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mbell claimed the city spent money to gentrify downtown. No, they did not. DTSA's gentrification began organically outside the control of city staff.
Gentrification may have occurred organically in other places, but that is not the case in Santa Ana.
Santa Ana city officials has been making a concerted effort to revitalize its city since the 1960's. It began with creating the Civic Center area to concentrate local government office. In the 1970's, they formed redevelopment areas to capture tax increment dollars to invest back into the city. This enable them to offer cheap land and low cost loans to entice investors to clean-up various areas downtown and throughout the city. Flophouses, blood banks, and rowdy bars were removed and commercial areas were improved. These efforts lured middle class families to return to the city and make even more investments in their neighborhoods.
A series of articles in subsequent threads document this effort. They are from Newsbank and date back to the 80's. There were also some excellent articles going back to the 60's and 70's from the LATimes which are in PDF format and I was not able to post. I apologize in advance for the word wrap problems posting these articles.
Santa Ana: A city in transition tries to become county hub once more
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Orange County Register, The (Santa Ana, CA) (Published as The Orange County Register) - June 7, 1987Browse Issues
Author: Anita Snow; The Register
Readability: >12 grade level (Lexile: 1310)
Men in hard hats crawl like spiders over the webbed
scaffolding around the north Santa Ana shopping mall, creating another landmark along the Santa Ana (I-5) Freeway.
More construction workers can be found in what once were strawberry fields in Santa Ana's south section, riveting together the steel skeletons of office towers and luxury hotels.
Throughout much of the rest of the city, bulldozers rumble across empty lots and construction crews hammer together apartment complexes, shopping centers and industrial buildings.
While some Orange County cities are lamenting a decline in construction, and others actively are discouraging development, Santa Ana invited the building boom that is changing the face of the city.
Santa Ana officials predict that the construction will mean more jobs, higher property values and more money to pay for new roads and sewers, a new police station and city services.
Just as importantly, they said, the construction will help polish Santa Ana's tarnished image and regain the respect it commanded three decades ago as the retail and financial hub of the county. Santa Ana is the county seat and the county's second-largest city, after Anaheim, with a population of approximately 225,000.
"We are undergoing an urban renaissance," Mayor Dan Young said. "We have gone from a city headed downhill to a city with a future."
Santa Ana suffered a major decline in the 1960s and '70s because of shortsighted leadership during a period of massive population growth and change. That decline was especially evident downtown.
"When I first moved my shop to downtown Santa Ana in 1974, it had a lot of problems," said hair stylist Reuben Martinez, owner of Hacienda Hair on Third Street. "Sometimes I had to call the police to move the bums off the doorstep so my customers could get in."
While shortsightedness fueled Santa Ana's decline, city officials are hoping that long-term, city-sponsored redevelopment, and the spinoff construction it inspires, will be the engine driving its comeback.
The current building binge is the result of the redevelopment program city officials initiated in the downtown area almost 15 years ago. The power to condemn private property, easy financing, low-cost land and other perks lures for developers were the tools that city officials used to produce those first redevelopment projects.
After launching some residential redevelopment projects and trying unsuccessfully for several years to convince developers to build in the city, Santa Ana officials in the late 1970s and early 1980s began putting together the redevelopment deals for the big commercial projects now sprouting up citywide.
Most of the construction began in the early 1980s and is expected to continue well into the next decade, city officials said. Smaller development projects will continue into the year 2000.
While the dollar amount of new construction countywide increased threefold in the past five years, the value of construction in Santa Ana increased more than fivefold between 1982 and 1986, according to the state Construction Industry Research Board.
Last year, $370.7 million in new residential, commercial and industrial projects were built in Santa Ana, second in the county only to Irvine's $381.5 million. Next was Anaheim, at $222.5 million, and Yorba Linda, $217 million.
"They're going great guns out there in Santa Ana," said John Erskine, executive director of the Building Industry Association of Southern California, "especially in terms of commercial development."
