New Era Dawning for Troubled South Oxnard

By CHRIS CHI

April 19, 1998 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

OXNARD — On the south side of Oxnard, suburban Ventura County gives way to a patchwork of blue-collar neighborhoods and big-city problems.

Vacant storefronts and 99-cent stores dot Saviers Road, the gritty commercial strip, reflecting a community with twice the countywide poverty rate.

Immigrant families cram into rental houses, moving in next door to longtime residents who complain of plummeting home values.

Santa Clara High, the Catholic school known for its powerhouse basketball teams, is half empty after a 60% enrollment plunge--a drop school officials blame on the south side’s reputation as violent and crime-ridden.

“If this school were on the north end of town, we’d be packed to capacity,” said Lou Cvijanovich, the school’s basketball coach.

Blaming a school’s decline on location might seem simplistic, but on this point few would argue with the coach.

For years, community leaders say, crime, economic blight and poverty have been mushrooming here, transforming a middle-class community built during a post-World War II construction blitz into a pocket of urban problems.

Neglected by city officials who focused instead on the more affluent north side, south Oxnard is in urgent need of revival, residents say.

“The blue-collar worker had to go somewhere to live. . . . Does that mean we should have less support?” Cvijanovich said.

Now, amid a groundswell of community activism, city and county officials are promising to bring change.

A series of government programs launched in the past year aims at curtailing crime, staunching poverty and reviving a business community ravaged by an exodus of major retailers.

With an army of probation officers, drug counselors and social workers converging on the community, south Oxnard has become ground zero for reform.

Consider:

* The state has awarded a $4.5-million grant to fight juvenile crime. The South Oxnard Challenge Project aims to provide dozens of troubled teens with mentors and counselors--and give the community a say in their punishment.

* The county has targeted south Oxnard in its first attempt at welfare reform. Here, 150 families are part of an experimental program to gauge the effectiveness of welfare-to-work reform. The effort brings government agencies--providing everything from employment services to psychologists--to one site.

* The city has created a new redevelopment district, promising to pump millions of dollars into the Saviers Road commercial corridor and add sewers and sidewalks to aging housing tracts.

* The community itself has come together, launching a new business organization and neighborhood cleanup efforts in hopes of building leadership and political clout.

“There’s a lot of good people here, but there’s a lot of concern,” said Richard Arias, a worker with the South Oxnard Challenge Project. “People are getting on the bandwagon, because they don’t want to be victims. It’s not a school problem, and it’s not a police problem. It’s a community problem.”

Adds Ventura County Supervisor John K. Flynn, who recently moved from county government headquarters in Ventura to a south Oxnard office to oversee the massive reform campaign:

“We’re beginning to hear a heartbeat down here. But it’s going to take a lot of work.”

County’s Most Racially Diverse Community

Even as part of the county’s biggest and most urbanized community, south Oxnard stands apart.

Bounded by Wooley Road to the north, Hueneme Road to the south, Ventura Road to the west and Rice Avenue to the east, it is home to 58,000 residents.

Viewed as a city within a city, it is the county’s most racially diverse community: Three out of five residents are Latino, three out of four are minorities.

And despite being home to a substantial middle class of Navy base workers, government employees and commuters, it is on the whole one of the county’s poorest areas. The average household income is $35,500 a year, and residents on average live four to a household, contrasted with the countywide average of three.

Scenes of grinding poverty unfold on the edge of the Pacific. Near Hueneme Road, farm workers gather in Depression-era wooden shacks and Quonset-style huts.

A few blocks away in Southwinds, a crowded collection of 1,500 homes and apartments, young mothers push their children in strollers, weaving through streets jammed with old cars.

James Marks, a retired house painter, moved to south Oxnard from the Midwest 40 years ago, snapping up a new home in a pastel subdivision near the Port Hueneme Navy base. He lives just blocks from a home where 43 members of a family were forced out by a 1993 fire, revealing one of the worst cases of overcrowding in county history.

Like many old-timers, Marks complains of crime and crowding, pointing to rental homes with peeling paint and overgrown lawns. Worse, he says, is the plunge in home equity. Indeed, while the county as a whole is pulling out of a severe real estate slump, the median price of homes sold in south Oxnard has dropped from $175,000 in 1990 to about $130,000 today.

Awhile back, the 72-year-old Marks grew so tired of looking at his neighbor’s shoddy home that he offered to paint it. His neighbor turned him down.

Yet while some longtime residents see the community slipping, many newcomers describe a different experience. They view south Oxnard as welcoming and vital, a gateway for immigrants willing to work hard.

Take Rudy Liporada, a Filipino immigrant who moved here 10 years ago. For months, his family of six slept in a single bedroom in his brother-in-law’s house, saving money to buy a home of their own. Liporada, who has a college degree, worked on an assembly line to make ends meet.

He became a leader in south Oxnard’s Filipino community, editing a countywide newspaper on Asian affairs. Now a state insurance official and Oxnard Planning Commission member, he said he felt welcome in ethnically diverse south Oxnard, where many are striving for “a piece of the American dream.”

“It was the only place I could afford at the time,” said Liporada, who now lives in north Oxnard and rents his south Oxnard house to recently arrived relatives. “It can be a starting point--and then you move up.”

