Crowding Now Way of Life in California
California cities are among the most crowded in the nation, as high housing prices and a chronic apartment shortage have forced families to double up and homeowners to rent bedrooms and garages.
Crowding detailed in the latest U.S. census can be seen especially in largely Latino cities that have become major ports of entry for poor immigrants seeking a better life.
El Monte, East Los Angeles, Santa Ana and Oxnard--havens for past generations of Latino immigrants--are filled with young men from Mexico and their growing families. And the newcomers are often packed into small spaces as a statewide shortage of affordable housing forces them to make do.
Dwellings in nearly all of California’s large cities are more crowded than a decade ago, continuing a trend from the 1980s. Statewide, population rose nearly 14% during the 1990s, but housing increased just 9%, and most new homes were in the suburbs.
“Southern California is the port of entry for the 21st century,” said author and planner William Fulton, a senior research fellow at the Southern California Studies Center at USC. “So now on a metropolitan scale, the density in Los Angeles is equivalent to New York City; it’s just distributed differently. Here it’s lower to the ground.”
Eight of the nation’s 10 most crowded large cities, based on the number of people per household, are in California, and the other two are along the Texas border with Mexico. Seven are in Southern California, with Santa Ana topping the list.
When crowding is defined as people packed into each square mile--rather than each dwelling--New York City remains the American city most crammed with residents. But even on this list, which tends to emphasize the tight urban clusters of the East Coast, five California cities or communities are among the top 10: East Los Angeles, Inglewood, Santa Ana, San Francisco and Daly City.
Los Angeles ranked only 30th in the nation for population density and 3lst for household crowding. That is because packed neighborhoods such as Westlake, Wilshire, South-Central and Boyle Heights were offset by the sprawling suburbs of the west San Fernando Valley and the tony enclaves of the Westside.
“We’re expanding our population as strongly as ever, but we’re only building half the housing we need,” Fulton said. “That means the housing crisis is just going to get worse. Where are the children of these immigrants going to live in 10 or 20 years?”
The increasingly crowded conditions of large California cities have raised a host of questions: What should local governments do to provide housing that poor people can afford? How can cities eliminate health and safety problems--clogged sewers and overloaded electrical systems--caused by overcrowding without shoving the poor into the streets? And do cities have the legal right to limit the number of people living under one roof?
Santa Ana, the largest city in Orange County with 337,000 residents, decided more than a decade ago to attack crowding by refusing to build any more apartment houses and by passing a strict anti-crowding ordinance. The strategies didn’t work.
Santa Ana grew by 45,235 residents during the 1990s, while adding only 1,391 more occupied dwellings. That amounts to nearly 32 people for each extra dwelling. When vacant dwellings are considered, Santa Ana’s housing supply actually shrank by 385 units during the ‘90s.
That helped push Santa Ana’s average household size from 4.0 people to 4.55--compared with a state average of 2.87 and a national norm of 2.59. Santa Ana was also the nation’s ninth most densely populated urban area, ranking right behind Chicago.
Hoping to decrease density, the city since 1987 has allowed construction only of single family houses on lots of at least 6,000 square feet. The last approved apartment project, a luxury complex, is now being built on the southern edge of the city.
“We want to make sure what is built helps the problem, not aggravates the problem,” City Manager David Ream said.
v Community activists argue that the strategy is wrong-headed and ineffective. All it has done is force the city’s newly arrived immigrants into tighter quarters--cots on floors, families in garages and workers sometimes sharing a bed by sleeping in shifts.
“Their moratorium will only exacerbate the overcrowding to crisis proportions,” said Nativo Lopez, executive director of Hermandad Mexicana Nacional of Santa Ana, a Latino civil rights group. “They are only developing upper-scale, middle-class opportunities and nothing for the working-class families.”
Lopez, a Santa Ana school board trustee, helped fight a 1991 city law that attempted to tie the number of people who can live in a house or apartment to its size. The state building code allows 10 people in a typical one-bedroom apartment, compared with five under the Santa Ana law. A state appeals court ultimately ruled that the state housing code superseded the city ordinance.
Concerns Over Social Tension
City code inspectors can still crack down on health and safety violations, but officials say those are extremely hard to prove.
