New Site for Planned Residential Hotel Opposed : Housing: An SRO proposed for a heavy-industry area of Irvine raises fears that the businesses will become the target of complaints. Supporters say those concerns are unfounded.

IRVINE —  A proposal for a residential hotel for the working poor, booted out of the civic center area of this upscale city after residents protested, is now being considered for an industrial site and is raising the ire of several businesses there.

The new opponents aren’t concerned about the type of people the single-room-occupancy hotel would bring to the neighborhood. Rather, they claim that introducing residential use into the area will begin a death knell for the only section of Irvine set aside for asphalt manufacturers, cement crushers, rubbish transfer stations and other noisy, dusty and sometimes odiferous businesses.

A public hearing on the $8.5-million project, a nonprofit venture of HomeAid of Southern California and Shawntana Management Co. of Newport Beach, could be held by the Irvine Planning Commission as early as November, officials said.

The Irvine Inn is proposed as a low-rent residential hotel for working single adults with low to moderate incomes. The earlier plan for a 318-room complex near City Hall has been scaled down to a 191-unit facility in the heavy industrial area.

The Irvine Inn would be the second SRO in the county. It also would be the larger of the two and the first built specifically as an SRO. The county’s first, the 96-unit Costa Mesa Village, is scheduled to open late this year in a converted former motel on Newport Boulevard.

Although they are politically and socially correct, SROs invariably come under fire from neighbors who fear that the hotels will attract an undesirable element.

But the project’s developers and many city officials say concerns about SROs attracting the homeless or becoming dumping grounds for substance abusers are groundless. The target market for the one-room residences, which would rent for about $370 a month, are industrial and service workers in the Irvine Business Complex and at UC Irvine, the city’s largest single employer.

“This is housing that is desperately needed in Orange County,” said Bart Hansen, a principal in Shawntana and a longtime supporter of the building industry’s HomeAid program. “It will provide a decent, affordable place for the single working person.”

Housing, in other words, for the drugstore clerks, fast-food cooks, gardeners and assembly workers who now must commute long distances--or live three and four to an apartment or even sleep in a car--because their pay of $6 to $12 an hour doesn’t stretch far enough to cover the rents in the communities where they work, said Mike Lennon, executive director of HomeAid Southern California.

Local units of HomeAid, which originated in Orange County, use donations of cash, labor and materials by builders to help provide shelter for the temporarily homeless in several Southern California counties. The SRO program is an effort of the regional HomeAid organization, sponsored by the Building Industry Assn. of Southern California, to expand into permanent housing.

The Irvine project “is a milestone,” Lennon said. “For the first time in this area, we would have housing for people who have been excluded by the high rents. If this goes well, it will be a spark plug for projects in other cities.”

Shawntana, in fact, is working with officials in Santa Ana to convert that city’s historic downtown YMCA building into an SRO.

When plans for a centrally located SRO were dropped in Irvine, Hansen said, Shawntana quickly shifted focus to the alternative site provided by the Irvine Co.--a 2.4-acre triangle of grass bounded by the Marine Corps helicopter base in Tustin, the Jamboree Road overpass at Warner Avenue and Construction Circle--Irvine’s sole location for heavy industry.

Now some of the 40 or so businesses centered there are mounting opposition to the SRO.

David Ewles, vice president of Ewles Materials, an asphalt and concrete recycling operation, is leading the move, which he describes as a heartfelt effort by businesses that are loud, dirty and sometimes smelly to protect the only enclave left to them in the entire city.

“I’m not against the SRO,” said Ewles, who acknowledges that his own company probably employs a number of potential Irvine Inn residents. “I have even offered to invest my own time and efforts in helping find a better site.”

The Jamboree Road locale--which is just about 100 yards from his back lot and within a quarter-mile of several concrete companies, rubbish collection yards, auto body shops and other industrial users on Construction Circle--isn’t a good place for any kind of residence, Ewles argues.

“People say that it’s OK because they know we’re here so they can’t complain, but it’s like airports and houses,” he said. “Nobody is thinking about five or 10 years down the road.”

