Costa Mesa Renters on Endangered Species List?

To hear many homeowners on Costa Mesa’s Westside tell it, their beaten-down industrial neighborhood is ripe to become the next hot Orange County coastal address. It has ocean breezes, luxury shopping nearby and new folks moving in, spending big money to fix up their homes.

The stumbling block, they complain, are old, drab, overcrowded rental units--home to many of the area’s low-wage workers. A loud chorus of Westsiders is calling for those apartments to be torn down and replaced with new houses.

City officials appear open to the idea, saying that they will consider doing part of a redevelopment plan they intend to have in place within a year.

Which leaves an obvious question: What would happen to the tenants evicted from those apartments?

City officials say that depends. Some would receive relocation assistance. But not the many families who now can afford rent only by doubling up illegally in apartments with friends. And not the scores of undocumented migrant workers.

“Those people are guests,” said Donald Lamm, director of development services. “Why should taxpayers pay for those guests?”

Some residents are more blunt. At public hearings, they adamantly insist that any redevelopment plan rid the neighborhood of all low-end renters.

It’s a sentiment that doesn’t sit well with housing advocates. Allen Baldwin of the Orange County Community Housing Corp. said that even the families who qualify for replacement assistance would not be able to find homes on the allowance they would be given.

“I’m sure that replacement housing is not in [the city’s] plan,” he said. “You have to build it in order to provide it. They’re not building it.”

Or at least not rental units.

The city does plan to replace any condemned apartment buildings with single-family homes that would technically qualify as affordable housing--but Baldwin said those homes would be out of reach for most families living in the overcrowded rental units.

City Councilman Chris Steel said that is fine by him. The self-styled conservative renegade, who is facing felony charges of election petition forgery, has built a wide base of support by railing about the city’s migrant worker population.

“The council is in denial and is tolerating what is going on and who we are allowing to be given sanctuary, free food and free medical,” Steel said.

He complains about poor children holding down property values by overcrowding schools. He proposes parking an INS car at the job center where migrant workers congregate. And he sums up his opposition to a proposed Westside community outreach center as simply: “We don’t want to lock in the barrio.”

Steel had nine failed election bids over 22 years. But in 2000 he won, with the support of homeowners who complain that they have lost patience with blight.

Now he is on the board overseeing Westside redevelopment.

That alarms advocates like Jean Forbath, founder of Share Our Selves, a medical clinic that has been on the Westside for 32 years. “I don’t disagree that the Westside needs improvement,” she said. “But you wonder what the motives are for some of statements being made.”

While some city officials propose involving nonprofit leaders in developing a plan to fight Westside blight, there is little support for residents who could be evicted and would not get relocation assistance under the law.

Baldwin said that leaves the city threatening to evict the people it depends on to work the many low-wage jobs nobody else will.

Redevelopment “cleans up the city, no doubt about that,” he said. “But will the City Council put a moratorium on jobs paying less than $15 per hour because no housing exists? Anything less than that lacks integrity.”

Others pose a different challenge to the city--and the county: Stop tolerating conditions that concentrate all low-income housing in a few places.

“We’ve got maybe too much affordable housing here,” said Paul Bunney, a 50-year resident of the Westside. “We’re drawing people in who can’t afford the area, and they are doubling up or living in places they shouldn’t live.

“There is more crime, more accidents, more trash,” Bunney said. “These are things we didn’t put up with when I was a kid.”

That was when the neighborhood was called Goat Hill. Animals grazed on the bluff where pockets of industrial buildings now sit. There were rolling farm fields dotted with yacht-building businesses.

Bunney still lives in the subdivision where his family moved in 1954. It used to be called the Freedom Tract. Now it just melts in with all the other homes.

The area grew into a patchwork of industrial facilities with homes sprinkled among them. In the 1950s and ‘60s, the Westside was the leisure-boat building capital of the state. Most every major fiberglass boat builder had an operation there. Surfboard and water-sport clothing companies followed, earning the area the nickname “Velcro Valley.”

The presence of factories kept the Westside from becoming a boutique residential enclave like many other places near the coast. Apartment buildings cropped up, bringing a concentration of cheap housing.

As new homes nearby became increasingly expensive, the Westside began to attract higher-income families. People like Ralph Ronquillo moved to the area. He recently put $100,000 of work into his house, anticipating that it would be a good investment.

“As the property available near the ocean gets smaller and smaller, it makes this area more valuable,” he said. “People are buying houses here they don’t even want and tearing them down and rebuilding them. . . . A new group of people that are a lot more white-collar are coming in.”

But Baldwin said nobody is keeping track of what happens to residents who are priced out or evicted and can’t afford to live elsewhere. His group estimates there are already 100,000 people living in overcrowded Orange County apartments where families are doubled or tripled up.