Santa Ana stands in stark contrast to a number of Orange County cities that have adopted slow-growth policies, such as San Clemente, Irvine and Costa Mesa.
"We're pro-development and we don't make any secret of it," Santa Ana City Manager David Ream said. "Development is necessary to provide good services for residents."
The MainPlace shopping mall expansion and hotel-office complex is among the major development projects that city officials hope will help dramatically change Santa Ana's appearance and economy. Construction workers have been scrambling to complete the adobe pink structure, visible from the Santa Ana and Garden Grove (22) freeways, in time for its September grand opening.
Many of the giant projects that city officials hope will transform Santa Ana are in the city's south section, alongside the Costa Mesa (55) Freeway. They include the tall office buildings of Hutton Centre and Griffin Towers, five new hotels and the eight-story Butterfield Savings building.
Those projects, inspired by redevelopment, are beginning to spin off other new projects built without redevelopment incentives. Earthmovers in recent weeks have been lumbering across the southeast corner of Fourth Street at the Santa Ana Freeway, smoothing the foundation for the largest of those spinoff projects, the Xerox Centre commercial and office complex.
Similar construction booms are reverberating in other older California cities using redevelopment to attempt a comeback after suffering declines, redevelopment experts and urban planners said.
Those cities include Long Beach, San Diego and Sacramento, which fell into urban decay in the 1950s and early '60s through changing demographics and national migration from cities to suburbs, Long Beach Planning Director Robert Paternoster said.
"From around 1940 to 1970, there was a flight of the middle class from the cities to the suburbs," said Paternoster, an American Planning Association board member. "Downtowns just fell apart. Cities were abandoned."
Some of the movement, he said, was "white flight," or the migration of white residents to the suburbs to escape growing black and Hispanic populations in urban areas. Some was what Paternoster calls `green flight," a movement to take financial advantage of cheap new homes in cities full of parks and greenbelts.
Paternoster predicted that those same cities will enjoy a renaissance through aggressive redevelopment efforts and a new national migration back to the cities from the suburbs.
"The suburbs didn't deliver everything they promised," Paternoster said. "It became more expensive to live in the suburbs with all those added city services. And with increased traffic problems, it has become more attractive to live in the cities, closer to work."
Before Santa Ana residents fled to the suburbs, downtown was a dynamic commercial center.
"In the early 1950s, downtown Santa Ana was the dominant shopping area in Orange County," said lifetime Santa Ana resident Lorin Griset, 68, who served on the City Council from 1967 to 1975. "You could hardly find a place to park."
But that changed in the late 1950s when Santa Ana's general population more than doubled and the number of Hispanics in the county increased nearly tenfold.
Santa Ana's population grew from from 45,533 residents in 1950 to 100,350 in 1960, state Department of Finance figures show. In that same decade, the county's Hispanic population soared from 5,410 to 52,576, much of it concentrated in Santa Ana.
In those years of explosive growth and changing demographics, Santa Ana officials refused federal funds and prided themselves on low taxes for residents, said current and former city officials.
Every year in budget study sessions, they said, council members boasted that Santa Ana paid less than any other city in the county for such things as police and fire protection and repaving roads and repairing storm drains.
"During that postwar period, there was a free-enterprise philosophy in Santa Ana that said lower taxes are a measure of success and that it is bad to accept federal funds because of a threat of outside strings on that money," said Griset's son, Dan Griset,, 42, a current council member.
Eventually, the city's streets, storm drains, sewage lines and alleyways began to deteriorate from lack of maintenance, Griset said. Meanwhile, the downtown department stores followed the national trend to suburban shopping centers.
"The new shopping centers had convenient parking and access to the residential areas," he said. "That was the beginning of the end for downtown."
City fathers apparently failed to recognize the trend toward suburban shopping and made what some say were the most grievous errors in Santa Ana's 101-year history. In the mid-1960s, they turned down the chance to have South Coast Plaza -- among the largest indoor shopping malls in the world -- within their borders.
Santa Ana officials were unwilling to pay for improvements to the property, such as new roads, curbs and gutters, current and former city officials said. So the Segerstrom family built the mall in Costa Mesa, where officials were more cooperative.
