Crowded-Apartment Evictions Hit : Immigrants’ Group to Stage Protest Tonight in Santa Ana

Scores of protesters--including families with young children--are expected to jam the Santa Ana City Council chambers tonight in an effort to stop the city’s crackdown on overcrowded apartments.

Nativo Lopez, head of Hermandad Mexicana Nacional, an immigrants’ rights organization, said that he hopes to have several hundred people at the 7 p.m. council meeting to dramatize the plight of low-income Latino families who cannot afford anything other than cramped, one-bedroom apartments.

Last December, more than 200 protesters carrying red and black banners crashed a city-sponsored Christmas party in protest of the enforcement. And in January, the group failed to convince a Superior Court judge that the city was acting unfairly when it ordered the evictions of two families--a family of four and another family of five--from one-bedroom units.

Santa Ana began a stepped-up building code enforcement program in 1984, citing apartment landlords for such violations as exposed wiring, cockroach infestations and broken plumbing. For the last several months, building inspectors have also been ordering landlords to reduce occupancy levels.

Hermandad attorney Richard Spix said that 150 families are now threatened with eviction because of what he called “this new wave” in the city’s code enforcement. The program itself is good, he said, but he called the strict enforcement of occupancy levels a turn for the worse. He said that he and other activists are prepared to fight it with legal and social pressure.

“If they want to play hard ball, they ain’t seen nothing yet,” Spix vowed.

Spix said that he will present arguments from state and county officials and other building code experts tonight to persuade the council to instruct city inspectors to ease off enforcement of occupancy codes. He added, however, that he is not opposed to enforcing evictions in situations where, for example, 17 single males are crowded into one unit, but that he is against evicting four- and five-person families.

The council’s stance, so far, Vice Mayor P. Lee Johnson said, is that overcrowding is unacceptable in the United States. “The conditions under which they (immigrants) may have lived elsewhere are such that even our worst conditions are better,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean they’re acceptable.”

The city’s code, which officials say is based on state law, requires that each home be at least 70 square feet for two people and another 50 square feet for each additional occupant. Lopez and his supporters argue that the city should be more lenient, allowing, for example, a rollaway bed in the living room.

City officials agree that Santa Ana--because of its large immigrant population, with estimates of more than 25,000 undocumented aliens--stands in contrast to many other cities.

George Gragg, who heads the city’s code enforcement program, said that Santa Ana cannot afford to ignore the issue. “I believe it has some very serious effects,” he said. “Overcrowding clearly has a tremendous impact on the structure itself--overcrowded buildings are run-down buildings.”

Same Standards

He pointed out that Santa Ana is enforcing the same standards as those prevalent in other Orange County cities, and inspects apartments only after receiving a complaint or spotting obvious violations. When asked what might solve the problem, Gragg said only that relaxing the code would not be the solution.

“Changing the standards here in Santa Ana to be less of a standard than in other parts of Orange County or the nation is certainly not the answer,” he said.

Mayor Dan Griset said that he did not want to comment until after Lopez presents his case Monday, adding that he is having staff members compile a report on the program, including the exact number of families displaced.

He stressed that the city is not waging any campaign to ferret out overcrowded conditions, pointing out that inspectors are swamped just handling the hundreds of complaints they receive each month. Johnson added that families who might be evicted because of the program can take advantage of relocation programs to which the city has provided more than $250,000.

Financial Assistance

A local social service agency, the Feedback Foundation, administers the program, according to spokeswoman LaDayle Dunbar. She said that 109 families have received financial assistance so far, which can be as much as $1,500 paid to new landlords for rent and deposits.

The biggest problem for the families, she said, is that they cannot find affordable housing. “These families have a very, very, very difficult time finding housing. I can’t say ‘very’ enough times to illustrate that situation,” she stressed.

“I don’t have the answers. I’m not sure that anybody does,” she said. “But I think I would agree with Nativo that a certain segment of the community tends to suffer. And they’re the ones with the least resources.”