Quake Victims Anxious to Start Over Are Facing a Host of Problems : Fillmore: Lack of income and affordable rentals make it difficult to find new homes. But often, the size of many families is the biggest obstacle, officials say.

Nearly a month after an earthquake crumpled their dwellings, about 65 Fillmore residents still make their homes on cots at a Red Cross shelter--rejected by landlords who shun large families or victims of their own determination to stay near their jobs and in a community they love.

Many of the low-income families that cluster in groups at a school gymnasium say there are no affordable rentals left in Fillmore.

They search for housing when not working in the lemon groves that ring Fillmore, and listen for word that government-funded trailers have arrived.

But many families--some with five, six or seven children--still see no immediate way out of the clean, new Fillmore Middle School gymnasium. They appreciate the accommodations but are eager to escape.

“We have no privacy,” Deana Gonzales, 29, said as her three small children played nearby. Her 10-month old, Nykidemuz, learned to walk at the shelter.

“But we want to stay here in Fillmore,” she said. “I grew up here. It’s such a nice little community.”

The Gonzales family had expected to be out of Ventura County’s only remaining earthquake shelter by mid-afternoon. But their hopes were dashed when they discovered that a Fillmore landlord agreed to rent them a condo that city officials say is still unsafe.

A shelter dweller for 28 days, Jess Gonzales, 29, cried out in frustration: “It’s a big deal. I have everything ready to go, and I find out the owner had us go through all this under a yellow tag.”

Housing authorities said Monday that families still in the Fillmore shelter face a number of handicaps not easily overcome.

Some workers who live at the shelter lost their jobs because of damage to packinghouses in Fillmore and Piru, said David Roddick, housing director of the Area Housing Authority of Ventura County.

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That stops some landlords because, even with federal housing subsidies, the families must pay 30% of their income as rent.

“Owners still want to run background checks,” he said.

Other workers walk to their jobs or ride in car pools from their old neighborhoods, Roddick said. So a move to Santa Paula, where low-cost housing is available, is nearly impossible for a worker without a car.

Often, the biggest obstacle is the sheer size of the displaced family, said Roddick and workers at the Fillmore shelter.

“A lot of these are large families, and the owners are reluctant. They fear the place won’t be kept nice,” said Lupe Denette, a county mental health worker who counsels at the shelter.

“One lady came in,” Denette added. “She had a four-bedroom house she wanted to rent. But when she found out that the families had six or seven children, she said she would be back at 3. We never heard from her again.”

Some families are handicapped too because they have never rented a dwelling themselves, living instead with members of their extended family, Roddick said. Several shelter dwellers who lived at the now-demolished Fillmore Hotel were in that situation, workers said.

Two federal housing counselors have begun helping some of the families by “taking them by the hand and helping them hunt for apartments,” Roddick said.

Usually, federal workers cannot recommend a specific landlord to prospective tenants, but that rule has been waived temporarily for the federal counselors.

Then there is the lure of Fillmore itself. A number of the families at the shelter Monday said they wanted or needed to stay in town.

“I was born and raised here, and I want to bring my kids up here,” said Linda Acosta, a 40-year-old mother of four. She knew other families at the shelter even before the quake. “So we’re all a big extended family.”

But staying in town seems increasingly problematic, she said. “What is left is substandard housing,” she said. “It won’t pass inspection.”

For the displaced, one potential problem never developed.

The exclusion of illegal immigrants from $8.6-billion in federal quake benefits has not been an issue here, Roddick said, because that exclusion is handled the same way as the prohibition of gays in the military.

“Our direction from HUD is essentially the same as the order about gays in the military--don’t ask,” he said. “Housing authority people do not have the training to make sure a green card is good. But if it is known to us, we will not issue them a certificate.”

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In any case, many of the shelter residents said they had lived in the United States for many years or decades, and many knew each other long before the earthquake threw them together Jan. 17.

Now they live as a mini-community, their goods stacked in cardboard boxes and plastic bags along the gym walls, and their conduct so disciplined that they could hardly seem more compatible, said shelter manager Elmer Fulesday, a Red Cross worker from Pennsylvania.

“They’re all from the same neighborhood and all know one another,” he said. “That’s the nice thing about this shelter.”

The shelter is as neat as the homes the dwellers left behind, some said. Each of the “shelter moms” keeps her family’s area tidy, and all pitch in to clean common areas and watch out for the children’s safety, Acosta said.

“Everybody volunteers,” she said. “We have our juniors who love wearing their Junior Volunteer Red Cross stickers. They even clean up the bathrooms. It just works out.”

Times photographer Carlos Chavez contributed to this report.