Today, about one-fourth of Costa Mesa's approximately $20 million in annual sales-tax revenues come from South Coast Plaza, Costa Mesa officials said.
By the late 1960s, downtown was a commercial slum and home to drunks, drifters and derelicts. The shops where wealthy ladies bought Italian leather shoes were replaced by pawn shops, blood banks and beer bars that catered to illegal immigrants from Mexico.
That decay soon seeped into many Santa Ana neighborhoods.
"If a downtown is going downhill and the city's image is tied up in the downtown, it will pull down the rest of the city with it," said Milt Farrell, executive director of the non-profit Community Redevelopment Agencies Association in Sacramento. The group offers educational services to 245 community redevelopment agencies statewide.
"Urban decay is like a cancer," Farrell said. "It keeps spreading, and people move out because no one wants to live in a deteriorating area."
Following the lead of other urban dwellers nationwide, many of Santa Ana's younger residents migrated to the suburban communities of Irvine, El Toro and Mission Viejo, where in the late 1960s they could buy a home for about $30,000.
"When I graduated from high school in 1969, the attitude was: `Get out of Santa Ana as soon as you can,' " said Mayor Young, 36. "The neighborhoods were deteriorating. Crime was increasing. The city didn't seem to have a future."
Racial tensions clouded the community during the late 1960s and early 1970s, lifelong Santa Ana resident and community activist Zeke Hernandez recalls. It was a time of school busing and the Black Panthers. In 1970, 21-year-old Black Panther Arthur D. League was convicted of second-degree murder for killing rookie Santa Ana police officer Nelson A. Sasscer.
"There was a lot of unrest and turmoil at that time," Hernandez said. "It was openly accepted to be a racist in those days."
Santa Ana's image soon became so tarnished that people from some parts of the county were afraid to drive through the city, said Mike Metzler, president of the Greater Santa Ana Chamber of Commerce.
"My wife grew up in Anaheim in the 1960s," Metzler said. "When she and her friends went to the beach, they actually drove around Santa Ana."
With declining property values and the lack of a strong commercial center, Santa Ana was losing its tax base. Santa Ana officials were worried that the city would die.
Those officials already had made unsuccessful attempts to raise money for improvements in the downtown core of the city's decay. But their ideas for a business-improvement district to tax merchants and installation of downtown parking meters were rejected by merchants.
Out of ideas and almost out of money, Santa Ana officials looked to redevelopment for answers.
They learned that under state legislation approved in 1952, city officials could be empowered with special tools to give Santa Ana an economic shot in the arm.
Those powers included the ability to condemn private property and either give it or sell it at a reduced price to a private developer. They also could issue millions of dollars in construction bonds to developers, using an expected increase in future property values as collateral.
Lorin Griset was mayor in December 1972 when the City Council formed the Santa Ana Community Redevelopment Agency in the first major step toward renovation. The following month, the agency declared downtown blighted and formed the city's first redevelopment area.
Like most, Santa Ana's redevelopment programs was slow to start. Santa Ana officials said they spent much of the first decade making plans, conducting studies and wooing developers.
"The more blighted an area, the tougher it is to get started," Farrell said. "San Jose officials kept trying to get redevelopment rolling in their city for about eight to 10 years before they had success. Now, they're doing just fine."
By the late 1970s, Santa Ana officials were using cut-rate land and cheap financing to convince developers that their city was the place to build.
The redevelopment program was expanded in mid-1982 to a total of 4,196 acres, or about 28 percent of the city. City officials currently are studying possible inclusion of Bristol Street in the redevelopment program.
Today, Santa Ana has among the most aggressive and successful redevelopment programs in the state, Farrell said.
The new construction will push up property values, making Santa Ana a more attractive place to live and work, City Manager Ream predicted. It also will create more city revenue through increased sales taxes and increased valuation of projects built in
redevelopment areas.
Ultimately, the city should have more money for such improvements as wider and smoother streets and a new police station, Ream said.
