SPECIAL REPORT * As officials weigh demolition plans to make way for proposed sports arena’s parking lots, low-income residents wonder if it would be a . . . : Blessing or Curse to Be Evicted?

Diego and Juana Gudino have never been to a Lakers game, they say, because the tickets are too expensive. Instead, the couple and their children watch basketball on television in their cramped but neat three-room apartment on West Olympic Boulevard in downtown Los Angeles.

Soon, however, the Lakers and hockey-playing Kings may be coming very close to where the Gudinos have lived for 18 years. So close that their apartment and 187 others are targeted for demolition to make way for parking lots serving a $240-million sports arena that is proposed for construction a block away.

The arena plans still face final review by the Los Angeles City Council in coming weeks. But the strong possibility of having to move by winter has already deeply affected about 250 residents, mainly low-income Latino immigrants and their youngsters, in the scruffy five-block district bordered by the Harbor Freeway, Figueroa Street, 11th Street and Olympic Boulevard.

“I think it is good for the Lakers, but bad for us,” said Diego Gudino, a 54-year-old air-conditioner installer. “They are going to move us from here and we don’t know where they are going to relocate us.”

Yet he and others are emotionally tugged. They are sad at the prospect of saying goodbye to neighbors, and some are worried about keeping within walking distance of jobs in downtown sewing lofts and warehouses. Many are also warily anticipating government relocation money that they hope will prove a once-in-a-lifetime ticket to a better future.

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Meanwhile, advocates for the residents contend that housing conditions in the area are deteriorating because landlords are reluctant to repair buildings that are probably doomed.

“I guess everybody who has been working with the tenants wants the arena project to happen because that will mean benefits, in the sense that they will escape from their nightmare, which is conditions now,” said Enrique Velasquez, an organizer of United Tenants, a nonprofit agency helping the residents. “But the question is: Will these tenants have access to full benefits?”

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On the other hand, property owners complain that one arm of city government is appraising their buildings for buyout and demolition in the fall, while another city agency is hassling them to make expensive and unnecessary repairs or face sharp reductions in rent receipts.

Cut off by the Harbor Freeway on one side and the glistening skyscrapers of Figueroa Street and the Convention Center on others, the neighborhood’s housing is weirdly isolated. Ramshackle rooming houses built in 1907 and three-story walk-ups from the 1920s share turf with warehouses, bodegas, wholesale showrooms and littered lots. Youngsters play soccer on the asphalt and grandmothers sit on plastic lawn chairs in the shade of sidewalk ficus trees.

A sense of uncertainty permeates the neighborhood as the arena project advances. Residents swap information from community meetings the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency has sponsored in recent months.

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The Gudinos say they hope to obtain a lump sum of about $10,000 for a down payment on a house farther west, maybe near Crenshaw Boulevard. Such home-purchase aid may be possible instead of rent subsidies, according to officials of the CRA.

But in most cases, these families of garment workers and lunch counter cooks earn so little that they would not be approved for mortgages. (According to a CRA survey, the average household income is below $15,000 a year. In contrast, Laker center Shaquille O’Neal’s $14.8-million salary in 1997-98 is at least six times higher than the total combined annual income of all the surveyed residents.)

Most tenants would receive rent subsidies for four years that would ensure that they pay no more than 25% of their income on rent. CRA officials estimate that aid would range from $5,700 to $30,000 per household over the period. In addition, moving expenses would be paid and counseling made available to help find new homes.

The subsidies can be applied only to apartments and houses that, unlike many of the current residences, meet strict government standards for habitability and size. Although welcomed by most families, the rule could also cause some conflicts. One extended clan of 11 people now occupies a five-room apartment on West 10th Place and it won’t be easy to break them up or find a suitable space.

Some households may be moved directly into a new CRA-backed, 79-unit apartment development at 9th Street and Grand Avenue downtown that is expected to be completed in January 1998, according to David Riccitiello, the CRA’s project manager for the arena plan. Other displaced residents will be moved elsewhere and then will have priority to move later into other government-subsidized housing complexes.

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A $70-million city bond issue is supposed to pay for relocating tenants, acquiring the neighborhood properties and razing all the buildings in the area. Garages and hotels may be built later on. Under a tentative agreement with the Kings owners who are also the arena developers, ticket surcharges and other revenues would help pay off the bonds.

As part of the replacement housing plan, the CRA is asking the City Council to authorize $4.49 million in additional spending for two more proposed apartment houses, one downtown and the other near MacArthur Park, within four years. The financing is being debated. Advocates for affordable housing worry that the already tight market will shrink further during the waiting.

