Housing Orange County

Demand for housing in Orange County over the next five years will plummet to the lowest levels since the initial population boom of 1950, a prominent local economist predicted Monday. One result of the predicted housing bust, Chapman College economics professor James Doti warned industry leaders, will be the demise of dozens of area residential developers.

In 1980, when a bad economy and rising poverty forced the Republican candidates for Orange County supervisor to debate welfare, the issue turned into a contest over who was tougher on fraud and laziness. Supervisor Roger R. Stanton won the election. And following through on his campaign promise, he helped create what is still one of California's most extensive welfare-fraud units as well as a rigorous workfare program, in part, to drive home the message that "there is no free lunch."

When the Orange County specialists at TPF&C sat down to review the national compensation consulting firm's latest survey on anticipated pay raise activity for 1990, they noted that there was little difference between what county firms were planning and what everyone else in the nation intended to do.

About 400 mobile home owners--many of them senior citizens living on fixed incomes--are expected to fill the City Council chamber tonight to protest escalating rents in the city's four mobile home parks and to press for a rent-control ordinance. "It is high time that our rents stopped going up 7% a year while a lot of our retirement checks that are based on the cost of living are increasing by only 1.5% to 2% a year," said Carol Caille, president of the El Toro Mobile Estates Homeowners' Assn.

Richard Poucher has been conducting a lonely campaign for more than five years now to persuade the California Assn. of Realtors--of which he is a lifetime member--to include attached homes in its monthly housing sales data in order to give people a more realistic picture of the state's housing prices.

In a move that may set a precedent for funding part of future housing developments, the City Council this week agreed to establish the city's first Mello-Roos special tax district. The city plans to impose an additional property tax on future residents of 113 homes being built near Ellis Avenue and Golden West Street to install utilities, widen Ellis and make other improvements. The special tax district will take effect if a majority of the area's seven landowners approve the idea.

Dragged down by a seemingly endless recession and price cutting by new home builders, the median price of previously owned single family homes in Orange County during the second quarter fell 7.6% from the same period in 1992, the National Assn. of Realtors reported Tuesday. The Orange County drop was the nation's steepest, according to the association, and brought the median price of previously occupied homes here to $219,900 from $238,000 in the year-earlier period.

Commercial real estate markets in several major California cities, including Anaheim and Los Angeles, may be headed for trouble if lending excesses are not curbed, the chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. indicated Tuesday. L. William Seidman released a list of 40 large American cities, ranked according to risk, that is supposed to serve as an "early-warning system" for regulators and lenders on where commercial real-estate loan problems are brewing.

The County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday ordered its lawyers to file suit against the city of Anaheim, charging that the city's environmental analysis of a huge new housing development in Gypsum Canyon is legally flawed. The supervisors' action comes as county officials search for a way to press ahead with either a jail or landfill on the land, both strongly resisted by Anaheim officials.