La Habra Looks to Retire Image

La Habra officials are all too familiar with the town’s reputation. They’ve heard the jokes, the derisive references to “Guada La Habra” and the “thrift store capital of Orange County.”

Frankly, they say, they’re tired of them. And they’d like a little credit for the town’s recent transformation, part of an aggressive effort to reinvent the city as a quaint yet booming Spanish town.

In the last three years, officials have invested $50 million to revitalize the city by improving streets and parks and gussying up aging strip mall facades.

“By investing in public infrastructure, we’re sending a message to the development community that this isn’t a sleepy little town anymore,” said City Manager Brad Bridenbecker.

And it’s been anything but sleepy this week as media crews descended on the town for the kind of publicity officials don’t want: a shootout that injured two police officers and one suspect, followed a day later by a couple found slain in their home.

Officials and residents alike say the city’s image, not crime, has been its biggest problem. The crime rate has been relatively stable the last few years. In 1999, La Habra reported 156 violent crimes, according to California Department of Justice statistics supplied to the OC Almanac, an Orange County website. The 2003 total was identical.

The city, with a population of about 60,000 on the northern edge of Orange County, is wedged among five freeways and bordered roughly by five cities. Hampered by size and squeezed among much bigger neighbors, La Habra has struggled to make a name for itself since its early days.

Most of the residents live in La Habra because they were born there or their parents were -- and they never left. It is a largely working-class, bedroom community. Most have jobs outside the city. Nearly half the population is Latino, earning the city the “Guada La Habra” nickname, even though many Latino immigrants there don’t hail from Guadalajara, but from Guanajuato, according to the Mexican Consulate in Orange County.

Others moved to the 7.3-square-mile city because it was affordable, they said. Or, at least, it used to be.

Starting with the remodeling of a now-defunct shopping center on the city’s south side, La Habra’s new wave of development began about eight years ago.

A second spurt followed in 2000, when 55 acres of land formerly owned by Chevron became available to developers. Close to Beach Boulevard and Imperial Highway, two of the city’s main roads, the Westridge Golf Club and La Habra Westridge Plaza sprung up on the property in rapid succession.

And more growth is in the works.

A Costco and a 7.5-acre industrial complex are expected to open by fall. And 111 single-family homes with prices starting in the $800,000s are slated for the city’s south side by summer’s end.

Like elsewhere in Orange County and the Southland, housing prices have skyrocketed. In 2001, the median home price was $236,000, compared with $425,000 so far in 2005, Bridenbecker said.

But nowhere is La Habra’s transformation more evident than in its downtown. Along La Habra Boulevard, the city’s main drag, the pavement has been ripped up to make room for new crosswalk markings and median dividers, with gleaming facades camouflaging formerly shabby stores.

The makeover, officials say, was spurred by financial need because new tax formulas left the city with less money to spend on services, forcing it to generate funds through sales taxes, said City Councilman G. Steve Simonian.

“With no regional shopping centers, that started an 11-year downward spiral,” he said. “The parks were left unattended and unkempt; the streets were not touched.”

Founded in 1896 and incorporated in 1925, La Habra -- Spanish for “opening,” or “pass through the mountains” -- was settled largely by Basque sheepherders who arrived in California after the Civil War, said city historian and author Esther Cramer. Midwesterners and Mexican agricultural workers followed.

“La Habra was like many Southern California towns,” said Cramer. “It had a citrus wave and an oil wave, and then came suburbanization.”

But growth in La Habra didn’t exactly engender grandeur.

Few landmarks have graced La Habra’s streets since its beginnings, the Children’s Museum being a notable exception. The first law offices of the late President Nixon were established in the 1930s, but were subsequently torn down to make way for the La Habra Community Center.

Today, officials are embarking on a tree-planting campaign, and the City Council plans to refurbish a library in the Civic Center that will house La Habra’s first historical museum.

The upgrades, officials hope, will put the city on the map, attracting new money and faces.

“There’s a believable theory called the ‘broken window theory’ that says if you clean things up, it scares the cockroaches away,” said Simonian. “We really want to make it so people say, ‘I really want to go there.’ ”

For now, the approach seems to be working.

Valeria King, 49, is a case in point. She moved to La Habra with her husband six years ago from Los Angeles. A teacher, she said she was attracted to the city by its affordable housing prices and good schools. But the clincher, she said, was learning that the city planned to build more desirable shopping spaces.

“We knew development was coming and wanted the convenience,” she said. “I don’t need to go to L.A. anymore. I have everything here now.”

Norma Marroquin’s herbal store sits in a newly renovated shopping center known colloquially as “La Michoacana.” Painted in Mexican terracotta and deep blue hues, the strip contained mostly Latino shops.

Marroquin, who has owned her store for six years, said the changes were inconvenient but necessary.

“It’s for the better. Things will be prettier than they were before,” she said.

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City Profile

La Habra, a city of 7.3 square miles in the northwest corner of the county, was incorporated in 1925 with a population of 3,000. About 60,000 people now reside within the city’s borders, and 99.9% of its land is developed or under development.

Racial breakdown, 2000

Hispanic: 49%

White: 41.4%

Asian and Pacific Islander: 6%

Other races: 2.2%

Black: 1.4%

La Habra facts, 2000

Median age: 31.5

Median household income: $47,652

Median home price*: $425,000

Median monthly mortgage: $1,455

Registered voters: 24,221

Native born: 73%

Foreign born: 27%

*According to the La Habra city clerk’s office. Census 2000 estimate was $199,500.

Sources: La Habra, Census Bureau