She hit the road over a nowhere road

Stop me if you’ve heard this: The bureaucracy really isn’t geared to listen to the laments of people like Ruth Feinberg. It is geared, rather, to doing what it thinks is in the greater public interest, such as moving traffic from point to point in the tourism/entertainment sections of places like Anaheim.

And when people like Feinberg -- who lived alone in a rented coach in a mobile home park in Anaheim -- find themselves in the way of such “improvement” plans, well ... the hope is that things work out for them.

But if not, sorry.

Feinberg had lived for 12 years in her mobile home when the city came calling in late 2005. It told her she would have to move in 60 days because Gene Autry Way was being extended through part of her complex. Because she’d kept up with local news and had attended City Council meetings, she’d known for some time that was a possibility.

“All of a sudden,’ she says, “they hit us and said, ‘Now.’ ”

It wasn’t an eviction notice, she says. It just had the effect of one.

In January 2006, she moved out.

I’m not going to walk you through the minutiae of her 16 months since then, other than to record her complaint that she wonders why things had to happen when they did. The suddenness of things, she says, has led to various problems, with the most important being the loss of her low-income federal housing supplement she’d received the last four years in Anaheim.

She lost that because her first move out of Anaheim was to an apartment building in Alhambra that accepted the so-called Section 8 stipend. But when that building was boarded up as inhabitable shortly after she moved in, she was forced to move in with her son and his family. When she found an apartment for herself last August in South Pasadena, she had to reapply for the federal help.

She’s still waiting. Since August, she’s paid the full $1,000 monthly rent. If and when Section 8 money comes through, she’ll pay only $650. The difference, she says, is eating up her finances.

That, of course, isn’t Anaheim’s problem. The city didn’t want Feinberg to run into bad luck. It gave her $1,900 for her relocation, Feinberg says.

What cities don’t bother to contemplate is that what happened to Feinberg is just the kind of thing that happens to people when they’re forced out of their homes. The kind of thing where city officials can only say, “Sorry.”

“I lived right in the city for 42 years,” Feinberg, 69, says of Anaheim. “I loved my little house. It was perfect for me.”

In Orange County, Feinberg was a telemarketer for the Pacific Symphony Orchestra, even after recovering from a stroke in 2001 that cost her the ability to speak for 18 months. She’s now working part time for the Pasadena Playhouse. “I still don’t walk very well, but I can write again and I can speak,” she says.

And the final touch? Her former Anaheim home is still standing. She saw it as recently as six weeks ago, she says, and it wasn’t even boarded up. She saw her washer and dryer that she had to leave behind. “I could walk right in now and take over,” she says.

Natalie Meeks is Anaheim’s city engineer. She wasn’t aware of Feinberg’s situation but noted that the road extension project has been hampered by a lack of funding that now may be clearing up. Still, she says, the project probably won’t be underway until the end of 2008.

That, of course, makes Feinberg want to scream.

Meeks says large projects like the Autry Way extension need long lead times. Land acquisition and relocation help can be time-consuming, especially when, as in this case, 100 families are involved. Feinberg’s group of relocated people just happened to be in the first wave of people who needed to relocate, Meeks says.

I don’t mean to imply that Meeks is coldhearted. She didn’t know of Feinberg’s post-Anaheim travails, and she was quite cordial as she discussed how these kind of projects are handled.

It got me thinking that city officials must be like doctors. They can’t get involved with people’s personal situations, because if they did, they’d feel lousy. They’d sympathize with someone pushing 70 who was forced out of a comfortable home after 12 years and asked to start a new life in a new town.

All I could think of to ask Meeks was whether she’s satisfied with the way cities handle these kind of dislocations. “I’m comfortable with the way Anaheim handles it,” she says, “because I do try to manage the project in the best interest of the families that have to be relocated. We’re out there because the project needs to move forward, and we do our best to accommodate individual needs and provide them adequate or better housing than what we’re relocating them from.”

I suppose I could give her Ruth Feinberg’s phone number -- just to let her know how things sometimes pan out. But I’m not sure either one of them would have enjoyed chatting.

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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.