Changing people's perceptions of Santa Ana will be the most difficult task, Ream said.
"It takes time to rebuild an old car," he said. "But if you stick to it, it can be done."
CUTLINED: The historic Santa Ana Hotel is being demolished to make way for downtown parking.
CUTLINEE: Workers for Sakioka farms harvest celery near Hutton Centre in one of the city's few remaining fields.
CUTLINEF: Santa Ana may develop the area surrounding Bowers Museum.
CUTLINEG: Erik and Paulina Sanchez, both 3, watch construction near their home. The Sanchez family, along with others on Nancy Lane, must move this month to make way for a new apartment complex.
MAP: (Carbo)
Major development in Santa Ana
After years of very little major commercial development, Santa Ana is experiencing a surge of large-scale new construction totaling hundreds of millions of dollars. The largest commercial projects recently completed or proposed for construction in Santa Ana are, (numbers and letters correspond to map):
1. Centerpointe: An $85 million, 350,000-square-foot office and commercial complex with a 200-room hotel. Construction was delayed pending an unsuccessful lawsuit by an anti-redevelopment group seeking to block its construction. Ground breaking is scheduled for spring
1988. 2. Pavilion International: A proposed $53 million,
300,000-square-foot project that would house Orange County's first jewelry mart. No completion date has been scheduled. It will go before the Santa Ana Community Redevelopment Agency for final approval in the fall. (A) Jewelry Mart (B) Plaza (C) Gift Mart (D) Bank building (E) Parking structures.
3. MainPlace/Santa Ana: A $400 million expansion of the former Fashion Square shopping mall with 1.6 million square feet of retail, 1.5 million square feet of offices and a 1,200-room hotel. Shopping mall expansion scheduled to completed in September. No completion date scheduled for the the office and hotel construction. 4. Xerox Centre: A $200 million, 1.1 million-square-foot commercial and office complex. Scheduled to be completed in 1992.
5. McDonnell Douglas Complex: A $100 million, 335,000-square-foot, high-tech office and manufacturing complex. Scheduled for completion in fall 1988.
6. Santa Ana Auto Mall: (artist's interpretation) A $50 million, 50-acre development to include as many as nine auto dealerships. First one to be completed this year.
7. Hotel Terrace: A $60 million, five-hotel complex with 920 rooms. Completed in spring 1986. (A) Embassy Suites (B) Petite Suites (C) Quality Suites (D) Super 8 Travel Lodge (E) Comfort Suites. 8. Hutton Centre: A $140 million, 1.5 million-square-foot office and commercial complex and 174-room hotel. Scheduled to be completed in 1988. (A) Butterfield Building (B) AT&T Building (C) Hutton 3 (D) Parking (E) Hutton 4 (F) Compri Hotel.
9. Griffin Towers: A $90 million, 580,000-square-foot office tower project. Scheduled to be completed in early 1989.
10. MacArthur Place Urban Village Project: (artist's interpretation) A proposed $600 million high-density project to include residential, office, hotel and retail buildings. No completion date scheduled, but should take 20 years to build. Scheduled to go before the Santa Ana Community Redevelopment Agency for final approval in the fall. 11. Harbor Corporate Park: A $55 million, 527,000-square-foot office and research and development complex. Completed in January 1986. Source: City of Santa Ana.
CHRONOLOGY:
History of Santa Ana redevelopment
The seeds of Santa Ana redevelopment planted in the early 1970s are sprouting as more major construction projects start popping out of the ground citywide.
September 1971 - The Downtown Redevelopment Committee, a coalition of chamber of commerce members and city officials, is formed to study downtown redevelopment.
December 1972 - City Council members form the Santa Ana Community Redevelopment Agency and appoint themselves its members.
January 1973 - Revelopment agency declares downtown blighted and forms the downtown redevelopment area.
January 1976 - Redevelopment agency approves a $4.9 million senior-citizen housing complex, the first downtown redevelopment project.
