Hoping to Go First Class

A deteriorating neighborhood of cheap motels and dilapidated apartment houses on Harbor Boulevard will be transformed into a bustling tourist destination if city officials have a say.

With visions of luxury hotels and vacationing families, officials say that ridding the area of small, overcrowded apartments and $30-a-night motel rooms will bring both safety and revenue to Garden Grove.

The troubled neighborhood, where transients can easily find a weekly flop, and where police are commonly called to break up disturbances, will be a problem of the past, they say.

Known as the Yucca/Sage district, city officials identified it three years ago as a blighted area. A city Neighborhood Impact Team was dispatched there to help identify, then solve, the area’s social and economic problems.

The team, which included a two-officer community policing squad, concluded that inefficient and even absent apartment managers helped contribute to the neighborhood’s overcrowding and crime. Additionally, at least one of the neighborhood’s three Harbor Boulevard motels was frequented by transients, drug dealers and prostitutes.

One proposed solution: a tourist hotel district that could raise about $2 million in bed taxes annually for the city’s $48-million annual budget.

A planned expansion of Disneyland, just a stone’s throw from the neighborhood, is helping the planning for the multimillion-dollar redevelopment. Major hotel chains have expressed interest in building two 175-room hotels and one 350-room complex in place of the apartments and motels.

To reach that end, the city entered into a deal with apartment house owners and developers earlier this summer and helped buy a dozen complexes with about $500,000 in federal funds. The city turned the complexes over to a management team with experience in rehabilitating low-income areas. Once developers are lined up for rehabilitation, the apartments will be sold.

The city’s Redevelopment Agency also is prepared to buy the three motels in the neighborhood, City Manager George Tindall said. More than $10 million has been earmarked for the project, and property appraisals are expected within the next few weeks.

With the agreements in the works, city officials say the 96 Sage Street apartment units, along with the adjacent Pitcairn Motor Hotel, Angel’s Inn and the Cavalier Inn and Suites on Harbor Boulevard, may soon face the wrecking ball.

Tindall said the Yucca/Sage plan is a classic case of redevelopment.

“We’ve been marketing this area for four or five years,” he said. “We’ve had to work hard to get people interested in our community and in this location.”

Councilman Mark Leyes, chairman of the city’s Redevelopment Agency, said the project “will help the city’s image a great deal. It’s not simply the image. Not only is that a distressed area that’s in need of some redevelopment, but it’s also a drain on city services. In fact, we have two police officers assigned full time to that area. Assuming we are successful, that will free up those resources.”

“On top of all that is the prospect of more revenue for the city’s general fund,” which, Leyes said, means “a higher level of service for everyone in the community.”

Officials say agreements with hotel developers could be reached by the end of the month. When formal agreements are reached, officials will begin relocating residents, who have been warned they face eviction, according to Chuck Fry, the property manager working with the city.

This won’t be the first time the city has relocated residents for planned redevelopment.

The city recently bought the nearby Oasis Mobile Home Park and moved more than 100 of its elderly residents to make way for the proposed E-Street entertainment and retail project.

Tindall said the city has available low-income housing citywide for the Yucca/Sage residents. Officials are not yet sure how many residents from the 96 units will require relocation.

Motel managers haven’t objected to the redevelopment plans. “If the city were to buy us out, it would be a nice situation for them,” said Pat Sharples, manager of the 87-room Pitcarin motel.

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NEIGHBORHOODS

Yucca / Sage

Bounded by: Harbor Boulevard on the east and Sage Street on the west, north to Orangewood Avenue and south to Yucca Avenue.

Population: About 800 permanent residents.

Hot topic: City is negotiating to replace motels and apartments with as many as 700 new hotel rooms in a major redeveloped project.