Angels’ Moreno could face squeeze play on housing

When Arte Moreno bought the Angels in 2003, I suggested that baseball’s cruelties would inevitably lead to heartache. What I failed to mention was that City Hall might give him a headache.

Losing streaks and tough playoff losses can be dealt with. Even the hot breath of the Seattle Mariners on Labor Day weekend now must feel like a refreshing breeze compared to the blasts he’s gotten from Anaheim politicians.

Baseball seasons end; Moreno’s squabbles with City Hall go on and on.

The Times reported this week that Moreno and the council are at it again, this time over a development project in a corner of the Angels’ parking lot. The city wanted to add housing to the project, seen primarily as a commercial venture, but Moreno said he wanted no part of that, and his lease with the city gives him veto power over residential use at the site.

But the rancor at the meeting, according to our story, once again raised the specter of legal action if things come unglued. Still bobbing somewhere in the courts is the city’s appeal of the 2006 jury verdict upholding Moreno’s right to rename the team the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.

Council members indicated that the housing matter would be laid to rest, but . . . not so fast.

Moreno may be in for another round of headache-inducing public pressure. And this time -- if Councilwoman Lorri Galloway is correct -- it will come not from the council but a significant symbolic representation from the Angels fan base.

At first blush, you might be wondering how baseball and public policy could intersect. Or, whether they should.

Here’s what’s cooking, Galloway says: affordable-housing advocates, including a visible segment of the local Latino community, will try to persuade Moreno to lighten up on his opposition to residential housing on the site.

And why would Moreno -- or any baseball owner -- want to get in the middle of that?

Galloway says Moreno has courted the Latino community in his advertising and marketing efforts. What better way to show he really cares, she suggests, than to support affordable housing that presumably would mean homes for many of those fans he’s targeted?

Right about now, I picture Moreno popping an aspirin.

“The land we’re talking about is public land,” Galloway says. “I’ve received an unbelievable number of calls from people paying attention to this. It’s an incredible thing that the Hispanic community is very much looking at this. They are telling me they’d like to see housing, and some affordable [housing], on it.”

I ask Galloway why Moreno would connect his baseball marketing and support for housing.

“He’s asked something of the Latino community,” she says, “and it’s responded. He’s said, ‘Come to my ballpark, support my team, make my team successful.’ So there’s kind of a feeling that maybe it would not be such a bad thing to say, ‘We did that, we continue to do that, do you care about our needs?’ ”

I now picture Moreno popping another aspirin.

I asked Galloway, as passionate about low-cost housing as Moreno is about baseball, how the message would be delivered to him. “What if they came to him en masse and said, ‘We buy your tickets; this is what we want. We want you to pay attention to what our needs are, too, and we don’t want you to stop what could be an advantage to our community.’ ”

The housing coalition, much like the group that wants affordable units in another project near Disneyland, would be a broad-based group, Galloway says. But it would be the Latino element in the group, she says, that could specifically link its plea to Moreno’s courting of Latino baseball fans.

I put in a call Friday to the Angels but couldn’t connect with spokesman Tim Mead.

Galloway says “there’s going to be some kind of move” from the Latino community. However, it’s not as though the council itself has pushed for housing on the site, now envisioned to sprout retail and commercial enterprises.

We’re too early in the game to speculate on the outcome. Maybe whatever pressure is brought to bear on Moreno will be short-lived. Maybe it’ll never happen. The supposed “outrage” over the name change certainly hasn’t hurt attendance at Angel Stadium. The team is more popular than ever.

But that doesn’t mean there won’t be pressure on Moreno, Galloway says.

And Moreno thought pressure meant making it to the World Series.

--

Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.