June 1982 - Redevelopment agency expands its revitalization program to 4,196 acres, or about 28 percent of the city.
May 1984 - Redevelopment agency approves the final phase of the city's largest redevelopment project, MainPlace, a $400 million shopping mall expansion and hotel and office project.
January 1986 - Developers announce they will build the $200 million Xerox Centre, the biggest spinoff project being built in Santa Ana without redevelopment benefits.
May 1987 - City Council commissions study of possible creation of a sixth redevelopment area, along Bristol Street.
Source: Santa Ana officials.
GRAPH: (Lai)
The Santa Ana building boom - New development has blossomed in Santa Ana as city officials have encouraged developers to build in the city. As a result, the annual dollar amount of new projects built in Santa Ana has increased more than fivefold in the past five years. Nearly $1 billion worth of new projects were built citywide from 1982 through 1986.
Total spent from 1982 to 1986 on new development: $984.7 million.
Value of new projects built (in millions)
1982 - $68.3
1983 - $115.3
1984 - $217.2
1985 - $213.2
1986 - $370.7.
Source: City of Santa Ana Planning and Building Agency.
• Caption: MAP PHOTO GRAPHMike Williams, left, and Vidal Yniguez work outside Nordstrom store at Santa Ana's MainPlace project. CAP= A steelworker solders an archway to the back entrance of the Nordstrom store at the MainPlace complex. CAP= Some of Santa Ana's tallest palm trees line Edgewood Road in an area of fine old homes. SEE END OF TEXT FOR MORE CUTLINES.Paul Carbo; Tia Lai; John Blackmer
• Memo: BUILDING BOOM CLOSE-UP `WJ
• Edition: EVENING
• Section: NEWS
• Page number: M01
• Record: OCR35681
• Index terms: CHRONOLOGY; CONSTRUCTION; CITIES; ORANGE COUNTY; GROWTH; DEVELOPMENT; BUILDINGS; BUSINESS
• Copyright: Copyright 1987 The Orange County Register
Return to Results
Spinoff: Redevelopment is attracting private projects to city
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Orange County Register, The (Santa Ana, CA) (Published as The Orange County Register) - June 7, 1987Browse Issues
Author: Anita Snow; The Register
Readability: >12 grade level (Lexile: 1370)
Like a pebble tossed into a pond, Santa Ana redevelopment has created a ripple effect.
The city-sponsored redevelopment program begun in the mid-1970s and expanded in the early 1980s was the catalyst for most of the current wave of construction that has been undertaken without government subsidies, Deputy City Manager Rex Swanson said.
Redevelopment offered cheap land and other incentives to those willing to risk building office towers, hotels and shops in a city with a decaying downtown and some of the worst slum neighborhoods in Orange County.
But now that city officials are making progress in revitalizing Santa Ana's neighborhoods and business districts, developers are proposing big projects outside redevelopment areas, and without the breaks that redevelopment can give them.
Under state law, city officials can condemn land and either give it or sell it cheaply to developers who build within Santa Ana's five redevelopment areas, which make up more than one-fourth of the city.
"After developers started investing and did some major development projects within the redevelopment areas, they started looking around and began to do some major developments outside those areas," Swanson said.
Swanson pointed to the $200 million Xerox Centre under construction at the northeast corner of First Street and the Santa Ana (I-5) Freeway as the most obvious example of spinoff development resulting from the city's aggressive redevelopment program.
The first phase of construction began this spring on Xerox Centre, which will have two 15-story towers and a 22-story tower with a total of 1.1 million square feet in office space. The project is just outside the downtown redevelopment area and is being built without redevelopment incentives.
"That project was really a major coup for the city," Swanson said. "We're hoping to see some more major projects like that outside the redevelopment areas."
Other developments either planned, under construction or recently built outside redevelopment areas include the Ralph's Giant market on Grand Avenue just north of 17th Street; the Target Store at 3300 S. Bristol St. near the Costa Mesa border; the proposed rehabilitation of a neighborhood shopping center at 17th and Tustin streets, and a two-story office building and manufacturing facility in the 2000 block of East McFadden Avenue.
