Santa Ana Takes New Overcrowding Tack : Housing: Officials back bill that would let cities set tougher occupancy limits on grounds that crowding raises fire danger.
In Santa Ana’s years-long battle to limit the number of people who can cram into apartments and houses, a city overcrowding ordinance was deemed illegal by the courts, chided as a recipe for displacement by state housing officials and blasted as racist by Latino community activists.
But a new approach stressing increased fire danger as the key evil of overcrowding is raising proponents’ hopes that a bill going before the state Senate Local Government Committee on Wednesday may be the city’s most promising chance to wrest control of the issue from state hands.
The bill, carried by Sen. Marian Bergeson (R-Newport Beach), would allow cities to set their own standards for housing occupancy, and Santa Ana officials are lobbying state lawmakers and scrambling for endorsements in a last-ditch frenzy to win support before the bill meets its first test in Sacramento next week.
“As we have found out that fire is an equal opportunity killer, it has become a more important issue,” said City Councilman Robert L. Richardson, a main force behind the bill. “In our book, we have irrefutable evidence that there is a problem with the occupancy standard that the state makes us all salute. They either have to come to terms with leaving it be and killing people, or they can do something about it.”
After a major Santa Ana concession that grandfathers current residents and allows them to stay in their homes, the League of California Cities last year got behind the bill. Fire chiefs, including those in Oakland, Riverside and Lynwood, where two small children recently died in a garage fire, also support the measure, and three state fire associations have formally endorsed it.
City officials in other Orange County cities, including Anaheim, San Clemente, Garden Grove and Dana Point, have offered support for the legislation, along with the Apartment Assn. of Orange County.
If it becomes law, Santa Ana could once again enact an ordinance that was deemed illegal by a state appellate court in 1992 for contradicting state guidelines. Under that ordinance, each unit with two occupants must have at least 150 square feet of living space, excluding kitchens, bathrooms and hallways, and another 100 square feet for each additional resident. That works out to four or five people in an average one-bedroom apartment, compared to the current, more lenient state standard of 10.
But critics say that the bill will not alleviate Santa Ana’s crowding problems. What it will do, they say, is criminalize poor people and prompt landlords to discriminate against large families, many of whom are Latino in Santa Ana.
They complain that the measure also could give slumlords an excuse to quietly condone overcrowding, and then evict tenants when they request repairs.
Low-income residents say the bill’s grandfather clause offers them little solace. They fear that when it does come time for them to move, they will be frozen out of Santa Ana’s already steep rental market.
“If there were fewer of us, we wouldn’t be able to make the rent,” said Guadalupe Flores, 25, who shares a two-bedroom apartment with her husband, their three small children and three other adults in a West Myrtle Street complex pegged by the city as overcrowded.
Upstairs, Manuel and Alicia Esquivel pondered their own situation.
Their two-bedroom apartment costs the same as the Flores’--$600 a month plus about $100 in utilities. Manuel Esquivel makes $5.25 an hour as a landscaper, bringing home about $740 a month for himself, Alicia and their four small children. The reality has forced them to rent out one room to a young woman, but she recently told them she would be leaving at the end of the month.
“I don’t want to live with strangers, or with another family, but with my salary, we can barely make it,” said Manuel Esquivel, 33.
Alicia Esquivel, 26, said she fears she would have trouble finding a cheaper apartment if the city begins restricting occupancy. She experienced a similar problem after giving birth to her fourth child, Isabel, now 2.
“The landlord said they wanted no more than two or three children. Well, what could we do? We have four!” she said as the children scrambled in and out of a cardboard clubhouse in the living room.
Santa Ana officials have long argued that overcrowding strains the city’s beleaguered school system, overloads the sewers and tests police abilities to serve the community. It also gives neighborhoods a blighted appearance and wears down property, amplifying other health and safety code violations, they say.
But after fire killed three people last January in a South Alder Street home believed to be overcrowded and melted copper wiring in the kitchen--which happens only when temperatures reach 2,000 degrees--Santa Ana Firefighter Jim Albers took up the issue with personal fervor. He has spent his own money to test a theory that apartments crammed with belongings burn faster and hotter, jeopardizing lives.
The data from two test burns set up by Albers are now being analyzed by computer, but initial results--and a dramatic video of the first test--indicate that overcrowded rooms did ignite more quickly and heat up much faster than rooms filled with “normal fire load.”
“It’s real obvious to all firefighters that when these fires happen, they’re going to be much more severe,” said Albers, a 24-year veteran of the department.
Thirteen Santa Ana fire deaths between December, 1991, and January, 1993, were attributed by officials to overcrowded conditions. When several families are living under the same roof, they often have no idea who is in the room next door, or what was left to burn on the communal kitchen stove--other factors that lead to confusion and increase the risk of fire, Fire Chief Allen (Bud) Carter said.
