Mass Relocation Set in Anaheim

Dozens of families in Anaheim’s blighted Jeffrey-Lynne neighborhood will receive notices within a week requiring them to move starting within a month so the area can be rehabilitated.

Over the next two years, at least 233 families in the community, just west of Disneyland, must move so that many of the neighborhood’s run-down studios and apartments can be renovated.

City officials hope the improvements will help reduce crime and crowding. The rehabilitation plan was controversial at first, but neighborhood activists have since come out in support of the project.

“I think this is good for the Jeffrey-Lynne people,” said Francisco Ceja, a member of a residents organization that helped the city draft the relocation plan. “Their neighborhood will change a lot. It will improve.”

Nineteen families being displaced won’t be allowed to return because their incomes are too high to make them eligible for the low-income housing units. Among the 19, those families who now live in the redevelopment project’s first phase will have 90 days to find new homes, said city Housing Manager Bertha Chavoya.

Pacific Relocation Consultants of Long Beach, hired by Anaheim, will help those families find new living arrangements. Families that are permanently displaced will also receive housing subsidies for 42 months to help compensate for higher rents outside the Jeffrey-Lynne neighborhood, Chavoya said.

Eighty families will be the first who must find temporary living arrangements--by September--but will be allowed to move into the refurbished apartments once completed by Irvine-based developer Related Cos., Chavoya said.

Southern California Housing Development Corp. of Rancho Cucamonga, which was hired by Anaheim, has put deposits on 16 apartments so far for those who will later move back to the neighborhood.