Swanson said developers now also are willing to build projects in redevelopment zones without traditional redevelopment incentives.
The city did not reduce the price of land for those who recently built the five-story office building at 2020 E. First St., inside the downtown redevelopment area, he said. Nor did it offer the traditional redevelopment incentives to McDonnell Douglas Development when it began building its $100 million, 335,000-square-foot manufacturing and office complex just south of Edinger Avenue and east of Grand Avenue.
"Although it's still in a redevelopment area, that's all spinoff, too," Swanson said. "We didn't do anything extra for them."
Local developers said they are willing to build in Santa Ana because it isn't the financial risk it once was.
"I probably would not have been interested in building in Santa Ana 10 years ago," said developer Bernard Truax, who has proposed a wholesale jewelry mart for downtown. "It was seedy and
crime-infested.
"But now, business is beginning to return to the city," Truax said. "The best indicator is the interest developers have in building there. You don't get developers to part with a buck unless they think they're going to make a buck."
Now that developers are interested in building in the city, Santa Ana officials no longer have to offer them the inducements they once did, Mayor Dan Young said.
"Developer interest in this city is going to reach a fever pitch later this year with the opening of the MainPlace," said Young, himself a developer. MainPlace is a $400 million expansion of the former Fashion Square mall on North Main Street near the Orange border.
"I'd say Santa Ana has become one of the hottest topics in the development community," he said.
That was not the case as recently as two years ago.
In their eagerness to reach an agreement with a developer group to build the $81 million Centerpointe hotel-office-retail complex in downtown, officials agreed to use their power of eminent domain and pay $18.2 million to buy a lot bordered by Broadway, Fourth, Ross and Fifth streets, relocate its occupants, demolish the existing buildings and construct a 1,200-space parking structure and conference center.
Construction was delayed for about a year, pending an unsuccessful lawsuit by a group calling itself the Alliance for Fair
Redevelopment, which opposed selling the land at a reduced price and sought to block the project. An Orange County Superior Court judge in March ruled in the city's favor, and the alliance did not appeal the ruling. City officials said the price reduction was needed to encourage the developer to build such a financially risky project in the dilapidated downtown.
But those type of land give-aways are now rare, Young said. And they will become rarer in the future.
"Because of the success we've had, we just don't have to do that anymore," he said. "And instead of investing in developments, we can now invest that money in our neighborhoods."
• Memo: BUILDING BOOM CLOSE-UP `WJ
• Edition: EVENING
• Section: NEWS
• Page number: M07
• Record: OCR35688
• Index terms: ORANGE COUNTY; CITIES; GROWTH; DEVELOPMENT; BUILDINGS; CONSTRUCTION; BUSINESS
• Copyright:Copyright 1987 The Orange County Register
Neighborhoods: Residents who care are revitalizing them
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Orange County Register, The (Santa Ana, CA) (Published as The Orange County Register) - June 7, 1987Browse Issues
Author: Anita Snow; The Register
Readability: >12 grade level (Lexile: 1330)
Sara Broadbent and Jeff Logston were newlyweds looking for their first home when they decided to buy a house in Santa Ana a decade ago.
They knew of Santa Ana's reputation as a crime-ridden, poorly maintained community, but the price was right. The young couple bought a three-bedroom home for $65,500.
"When we first moved in, the neighborhood was in a transition period," Broadbent said. "There were a lot of renters and people weren't taking care of their property. We had a lot of neighborhood burglaries."
Today, most of the homes in the neighborhood known as Washington Square are occupied by their owners rather than renters, said Broadbent, president of the Washington Square Neighborhood Organization.
There are about 750 homes in the neighborhood, bordered by Civic Center Drive and Bristol, 17th and Flower streets.
The renters have been replaced with young families who are painting and remodeling the homes, most of which were built in the 1930s and 1940s. The neighbors mow their lawns and trim their hedges. They gather weekly for Neighborhood Watch meetings.
As a result, Broadbent said, her house has doubled in value.