Esperanza Ramirez, a 45-year-old cook on a lunch truck, hopes to use her relocation subsidy to rent an apartment in a nicer neighborhood. For the last 16 years, she has lived in a two-bedroom apartment on a graffiti-scarred alley off West 10 Place. The wood-frame building is partly wrapped in exposed chicken wire, evidence of what she said was an abandoned repair job. The $494-a-month apartment, she complains, has roaches, mice, gas leaks, and plumbing and heating problems.

“I’d like to move to an area with better conditions than here, like Glendale for example. It looks peaceful there,” she said.

The property owner, whose address is listed in the Mandeville Canyon area of Brentwood, could not be reached for comment.

The Gudinos had thought about moving because of conditions in the three-story apartment building where they have raised four children, two of whom still live at home. Now they are afraid to lose relocation benefits if they leave their $463-a-month apartment before the expected start of the formal relocation process in the fall.

“We are not happy to stay, but we might as well wait and get the benefits. So we are trying to survive,” said daughter Otilia Gudino, 23, who is attending Los Angeles Trade-Tech College and working as a medical aide.

The 17-unit building at 924 W. Olympic, and a 37-unit building nearby owned by an affiliated partnership, were cited in December for numerous health and safety violations, such as holes in walls, broken windows, faulty heating and inadequate plumbing. After a recent hearing, the city Housing Department last week ordered that rents be reduced 80% until repairs are made.

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On the same day as the hearing, appraisers for the CRA were looking at the buildings to determine a purchase price. “I’m caught in the middle,” said Howard Lee, a spokesman for the partnerships that have owned the two buildings since 1994 and control others in the area.

About half of the units in the two Olympic buildings are vacant, and Lee said he is sealing them off to help meet some of the safety requirements. Lee, who contends that tenants caused much of the damage, said he is making repairs that are vital for safety in occupied units. But many of the city-ordered renovations are not necessary if the buildings, more than 80 years old, are going to be demolished in a few months, he adds. For example, he asks, why should a water-stained wall be replastered after a leak is fixed.

“You’ve got to make a distinction. Do you want to spend $50,000 to bring such a property fully to code and then tear everything down?” asked Lee. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

City Housing Department official Samuel Luna disagreed, stressing that the arena plan has had no influence--and should have no influence--on the city’s treatment of housing violations. “We have to remember there are tenants living in these buildings,” Luna said in a telephone interview.

The CRA, meanwhile, seems determined to avoid the type of relocation battles that accompanied such projects as construction of Dodger Stadium and the first phase of the Convention Center. “We are going beyond our legal requirements,” said Riccitiello.

Rod Field, a staff attorney for the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, has helped some of the residents and said he believes the CRA will keep most of the promises. “I’m not expecting major conflicts over principles or procedures,” he said, although he added that some families may have special problems on issues like pets and apartment size.

For the tenants’ sake, Field says, he supports the arena plan.

“They feel they are being displaced for a sports arena they will probably never be in in their lives. But from a paternalistic point of view, they are getting a better place to live than they would otherwise,” he said.

Anne Crawford, a tenant advocate from the St. Francis Center, a downtown social service agency, is worried that take-home pay for the relocated people will shrink because they will have to buy bus passes or cars instead of walking to work. And although the CRA promises to seek permanently affordable housing, Crawford wonders what will happen in four years. “If you live in this great new house and can’t afford to make the payments when the CRA money dries up, then what do you do?”

Around the corner on West 10th Place, an awful stench rises through the bare plywood floor of the porch. Tenants in the four-unit building think it comes from a festering pool of waste water, or worse. Still, Olympia Alas, a cheerful woman who offers visitors cold cans of soda, has regrets about leaving the four-room apartment where she and her family raised four sons over the last 14 years.

“I like it here. I’m used to it. I have everything close by,” she said, gesturing from the porch to the surrounding streets. “We don’t have a car and I can walk to the laundry and the store.”

Her husband, Miguel, who operates a wood saw in a Vernon picture frame factory, is less nostalgic about the $589-a-month apartment. He supports the arena because of the jobs he expects it will generate and the housing benefits it will bring.

Alas has never been to see the Lakers because it is difficult without a car to get to the Forum in Inglewood where the Lakers now play. So he is looking forward to the day when he and his sons can attend a game in downtown Los Angeles. “I think it will be something great,” he said of the arena, “and very beautiful.”