COLUMN ONE : Is It Urban Renewal or Removal? : Mexican immigrants claim Addison, Ill., is trying to bulldoze them out. Officials say they are razing their housing to eliminate blight. Such disputes are rising as more Latinos move into small-town America.

The Germans came, the Greeks came, the Italians came, the Poles came.

Generations of immigrants followed the lure of steady jobs to this factory town of 32,000 people on Salt Creek. Wages from the assembly line paid the rent at first and, later, the mortgage on the ranchers, split-levels and saltboxes near the industrial parks.

For 15 years now, it has been the Mexicans’ turn to make their way here, passing word to friends and family back home that there are plastic bags and compact-disc boxes to be made, punch presses to operate, cartons to pack.

But with Latino numbers growing rapidly here, they are beginning to feel distinctly unwelcome. Addison has been accused in a class-action suit and by the U.S. Justice Department of trying to bulldoze its Latinos out of town.

Citing urban blight, the village government plans to demolish small apartment complexes--indeed it has started the job--in the two neighborhoods, about 60 acres each, where poor newcomers tend to land first. These happen to be the two most heavily Latino sections, encompassing nearly 40% of the Latinos in town.

That decision has enmeshed Addison in an uproar touching some of the nation’s most exposed nerves: race, immigration, property values and the rights of local government.

“This is Mexican removal, not urban renewal,” says Matthew Piers, a lawyer representing the residents in the private lawsuit.

Village President Larry Hartwig, who denies ethnic bias, sees the defining issue differently. The Clinton Administration, he says, is fighting, through the courts, for “a housing affirmative action program to be imposed on local government throughout the country.” Adds Village Manager Joseph E. Block Jr.: “There are no federal funds involved. The federal government does not have a role in this redevelopment.”

The case is the most dramatic of four recently brought by U.S. authorities against municipalities that allegedly used the tools of government to in effect discriminateagainst Latinos.

“There’s no one region where this is happening,” says Paul Hancock, chief of the housing section of the Justice Department’s civil rights division. “What the cases we filed have in common is a dramatic increase in the number of Latinos moving to town.”

Wildwood, N.J., a beach resort, agreed last September to pay $75,000 in damages and change its stringent limits on the number of occupants in a home, after the Justice Department sued the city for violating the Fair Housing Act. The standard was enforced mostly against year-round rental units.

In Cicero, Ill., real estate agents said their lucrative business selling homes to Latinos slowed to a standstill after the town passed a similar ordinance that did not affect the predominantly Anglo population that had bought houses in the past. The Justice Department sued.

And Hatch, N.M., has been charged in federal court with forcing out mobile homes from an area where many Latino farm workers live. The occupants had little choice, the suit claims, but to move outside city limits to the squalid settlements known as colonias.

As the Latino presence continues to grow and disperse from historic enclaves in the Southwest and large cities into suburbs and small towns across America, Hancock says he suspects there will be more such indicators of hostile reaction along the new frontiers. The department’s past suits have concentrated on civil rights violations against blacks, but “we are definitely seeing some problems peculiar to Latinos in the United States,” he says.

A Distinct Pattern

Private fair-housing groups are noticing the same pattern. The Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities, a Chicago-based group that is involved in the Addison class-action suit, noticed an increase in complaints by Latinos in the past five years, says its general counsel, Edward Voci. About 45% of those come from the suburbs, where Latinos are beginning to appear in clusters.

Addison should not be counted among the resisters, insists John Berley, the town’s assistant director of community development. “There’s no way we’re discriminating,” he says. Addison’s redevelopment districts are “not Cabrini-Green”--a notorious public housing project in Chicago, 20 miles to the east--”but we don’t want to let it get that way before we do anything about it.”

Last year, the Addison Board of Trustees placed the sturdy brick-and-stone buildings of Green Oaks Court and Michael Lane in two redevelopment districts, which are financed by a quarter-cent villagewide sales tax.

Eight buildings so far have come down. Three more were purchased by the village, which evicted the occupants. The vacant structures stand boarded up, awaiting the outcome of the lawsuits.

Village officials describe both areas as blighted. The buildings, about 30 years old, are structurally sound, Berley admits, but suffer from “deferred maintenance.”