"This neighborhood is really coming back," she said. "I think a lot of it is because people really care about their homes and about the city."
Washington Square is among a number of Santa Ana neighborhoods reborn in recent years.
Residents and city officials attributed the rebirth in part to Santa Ana's aggressive redevelopment program, which has brought the city more high-quality development and an improved economy.
While Santa Ana officials have worked to clean up Santa Ana's commercial areas, Santa Ana residents have toiled to spruce up their neighborhoods, City Manager David Ream said.
"If people perceive a neighborhood is improving, then they are willing to invest in it," he said.
Residents agreed, saying that the better the rest of the city looks, the more they care about their homes and their neighborhoods.
"We wouldn't be doing this if city hadn't motivated our efforts to care," Broadbent said. "And if you care, you have to get involved. Santa Ana has a negative image it needs to overcome, and we think we can help."
Susan Tully said she is seeing a similar revitalization in her Santa Ana neighborhood, known as Heninger Park.
Tully said that when she and her family moved into the neighborhood two years ago, the collection of historic homes near downtown Santa Ana was being threatened by encroaching development of high-density apartment complexes.
Tully helped organize local homeowners and last year successfully lobbied City Council members to proclaim the area a historic neighborhood and prohibit future apartment development in it. The neighborhood is bounded by McFadden Avenue and Main, First and Flowers streets.
"Our neighborhood is secure now," Tully said. "We've really seen a change."
As in Washington Square, Heninger Park residents are taking better care of their property, Tully said.
"I think all the major development going on the city is going to reflect positively on us as homeowners as long as all the residents work together at the same time to improve their neighborhhods," she said.
Tully said the end result will be a safer neighborhood and improved property values. The circa-1915, Craftsman-style house she bought for $136,000 two years ago is now worth about $160,000, she said.
There are similar Santa Ana homeowner organizations fighting to improve the neighborhoods of French Park, Wilshire Square, Eastside, Westside, North Central, Mar Les and Sandpointe.
Unlike most other Santa Ana neighborhoods, Sandpointe, located in southernmost section of the city, did not suffer much during Santa Ana's years of decline, beginning in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
The same was true of North Santa Ana, where stately houses with broad, green lawns stood strong through the years as the winds of time, economic depression and poor planning slowly ate away at the areas around them.
Because they contained among the most expensive and well-maintained houses in Santa Ana, the neighborhoods in the city's northernmost and southernmost sections remained relatively stable for the past several decades while much of the city began to decay around them.
Property values in those neighborhoods remained firm even when the shops in the once-fashionable downtown were boarded up and the shoppers were replaced by drunks and prostitutes.
Crime in those neighborhoods remained low even while most neighborhoods around them suffered gang violence, burglaries and blatant narcotics traffic.
Like their counterparts in the rest of the city, residents of those neighborhoods are hoping the city's revitalization program will bring them increased property values. But they also are concerned that the new development will bring more traffic onto their relatively quiet neighborhood streets.
"I really have mixed emotions about all the development," said Richard Merritt, who has lived in Sandpointe 19 years. The tract development is at the southwest corner of MacArthur Boulevard and Main Street.
"I hope property values go up," he said, "but I know the development will make this a more urban area and anything city officials do to try and alleviate the traffic problems will not be enough."
It was those concerns about traffic that prompted Merritt last year to lead his neighbors on a successful campaign to halt attempts to build the proposed Westdome sports arena next to their neighborhood.
"The development is going to impact this area, especially in terms of traffic," said George Hanna, referring to the north Santa Ana neighborhood he has lived in more than a decade. "But I doubt if it will affect the quality of life here. And we're hoping it will make our property more valuable."
Santa Ana officials said city traffic engineers are putting together plans to widen the major roadways around the neighborhoods, in hopes that motorists will use those wider streets as an alternative to the narrower neighborhood roadways.
Those officials said they plan to include neighborhood group representatives in their discussions of traffic plans and any other future projects that could affect their neighborhoods.