A hotel--that is the legal description of an SRO--is permitted at the Jamboree site because it is an allowable use within the master zoning plan for the Irvine Business Complex.

But Ewles sees the SRO as a precedent-setting threat to the longevity of businesses on Construction Circle, which the city created 20 years ago as a preserve for businesses that run trucks and heavy machinery at all hours of the day and night.

Businesses on the circle are allowed to exceed noise and dust levels that apply in other parts of the city. Ewles’ company, for example, grinds old asphalt and concrete into gravel 24 hours a day.

“An SRO is fine, but it needs to be in a more compatible place,” he said. “They keep telling us that a lot of UCI maintenance and janitorial workers would live there. Well, fine, so put it up over by UCI with other residential things like parks and retail areas. There’s nothing like that within a reasonable distance of this place.”

Lennon says Ewles’ concerns are understandable. But he and Hanson both say that the project is compatible and that it won’t serve as a wedge for more residential developments in the area or as a source of complaints about noise, traffic and odors from Construction Circle.

“Among other things,” Lennon said, “we will have a tenant committee to work with the on-site management to develop rules for how this little community will operate. We will be a neighbor to these industries, and we will be a good neighbor. And people who rent will have to sign a waiver acknowledging that these industries are here and have a right to operate.”

The businesses might soon have bigger concerns. Several hundred nearby homes for families of Marines at the helicopter base will be vacated when the base is closed. Some are closer than the proposed SRO, and all are being targeted by housing advocates as ideal for low-income families.

Hansen, whose company has developed three different sets of plans for the Irvine SRO, said that Jamboree Road--which is an elevated overpass at that point--will be an effective barrier between the hotel and Construction Circle.

Hansen also points to San Diego, where a number of successful SROs have been developed in aging downtown commercial and light industrial areas, as proof that such facilities can coexist with businesses.

In the new plans filed with Irvine planners Sept. 14, the Irvine Inn developers have attempted to satisfy critics. Changes made since the first plan include increased parking so that there is one space for every room--almost twice the number analysts say is needed for that type of facility; adding a turnout for buses; redesigning the hotel so that it would have only one nighttime entry; and reducing the height of the building facing Jamboree and Construction Circle to two stories from three.

The plan also includes a walking and bicycle path from the SRO to a small food court and convenience retail center about a third of a mile away at Barranca Parkway and Jamboree. Hansen said the path was added to resolve concerns Ewles and others on Construction Circle voiced about safety should the SRO residents use their street, with its heavy truck traffic, as a walkway to the center.

The triangular complex has been designed so that each room has its own small kitchen, private bath and toilet--something missing in many of San Diego’s SROs, where residents on each floor share communal bathrooms. Shared facilities at the Irvine SRO would include a lounge and TV room on each floor and a community kitchen, exercise room, meeting room and laundry facility on the ground floor, Hansen said.

The idea of an SRO in Irvine was first raised by the city council in 1990, Councilman Barry J. Hammond said. The council asked the Irvine Co. to investigate the possibilities, and company officials approached Shawntana because of Hansen’s visibility in an SRO task force sponsored by the county and the city of Santa Ana.

The council is not united on the issue. Councilwoman Christina L. Shea says she is philosophically opposed to placing any residences in the Irvine Business Center and that she wants to see the entire area rezoned so that hotels would not be allowed.

She said she supports the SRO idea but that she wants to see one in a real residential area. “Is it fair, just because someone earns less than 50% of the median (annual income), to make them live near a dump?” she asked, referring to the rubbish transfer site on Construction Circle.

Unless there is an appeal of the planning commission’s decision, however, the council will not deal directly with the question.

The planning commission will have a public hearing before it votes on the developers’ request for a special permit for the SRO.

Hammond said he hopes that will provide a means of quieting opposition.

“If we get to that point,” he said, “we can put safeguards into the use permit to recognize that the businesses were there first and that the concerns and needs of the businesses will continue to come first.”