The preliminary results from Albers’ tests have helped garner statewide support for the Bergeson bill.
Last Wednesday, Santa Ana city officials traveled to Sacramento to persuade as many legislators as possible to climb on board, securing a promise from Sen. Robert B. Presley (D-Riverside) to sign on as co-sponsor and getting support from Sen. Ruben S. Ayala (D-Rancho Cucamonga) they said.
Meanwhile, Santa Ana Councilman Miguel A. Pulido Jr. has been tracking down members of the Hispanic Caucus to sell them on the bill and head off expected criticism that overcrowding ordinances will come down particularly hard on low-income Latinos, who often live with extended families.
“I don’t see it as a racist issue. Fire does not discriminate. If you’re overcrowded and you’re in a fire, it’ll kill everyone,” said Pulido, also a longtime proponent of regulating overcrowding.
Neighborhood associations throughout Santa Ana have been fighting for occupancy control for years, saying that large families and groups of men who share apartments near them are reducing property values, running down the housing and putting lives in danger by subjecting tenants to fire risks.
Neighborhood groups from Thornton Park, Valley High, Northeast, Floral Park and more than half a dozen other areas have taken up the issue in recent months in a letter-writing campaign designed to urge local legislators to sign on to the bill.
“My issue is property value starts going down when people come in to the neighborhood to buy, and they see people constantly leaning out of their balconies, hanging out on the streets, because there’s just not enough room,” said resident Jim Kendrick, who is active in the French Court Neighborhood Assn. There are about 1,100 apartments in the neighborhood.
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The bill may just prompt other, more affluent Orange County cities to build their fair share of low-income housing, Kendrick added.
“They don’t want the low-income people. They want their gardeners. They want their baby-sitters, but there’s no place affordable for them to live, so they end up taking over neighborhoods. The whole kitchen staff from one restaurant may live together,” Kendrick said.
Community housing activists counter, however, that the bill is not the answer to Santa Ana’s overcrowding problems.
“We’re defining a new class of illegal people, based on whether they’re working in a $4.35 an hour job,” said housing rights attorney Richard Spix, who successfully challenged the city’s initial ordinance. “They’re going to stay in the one-bedroom place because they have a blue-collar job.
“The state has determined that 50 square feet per person meets health standards. When we’re talking about housing people, we’re talking about meeting their minimum health requirements,” Spix said. “We’re not talking about what would be ideal in terms of middle-class living arrangements. The alternative is no housing whatsoever for many of these people.”
And, activists say, unscrupulous landlords will take advantage of tenants, as many did when the city implemented its ordinance.
“In the blue-collar rental market, where we anticipate finding the most overcrowding, you’re going to see landlords winking and nodding, that they don’t really care how many babies their tenants have until the time when their tenants might ask for some repairs,” he said. “They’re going to be living with deplorable conditions because they’ll be afraid of being kicked out.”
Crowd Survey, City-by-City
Santa Ana is the only city in Orange County estimated to have an average of more than four people living in each occupied dwelling unit. Of the 31 cities, 16 have rates equal to or higher than the countywide total of 3.0. Beach communities have the lowest totals. How the cities compare:
Occupied Per unit City Population* units population Anaheim 281,157 90,312 3.1 Brea 33,892 12,384 2.7 Buena Park 71,282 22,513 3.2 Costa Mesa 98,880 37,987 2.6 Cypress 44,839 14,785 3.0 Dana Point 33,607 13,209 2.5 Fountain Valley 53,949 17,416 3.1 Fullerton 117,423 41,572 2.8 Garden Grove 147,640 45,010 3.3 Huntington Beach 186,022 69,620 2.7 Irvine 115,066 41,602 2.8 Laguna Beach 24,086 11,326 2.1 Laguna Hills 24,384 8,012 3.0 Laguna Niguel 52,532 19,810 2.7 La Habra 52,875 18,252 2.9 Lake Forest 57,773 19,817 2.9 La Palma 15,633 4,822 3.2 Los Alamitos 11,797 4,242 2.8 Mission Viejo 83,631 28,209 3.0 Newport Beach 68,063 31,358 2.2 Orange 112,343 37,687 3.0 Placentia 42,799 13,612 3.1 San Clemente 44,075 17,379 2.5 San Juan Capistrano 27,744 9,276 3.0 Santa Ana 300,874 71,879 4.2 Seal Beach 25,763 13,376 2.0 Stanton 31,533 10,378 3.0 Tustin 55,508 20,155 2.8 Villa Park 6,400 1,930 3.3 Westminster 80,707 25,173 3.2 Yorba Linda 56,476 17,740 3.2 Unincorporated 160,664 62,620 2.6 County total 2,519,417 853,463 3.0
* Population not living in group quarters
Source: California Department of Finance