He cites large numbers of violations uncovered in annual inspections. They range from the unsafe and unsanitary to the merely untidy: from broken steps and roaches to a spaghetti-stained carpet. The village has produced photos showing discarded sofas and shopping carts and a tiled tub in need of caulking.

Berley points out a shot of a shirtless man slouching, cigarette in upturned hand. He is hemmed in by furniture and bric-a-brac. “This is my personal favorite,” Berley says. “This man actually stopped us so he could get in the picture.” The violation: fire hazard.

“The inspector told me I shouldn’t own a mop; I should get down on my hands and knees and scrub,” recalls Rita Gonzales, a resident of Michael Lane who is a plaintiff in the class-action suit and executive director of Hispanics United, a local group formed in 1992.

Yes, there is litter, Gonzales concedes. Yes, there are young men throwing gang signs on a corner of Michael Lane. Yes, there are parents who hurry their children to McDonald’s or the park when the inspectors show up, because there are more people living in their apartment than is legal.

“But is that a reason to destroy all these homes and turn everybody out?” Gonzalez asks, her voice faltering. “They should be doing their job, enforcing their laws, and we should be working together to educate people. You’re tearing apart what we have already made here.”

What they have knit, she says, is a community. When one family makes tamales, a plateful is sent next door. The kids sleep over at each other’s houses. The parents give each other rides to work.

Latino Influx

In 1980, 5.8% of Addison’s population was Latino. In 1990, the number was up to 13.4%. The last two years have seen an even greater rush, with many arriving here from Guanajuato or Michoacan or Mexico state. Gonzales, who has been canvassing for a voter registration drive, says the majority of the residents are here legally; about 10% to 15%, she estimates, are not.

Like the other immigrants before them, the Latinos are intent on scrimping to buy a home--at first, maybe one of the four-plexes on Green Oaks Court, then a single-family home elsewhere in Addison, and later, if they really do well, one of the more upscale Chicago exurbs nearby.

“I think they think if they eliminate these two areas, they eliminate the ports of entry,” she says, “and maybe they can stop all these Mexicans from moving in here.”

She sighs, forgetting to sip at a glass of cold water flavored with mashed blueberries handed to her by a friend.

“I know it sounds almost crazy,” she says. “They were planning this just to get rid of us? But why else are they going ahead with this?”

The inhabitants of Green Oaks Court and Michael Lane certainly seem puzzled. On a sultry summer day, the shouts of boys racing and girls riding bikes on the sidewalk compete for attention with the cicadas’ whine.

As the sunlight slants, workers get home and cluster in side yards by barbecue grills. Some of the narrow lawns are salted with weeds but more are fronted by a row of pansies or marigolds.

“ Esta bien ,” says Raul Hernandez, 42, who came from Mexico less than a year ago to live with friends and get a job. He lounges against an outside railing; the neatly kept living room, with an expanse of brown carpet, is visible through the open front door. “This,” he says in Spanish, “is a tranquil street.”

“I don’t have problems here,” says Maria Torres, a 30-year-old from Jalisco, also speaking in Spanish. “The owners watch the buildings. The owners are proud of their buildings.” She, her husband and mother have lived in their two-bedroom, $500-a-month apartment for six years.

“I don’t like people to say that it’s bad here because it’s not,” says Leopoldo Alcaraz, who saved for 10 years to buy his four-flat. “They have a bad image of Latinos. But I live to work and I don’t bother anybody. I pay my taxes.”

North of Michael Lane, where ranch houses of brick and glass line more streets named after the developer’s family, the view of the targeted areas is different.

Along Rozanne Drive and Janice Lane and Marilyn Trail, the talk is of the drive-by shooting of a woman eating an ice cream cone in Green Oaks Court last summer, of public beer drinking and public urination. The residents tell tales of families of five crowded into studio apartments, of a parking shortage so acute that some Michael Lane people have asked nearby homeowners about renting space in their driveways.

The longtime residents say they have complained about the apartments for many years, well before the arrival of Latinos. They never wanted them built in the first place, they say. They fought the rezoning that allowed them.

“This is nothing new. All immigrants have done this,” says a woman of Polish descent who requested anonymity. “But let’s face it. Anglos didn’t have so many people living together. I can’t understand why the [federal] government tries to keep people from keeping their towns nice.”

