Fontana Shedding Its Steel Town Image : New subdivisions on the outskirts are a sharp contrast to older parts of the city.

Like many newcomers to the multiplying suburban sprawl of inland Southern California, Ingrid Galeano Morrison didn’t know one city from the next. She certainly didn’t know Fontana until she, her mother and sisters bought a house there a few months ago.

And now there are times when she wishes she had done a little more homework before being lured by some of the best housing prices east of Pomona.

“If I had known the city looked like this . . . , “ she mused, while tending the front lawn of the family’s new, four-bedroom, two-bath home. Morrison doesn’t finish her thought. The $130,000 price tag on the family’s dream house, she knows, makes up for a lot.

And she has absolutely no complaints about her immediate, spanking-new neighborhood. It’s just the south-central part of town that depresses her.

This old-time section of Fontana, which stretches north from Valley Boulevard just out of the shadow of the shuttered Kaiser Steel mill, seems to be home to half of the world’s auto repair shops and a good number of its Confederate flag retailers. And long blocks close to the old downtown are spotted with debris-littered lots and dilapidated buildings.

Population Has Doubled

“It’s tacky, very, very,” Morrison said. “But, maybe I should be grateful. People tell me it used to be worse.”

Indeed. Fontana is changing.

In the last five years, the city’s population has nearly doubled to 80,000 as thousands of young and largely upwardly mobile families have decided to trek even farther inland in search of housing bargains.

They find pay dirt in Fontana. New, detached, single-family homes can be purchased for as little as about $110,000, and nothing costs more than $250,000. The average price of a new home, according to the city’s housing division, is $128,052.

And there is a wide selection from which to choose. No fewer than 18 new subdivisions are under construction; another 20 are under review by the city’s planning staff.

More House for Money

Many of Fontana’s new residents are first-time homeowners. And just as many are move-up buyers seeking to get more house for their dollar than they can in Los Angeles and Orange counties.

But although these families are willing to give up their old neighborhood ties and commute longer distances to their jobs in exchange for their housing bargains, they seem loath to abandon community values and expectations shaped by other areas of Southern California.

The result has been a bit disconcerting.

As in so many other fast-growing older communities, a schism has developed between the established working-class residents who liked Fontana for the steel town that it was and the new families who would mold it into something with a bit more style, charm and pizazz.

One story that circulated widely several years ago was told about two young housewives who had moved into Southridge Village, then the city’s newest planned community.

Culture Clash

The women were apparently so concerned about the negative image of Fontana that they refused to use it as their mailing address, substituting “Southridge Village” as their hometown. Through the miracle of ZIP codes, they still got their mail.

This culture clash was, in many ways, inevitable. Unlike the entirely new residential communities that are springing up throughout Southern California, such as Moreno Valley in Riverside County and vast stretches of Orange County, Fontana is an established city with thousands of longtime residents.

As the onslaught of new home buyers continues, the differences between old and new becomes more apparent.

“Whether people realize it or not, Fontana is becoming a segregated city,” said Rudy Cruz, a 35-year-old RTD bus scheduler and father of three who moved from San Gabriel into a new home in the city’s emerging northwestern quadrant last year.

“It’s not segregation by race, but by economics. It’s the old residents versus the new.”

‘One Whole Big City’

Fontana’s city leaders downplay the importance of such comments, noting that virtually all communities undergoing population explosions suffer growing pains and temporary imbalances until the growth pace slackens and the new residents have been absorbed into the city’s mainstream.

“In another 10 years, we’ll be one whole big city,” says Chamber of Commerce director Meredith Watkins. “Until then, there’s bound to be some isolation of the new residents. It’s normal; it’s geography. And it will change.”

John Anicic Jr., a Fontana resident for nearly 20 years, says newcomers aren’t the only ones affected by the changes brought on by growth.

There’s more traffic and the city is more crowded,” he explains. “This town used to be like a country farming town. Now things are more spread out.”

But Anicic, the manager of Foothill Builders Mart, a lumber and hardware store, isn’t terribly concerned about the city’s new residents. “They don’t have ties to town yet, but they’re slowly getting involved. It takes time.”

Establishing civic pride has not come easily for Fontana. And the burgeoning growth, which city leaders have courted as a means of erasing the past and capitalizing on the future, hasn’t completely wiped out remnants of Fontana’s history as a rural community that was home to thousands of lunch pail-carrying steel workers.

Fontana traces its roots to the early 1900s when A.B. Miller, the first of the two men who would forever shape its economic course, arrived.

Built Steel Plant

Miller envisioned a planned rural community on the 28-square-mile expanse of sagebrush and established the Fontana Farms Co. to develop the land into farms that produced everything from grain and walnuts to eggs and hogs.

Henry J. Kaiser, arguably the city’s most influential business leader, arrived in the early 1940s with plans to build the nation’s first West Coast steel plant.

In 1942, he began transforming Miller’s hog farm into what was to become the Kaiser steel mill, a plant that operated at breakneck pace through World War II and the postwar expansion until changing economic conditions forced its closure a few years ago.

Still, the Kaiser name and influence lives on; Fontana is home to one of the largest Kaiser Permanente medical facilities in Southern California.

Image Consideration

But to many Southern Californians, the steel mill made Fontana synonymous with smoke-belching heavy industry. And still others remember Fontana as the birthplace of the Hells Angels motorcycle outlaws and the site of periodic outbursts from members of the Ku Klux Klan.

Some developers, recognizing that this old image could harm their potential, have aimed their projects toward Interstate 15, the Devore Freeway, and the surrounding undeveloped acreage, rather than toward the city’s established corridor along Interstate 10, which takes travelers past the old steel mill and through the city’s older sections.

Many of the city’s new subdivisions are located in its two largest planned communities, Southridge Village and the Village of Heritage.

Heritage, which recently opened in the city’s northwest quadrant, features rows of stately palms and blocks of dusty-pink homes with terra-cotta-colored roofs.

Rudy Cruz moved into Heritage Village in March, paying $150,000 for a four-bedroom, 2 1/2-bath house on a street filled with youngsters and young families.

Park, Shopping Center

Pointing to the area just a few blocks away where developers are planning quarter-million-dollar homes, Cruz believes his house has already appreciated. “I definitely got more house for my money than I could have back in L.A.,” he said.

At completion, Heritage Village is expected to have about 4,000 homes, a community park and neighborhood shopping centers. However, for the time being just a smattering of new subdivisions have been built.

Southridge is by far the larger and the older planned community. Located just south of Interstate 10 and east of Interstate 15, Southridge is expected to have about 10,000 homes at completion. About 3,500 homes have already been built and new neighborhood shopping centers are just now starting to sprout.

City officials have designated land adjacent to Southridge as the site of a future regional shopping center, Empire Mall. Officials say they expect the center will be built in the mid-1990s on a site near the intersection of Interstate 10 and Sierra Avenue.

That’s the event chamber director Watkins is waiting for. When the mall opens, Watkins predicts Fontana will be known less as the birthplace of the Hells Angels than the home of a regional shopping center.

“They’ll say: ‘Fontana. Yeah. That’s where the mall is,’ ” Watkins said. “And the rest will be forgotten.”

AT A GLANCE Population

1989 estimate: 100,159

1980-89 change: +57.5

Median age: 30.1 years

Racial/ethnic mix

White: 64.7%

Latino: 26.5%

Black: 5.5%

Other: 3.3%

Annual income

Per capita: $10,169

Median household: $28,492

Household distribution

Less than $15,000: 25.9%

$15,000 - $30,000: 26.7%

$30,000 - $50,000: 29.8%

$50,000 - $75,000: 13.5%

$75,000 + 4.2%