Some Santa Ana residents say they fear that crowding, coupled with a worsening economy, could lead to social tensions and crime.
“With loss of income and people having more idle time, I’m afraid that will happen,” said Juan Fernandez, president of Nuestro Pueblo Forum of Orange County, an organization of Latino leaders to discuss local issues. “The county as a whole needs to [house] more of the labor force.”
In nearby Garden Grove, community development director Matt Fertel said Orange County’s newer cities should shoulder more of the burden for affordable housing. A destination for both Asian and Latino immigrants, Garden Grove ranks 13th in the nation for crowded housing and 23rd for population density.
“The best thing to do is to have cities like Irvine, Rancho Santa Margarita and Mission Viejo build more affordable housing,” Fertel said.
Overcrowding taxes a city’s infrastructure, he said.
“When you have six or eight people living in an apartment designed for two, the water and the sewer system are not set up for that,” Fertel said. “There is more wear and tear, the parking is not adequate . . . there are no areas for children to play safely.”
Karl Lawson, a housing official in Oxnard, said he deals every day with the problems of crowding and a super-heated Ventura County housing market. Household crowding in Oxnard ranks fourth-highest in the nation. The city of 170,000 is about two-thirds Latino and home to thousands of farm workers.
In one Oxnard case in 1993, 43 people in the families of six strawberry pickers were burned out of a three-bedroom house when an electrical wire overburdened by three refrigerators and five television sets erupted in flames. No one was injured.
“Thank God most of the kids were in school,” Blandina Carranza, 35, mother of six of the household’s 30 children, said the next day. “Only 12 were at home.”
To Lawson, that case illustrates how far workers sometimes go to afford housing in a market so expensive they opt for any bed they can get. A three-bedroom rental there now costs $1,200 a month, up 15% in one year, he said. That compares with a typical rental of about $600 in 1990. The vacancy rate hovers between 1% and 2%.
“Often there are two or three families living in each house,” Lawson said. “You drive down a street and you’ll see six vehicles per house. That is not a sign of affluence. That is a sign that there are several wage earners in that home.”
When the city of Oxnard sold 196 new houses at a cut rate to low-income residents two years ago, 1,200 people lined up overnight for a chance to buy.
On a crowded street near the La Colonia neighborhood, Salvadoran immigrant Sylvia Gutierrez, 28, said she is saving for just such an opportunity. Her 7-year-old son, Brian, held up a glass jug to display the $1 and $5 bills the family saves by living in a converted one-car garage.
“The rent is $400 a month,” said Gutierrez, a former store clerk who now stays home to care for her two sons while her husband earns as little as $300 a week installing carpet. “This is the best home we’ve ever had.”
In the San Gabriel Valley, El Monte masks its crowding well.
With 116,000 residents, it has large tracts of apartment houses but also swaths of single-family homes on spacious lots, with a rural atmosphere lent by roosters, ducks and horses hovering near weathered barns.
Cramped Distinction for El Monte
Yet the city’s predominantly Latino residents have large families. So El Monte ranks second among the nation’s large cities for crowded housing and 12th for population density.
Among the boxy, spartan apartments on Klingerman Street, Max and Sandy Barcenas and their three children live in a small one-bedroom apartment.
The street buzzes with the sounds of children playing and boom boxes blaring. And at night police routinely patrol.
“Where there’s more apartments and poor people, you see, there are more gangs and crime,” said Max Barcenas, 33, a driver for the handicapped. “I’d rather we lived elsewhere, where it would be less crowded and better for my children. But there’s no money.”
A couple of blocks away, in any direction, is a different El Monte.
Tina Flores, a city council secretary, lives in a house on a large lot that gives her neighborhood a roomy feel. Her family is typical: husband, wife, three children and a grandmother. But their home has four bedrooms and the children have never lacked for space to play.
Flores finds it hard to believe El Monte ranks among the nation’s crowded cities.
“If you concentrate on some small areas, you might get that impression,” Flores said. “But you look . . . at a lot of other places, and it’s hard to imagine it’s true.”
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Times photographer Carlos Chavez contributed to this story.