During a public hearing on the redevelopment last September, another woman, who gave her name as Terry Fitzgerald, told the board of trustees: “I’d like my property to go up in value. I’d like to send my kids out at night and not worry. . . . I would like to walk down the street and hear English.”

The old-timers lower their voices as they talk of the Latinos making the jump into their neighborhood. They’re fine people, they say, but they add that some of the Anglos are nervous. Though most of the long-term residents put thousands of dollars into repairing their homes after a 1986 flood, some now talk of leaving.

“They say, ‘It’s time,’ ” one woman says. “Or they say they need a bigger house. Their kids are grown, but they need a bigger house.”

Like her Anglo neighbors, Juana Morales, 20, says trouble hatches in Michael Lane. She should know. She lived there for 10 years until her father purchased a house a few months ago on Rozanne Drive.

But she also believes a double standard tends to apply. “You see two Latinos making noise, the police come and handcuff them,” she says. “The other day, an Anglo here started yelling and screaming bad words. We called the cops. They didn’t handcuff him.”

The drive-by shooting? Just down the street, an Anglo man shot and killed his wife. The overcrowding? In another part of town, in an apartment complex where blond children play, the manager confides: “If you keep your place nice, the inspectors don’t bother about how many people live there. They’re not coldhearted.”

John Berley says the major problem in both Green Oaks and Michael Lane is that the residents who fought the original zoning were right. “We fully admit that the village is at fault. We let too many buildings go in,” he says. “Times change. Now we know.”

But Piers, the plaintiffs’ attorney, counters that several predominantly Anglo projects in town have more buildings per acre than the two Latino areas.

No Plans for Sites

In the end, the village officials say, what happens to Green Oaks Court and Michael Lane doesn’t matter. The Latinos can simply move elsewhere in town. Addison has nearly 4,000 apartments that rent for $600 or less each month, the standard for affordable housing in DuPage County.

The vacancy rate is under 3%, though. And while turnover is high, about 18% a year, local fair-housing officials say they question the reception that landlords would offer the displaced.

A woman trying to move out of Michael Lane told a private fair-housing center that she was rebuffed when asking about an advertised unit elsewhere in town. In February, she filed a complaint with the Department of Housing and Urban Development, writing in her statement that the owner, after learning her address, explained on the phone that “the people who live on my street were bad people and that the city was condemning the buildings because the tenants were bad. He said he didn’t want to rent to anyone from Michael Lane.”

Block says he would be willing to help families who ask for help in finding apartments. The village, however, has not set any money aside for relocation aid. There is no plan for delaying demolition until tenants have relocated.

Indeed, there is no real plan for what would go on the land once it’s emptied. Berley says the village wants a park in the center of Green Oaks Court, but is not sure whether the periphery and Michael Lane should be filled with senior-citizen housing or condominiums or whatever. It’s up to developers, he says, to propose a project.

None of this sounds good to Becky Sherblom, community development programs officer for the National Assn. of Housing and Redevelopment Officials, which is based in Washington. “It’s unconscionable mowing down apartments that are perfectly habitable,” she says. “There aren’t enough affordable units out there now. It’s absurd to do that when you have people living in an area.”

Urban renewal has been controversial for 30 years. Loud, long protests that poor people are being pushed out often accompany the land-clearing process for new stadiums, factories and offices.

In this case, however, Sherblom says, “there are smaller, more moderate steps they can take. For less money than they’re spending, they could probably improve the buildings they have, put in trees and still have money left over for a summer juvenile program.”

For their part, attorneys for the plaintiffs say they are not opposed to improving Green Oaks Court and Michael Lane. They would even accept some demolition to make way for green space and parking. But, they add, the beneficiaries should be the people who live there now. If some have to leave, they should be helped to stay in Addison.

Meanwhile, tension builds, despite the red banners on Addison Road that proclaim this the “Village of Friendship.”

For the first time, gang graffiti spilled past Michael Lane this summer, appearing on the garage of an Anglo woman who favors redevelopment. Four days after the spray paint was scoured off, the taggers struck again.

Across town, an Anglo woman in an Anglo apartment building says she and her friends have been talking about how to keep immigrants out. “My Italian ancestors had to conform,” she says indignantly. “Why can’t they?”

Times researcher John Beckham contributed to this story.