Orange County Poor Struggle to Find Homes

The housing vise began squeezing Francisco Morales seven years ago, and it hasn’t let up.

Morales and his family shared a three-bedroom house in Santa Ana with five other people until rent hikes and cramped conditions forced them to seek better quarters in the mid-1990s. Their situation hasn’t improved much.

Today, Morales, his wife and four children are shoehorned into a studio apartment on Spurgeon Avenue in Santa Ana that, at $775 a month, takes about half of Morales’ gross monthly income as a $9.50-an-hour carpenter.

“I’d like a two- or three-bedroom place, but I can’t afford it,” Morales said, standing outside his apartment building in a neighborhood just north of 17th Street. “Everything goes up--rent, gasoline, electricity . . . but not my income.”

An analysis of Census 2000 illustrates in vivid detail the extent of Orange County’s housing crunch, a situation wrought by a steady influx of immigrants, high birth rates but only a modest increase in new housing. The problem is compounded by a virtual paralysis in the development of affordable homes for workers who clerk in stores, staff restaurants, assemble products and groom yards and parklands.

“We haven’t built any housing for labor in this county in the past 10 or 15 years,” said Allen Baldwin, who heads the nonprofit Orange County Community Housing Corp., which tries to alleviate housing problems for the poor. “We don’t know what to do about it as a nation. The [problem] is that nobody is talking about it.”

During the 1990s--a period that included a deep regional economic recession--Orange County’s population increased by 435,733. The number of housing units, though, increased by 94,412, enough for 283,236 people, based on the county average household size of three people.

The intensity of the problem varies. Tustin, an older city with new middle-class neighborhoods, grew by 16,815 people and 6,201 homes in the last decade--one new unit for every 2.71 new residents.

By comparison, Santa Ana, the county’s biggest city, lost 385 housing units--one of the few Orange County cities to do so--while gaining 44,235 people.

That helped push the average number of people per household in Santa Ana from 4.0 in 1990 to 4.55 in 2000--one of the highest average household sizes in the nation. The state average is 2.87, and the national norm is 2.59.

The crunch also hits other older core cities in the northern part of the county.

Garden Grove grew by 22,146 people but added only 719 housing units--one for every 30.8 new residents. In Stanton, there was one new unit for every 27 new residents; Costa Mesa added one unit for every 16 new residents. Anaheim, the county’s second-largest city, added one for every nine new residents.

Even then, few of the new units were affordable for many people who work in or near those cities.

Rents during the first quarter of this year averaged $1,175 a month in Orange County complexes with more than 58 units. And the California Assn. of Realtors last week rated Orange County as the least affordable housing area in Southern California for May, with only one in four households able to afford a median-priced home.

Scott Bollens, chairman of UC Irvine’s Department of Urban and Regional Planning, said the census indicates a sharpening divide between minority-heavy communities in the north and largely white areas to the south.

“We’re getting qualitatively and quantitatively different halves of our county . . . with the Orange Curtain now in the middle of the county,” Bollens said. “It portends a hardening of the de facto division between north and south.”

Finding ways to relieve the crunch has proven difficult.

“It’s a hard bill to fill,” said Pat Whitaker, Santa Ana’s housing manager. “Hard choices have to be made by city governments. I’m hoping that we see further growth of more affordable housing in cities that have available land. But that hasn’t happened in the past and I don’t know what will stimulate that, given the current cost of housing and land.”

The problem extends statewide. California’s Department of Housing and Community Development warns that 220,000 new housing units will be needed each year through 2020 to handle expected population gains. Only 149,000 units were built last year, though, and 154,000 are expected this year. At the same time, more than 2 million renters pay more than 30% of their monthly income in rent, a benchmark for affordability.

For the Morales family, the living is not easy. In a space the size of a living room, the family of six eats and sleeps in quarters too close to afford even a pretense of privacy.

“We barely have space to move around,” Morales said, reacting angrily to a Santa Ana policy dating to 1987 that bars construction of more apartment buildings--an effort, ironically, to ease overcrowding.

“That’s not going to keep people from moving here,” Morales said. “It is just going to pile more of us on top of each other.”

The squeeze is on at other rungs of the economic ladder, too, though the effects are less dramatic.

With housing lagging behind demand, modest houses can seem out of reach, with the median price for a home in May climbing to $297,000. That’s about 16 times Morales’ annual wages and five times Orange County’s median household income of about $59,600, as estimated by the Census Bureau in 1997, the last year for which figures are available.

Housing advocates have argued for years that Southern California needs a broad-based plan to narrow the housing gap, but concrete steps have been few and far between.

In Santa Ana, where the housing shortage is acute, the city razed 180 low-income apartments at the former Olive Garden complex on North Bristol Street in the 1990s and replaced them with 72 upscale, single-family homes--a gated community welcomed by city leaders as filling a need for high-end housing.

“There’s a feeling on the part of cities such as Santa Ana that they have done more than their fair share to accommodate low-income and moderate-income households,” UC Irvine’s Bollens said. “They should have the same chance as Newport Beach and Huntington Beach to encourage higher-income housing.”

In Garden Grove, limited construction and the city’s popularity among Latino and Asian immigrants have made the task of finding a home a test of patience.

Childhood friends Phung Phim, 30, and Mylinh Bui, 27, spent more than a month trying to find places to live when they emigrated from Vietnam two years ago. Frustrated with the limited offerings, they pooled their resources and took an $825-per-month, two-bedroom Galway Street apartment, which they share with Phim’s parents.

“If a place is cheap, it is not in a safe area,” said Phim, an assembler at an electronics firm. “If it is nice, it is too expensive.”

Although the housing crunch is pronounced in Orange County, it exists to some extent nearly everywhere in the nation where low-wage workers congregate, said Baldwin of the Orange County Community Housing Corp. Underlying the problem is a free market approach to housing, in which developers build to make a profit, not to serve a public need.

“I can’t imagine [developers] being proud of what’s happened in Orange County, but I don’t think they’d say they could do anything about it because they don’t know how to resolve the problem,” Baldwin said.

California laws require municipalities to create plans for addressing their housing needs, said Joe Carreras, manager of comprehensive planning for the Southern California Assn. of Governments. Yet he acknowledged that has had little effect on the housing crunch.

A better approach, he said, would be to expand incentives to developers to build low-income housing--helping offset potential drops in profit--and to entice municipalities to require developers to include affordable housing in their plans.

The city of Brea already does. A local ordinance requires developers to set aside 10% of new housing for lower-income families or pay a fee to the city that is used to refurbish existing housing--usually small apartment complexes--for the city’s poorest residents, said Eric Nicoll, director of the city’s economic development department.

A recent success was the development of 62 rental lofts above retail space near the heart of Brea. Thirty-three of the units were designed as affordable housing, Nicoll said. “We’ve been able to create housing that reaches people who couldn’t otherwise afford that type of unit,” Nicoll said.

But such gains are lost amid broader economic currents.

In Santa Ana, down the block from the Morales family, Monteserrat Garcia, 21, shares a studio apartment with her father and her younger brother. The family moved out of their two-bedroom rental house seven months ago when the landlord raised the rent, she said.

Garcia, a waitress, said the family searched for three months before settling on the $555-a-month room-and-bath on Spurgeon Avenue. “It’s really hard to find a good place,” Garcia said. “We looked all over the city, but there aren’t many options.”