends.

Among them was Noel Mendoza, whose family shared a Canoga Park apartment with his sister’s family--nine of them altogether.

In just five years, he worked his way to a supervisory job at a Los Angeles tortilla factory. Although he did not earn much more than minimum wage, his salary paid the bulk of the $635 monthly rent, with enough left over for a color TV and modern dining room set.

But the quake took all that. For nearly two weeks, the 35-year-old Mendoza and several neighbors have camped under frayed tarps in front of their condemned two-story building, which sustained deep cracks in its walls, further damaged by the rain.

Most of them have applied for emergency aid, but have been told they must wait until the building’s address appears on a government list. No one seems to know when that will happen. In the meantime, Mendoza’s thoughts wander to Nicaragua, which he fled in 1988 with only a few dollars to his name.

“I was a refugee there and now I’m a refugee here,” he said. “We just hope the help comes soon.”

For three days, Guillermo Velasquez and his wife and 3-year-old son also huddled under plastic sheets outside their Northridge apartment, which shifted about half a foot during the quake and hissed with the sound of leaking gas. Fatigued from the cold and anxiety, Velasquez said he has not returned to his full-time truck-driving job for fear of falling asleep at the wheel.

“In truth, I’m a little confused right now,” said the 35-year-old Mexican immigrant. “Nothing seems very secure.”

He eventually was persuaded by relief workers to join the encampment at the Winnetka Recreation Center, where he has filled out several applications for emergency aid. But his patience is wearing thin. His sister-in-law and her two children, with whom Velasquez’s family had shared a $650-a-month apartment, have qualified for a federally subsidized unit in Panorama City. He cannot bring his family to join her because of government rules against sharing such benefits.

“We don’t want to be here, but where else can we go?” he asked on a cold night last week, the steam from his breath illuminated by the baseball diamond’s lights. “It could be years before we get back to the level we were at.”

With daily life such a struggle for so many of the displaced, it is rare that they are able to plan ahead even in good times. Now with a disaster to confront, few can say with certainty where they eventually will end up.

Some, like Maritza Ibey, have thought of returning to their native lands. “I came here to get ahead, to be something, but my dreams have crumbled a little bit,” said the 20-year-old mother of two, who left Mexico three years ago. “Sometimes we suffer more here alone than we did with our families back home.”

Before the quake, she earned a few dollars a day selling steaming ears of corn--lathered in lime juice, mayonnaise and chili powder--on the streets of Echo Park. Along with her husband’s meager earnings as a day laborer, they were able to rent a $375-a-month apartment in a miserable building above a noisy bar.

“As immigrants, without papers, we’re the last ones they’re going to help,” she said as she sat in an Echo Park shelter last weekend, before going to stay with a friend. “For us, every day is like an earthquake.”

Ernesto Contreras also has been wracked by doubts. A baker for a supermarket chain, he and his wife saved for years to buy a Reseda condominium that violently collapsed in the quake. A mattress and refrigerator was all that could be pulled from the rubble.

Now staying with relatives in Sun Valley, Contreras has had time to reflect. His future is here, he said, pointing to his 2-month-old son, Juan Carlos, a U.S.-born citizen. “I have to keep working, go forward,” said Contreras, 29, who left El Salvador eight years ago.

Besides, he said, “if people like me go back, it will make it worse here. We are the ones who are doing all the work.”