The neighborhood groups are beginning to play a stronger role in public policy as they become more outspoken about problems and potential problems in their areas.
Months before Merritt fought to keep the Westdome sports arena away from his neighborhood, Broadbent was lobbying successfully to prevent it from being built at its first proposed site, right next to her neighborhood.
Hanna was active in the Santa Ana Merged Society of Neighbors, or SAMSON, which last year backed two unsuccessful ballot campaigns to create ward elections for City Council members.
"The measure of our success," City Councilman Dan Griset said, "is that the residents now know that our future is worth fighting for. And judging by the interest they have shown, we must be doing pretty well."
• Caption: PHOTOWith Richard Merritt, left, who led the effort to keep a sports arena out of his area, are his wife, Pat; son, Brett; and Brett's friend Chrissy Sanders.John Blackmer
• Memo: BUILDING BOOM CLOSE-UP `WJ
• Edition: EVENING
• Section: NEWS
• Page number: M08
• Record: OCR35677
• Index terms: ORANGE COUNTY; CITIES; GROWTH; DEVELOPMENT; BUSINESS; BUILDINGS
• Copyright: Copyright 1987 The Orange County Register
Hey Fast Cat, honestly, I am not going to read all of that. I did look at the date which was 1987, before the city hit rock bottom in 1993-95. I guess my real question is, what were you trying to get at there?
Hey Fast Cat, honestly, I am not going to read all of that. I did look at the date which was 1987, before the city hit rock bottom in 1993-95. I guess my real question is, what were you trying to get at there?
Santa Ana actually hit rock bottom in 1970's and there was also another dip as you indicated in the 1990's from an increase in gang violence and businesses leaving the mid-town area. However during that initial downturn, the downtown was filled with rowdy bars and flophouses that brought all kinds of undesirable types to the area. Vacant storefronts and deterioration were even more visible then what was experienced in the 90's and the environment downtown was much more threatening and intimidating. It was also during this time frame that Santa Ana experienced that great outflow of middle class families that impacted the city's tax base.
The city took a number of steps even dating back to the 60's to mitigate the urban decay occurring within its borders. However, it was until they established redevelopment areas that they were able to apply able resources to the problem. Although it still took awhile to get going, they were slowly able to cleanup the city and downtown in particular. They bought property and offered at discounted prices to developers to bring about new commercial development. They offered low interest loans that enticed business owners to fix up store fronts and lease up those spaces. The shady businesses that had opened were now forced out along with much of their clientele. As all this newly redevelopment inspired commercial development came about, Santa Ana reputation improved and attracted some middle class families back to the community. Hence the roots of Santa Ana gentrification were established in the 1980's.
I guess you could separate the next revitalization movement that took in the 1990's as a second wave of gentrification and I would agree that this revitalization probably had less to do with the city's active participation other than getting the crime problem under control.
I am not saying that everything that Santa Ana city officials have done has been perfect, far from it. However, I do believe that those early roots of revitalization came directly as a result of the city's actions. And that was the testimony of a number of people who moved or invested in the city during this period.
I remember Santa Ana in the 80s, 90s, etc. I think the main reason it didn't improve much during that time period, despite the best efforts of the City, was due to the unending waves of immigration, often illegal, that kept much of SA filled with low skilled workers.
I have a dear friend who is Hispanic and who grew up for a time in SA during the 70s. Her family became established and fled SA for other OC towns. However, she mentioned that low skilled, poorly educated migrants continued to flood the city in search of cheap rent.
In 2003, I began to hear that SA is better and that I should check out DTSA. It was always around the corner, but SA never seemed to quite get there. That said, improvement would be great for SA and for OC as a whole. Who wouldn't love to see SA succeed?
Incorrect. I'd love to see it succeed but painting it to be some amazing city when in fact it's a crime ridden ghetto with a couple nice areas is just silly. It's the most violent city in OC, still filled with gang members, illegals and low income scum and most areas are just dirty. Would be great if they could just get rid of 95% of the inhabitants, spend a year cleaning it up and start over.
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