To be sure, many here say theirs is a tightknit, racially harmonious community, where people help each other--and that above everything, it is suffering from a bad image.

At Santa Clara High School, the alma mater of City Councilmen Tom Holden and Dean Maulhardt, enrollment has dropped from 700 in the mid-1980s to 300 today. Officials say the neighborhood’s reputation for violence has made it tough to recruit new students.

“People think that if they go south of Wooley Road, they’ve come into South-Central Los Angeles, and the gangs are just waiting on the corner,” said Keith Murphy, the school’s principal. “There certainly is a stigma.”

Many Seem to Fit the ‘At-Risk’ Profile

But that stigma is rooted in reality, as too many children here fit the “at-risk” profile, social workers say.

There is, for instance, Michael, a 17-year-old from a rough part of the Lemonwood neighborhood. Michael, who is seeing counselors with the South Oxnard Challenge Project, was arrested after a drug overdose a few months ago.

A blood test showed marijuana, methamphetamine, cocaine and alcohol in his system. Beyond the drug offenses, Michael’s rap sheet is rather lightweight: He was caught running from a Denny’s without paying the tab for his bacon cheeseburger and French toast.

But look a little closer at Michael’s background. He has never met his father. “Don’t care to,” he said. He dropped out of school and took a landscaping job to help his mother meet the rent.

Without some guidance, teens such as Michael are courting danger, says his probation officer, Sandy Carrillo. “They can definitely turn violent and hurt people.”

Indeed, police statistics show teen crime in south Oxnard rising across the board. Teen arrests for auto theft and marijuana use doubled between 1995 and 1997. And 280 teens were arrested for battery last year, twice as many as in 1995.

The problem reached tragic dimensions in 1996, when four boys between 14 and 17 were beaten or shot to death in south Oxnard--all apparently killed by other youths.

In one of the most brazen slayings, a 16-year-old boy was gunned down at the Centerpoint Mall, the aging anchor of the Saviers Road commercial strip.

The killings prompted one police officer to call south Oxnard “the murder capital of Ventura County.” He was not exaggerating: 13 youths under the age of 18 have been killed in south Oxnard this decade.

Now, in what officials are hailing as an all-out effort to stop youth violence, a broad coalition of probation officers, counselors and community members has launched the South Oxnard Challenge Project.

Last year the state awarded the county $4.5 million for an experimental program that has poured government resources into the neighborhood.

Nearly 30 county and city employees are stationed at the South Oxnard Community Center on Bard Road, including probation agents, drug-abuse counselors and psychiatrists.

At nearby Durley Park, officials have established headquarters for the program’s nine teen mentors, who work the phones to schedule counseling sessions and even make wake-up calls to ensure teens get up for school.

Over three years, the program will serve about 300 south Oxnard and Port Hueneme youths who are on probation. The youths will be randomly assigned to the program and receive extra mentoring and counseling. They will still be responsible for paying restitution or completing community service required by the Juvenile Court.

Another 300 will go through the typical channels of probation, without any extra services.

To gauge whether the program is working, a researcher is tracking teens in both groups to determine which have the most success staying out of trouble, staying in school and getting good grades.

The difference between this program and others, officials say, is that this latest effort attacks such underlying causes of juvenile crime as poverty and parental neglect, rather than just meting out punishment.

Michael, rubbing a thick goatee with hands worn rough by his landscaping job, says all the attention has helped. He calls Sandy, his probation officer, at least five times a week just to talk.

“It’s always been just me and my mom,” he said. “Now there are other people I can trust. I like them.”

And by this fall, leaders plan to form an “accountability board,” which would give community members the power to determine sanctions for teen offenders, such as requiring them to reimburse victims or work on graffiti-removal teams.

The lesson would be “that the wrong was done to the community--and the solution lies in the community, not in going away from here and dealing with a probation officer,” said Carmen Flores, who runs the project.

Also, the Navigator mentor program has begun taking teens on outings, including a tour of UCLA and a boxing match. The outings address another key problem in the community: Without viable malls, movie theaters or the Boys & Girls Club that north Oxnard enjoys, there is little for youths in south Oxnard to do.

“Years ago, it was a typical neighborhood,” said Hawk Klingenberger, a mentor and former truck driver whose straight talk seems to give him credibility with kids. “There were dances every weekend at the rec center. Now, everything’s been taken away.”

The youth program, however, is not without its critics. Pat Hill, a neighborhood advisory board member, resigned several weeks ago, upset by the focus on recreation.

“If you take a kid to Disneyland, they’re going to have some fun,” she said. “But what it teaches them is, ‘Hey, if I get in trouble, there’s all these good programs thrown at me.’ There’s no responsibility.”

That criticism has stung program directors, who acknowledge the project is no panacea. Hoping to persuade city and county leaders to pay for the program once the state grant runs out in 2000, they are extremely sensitive to community backlash.

Jess Gutierrez, a project consultant, worked on a state-funded juvenile crime program in La Colonia in north Oxnard during the 1970s. That program had similar community-oriented rhetoric. But torn by neighborhood infighting, it was eventually shut down.

“The best possible outcome is we don’t make the same mistakes,” he said. “The sad part about the war on poverty in the ‘60s is we spent billions of dollars, and you can’t point to any programs that are left.”

Welfare Reform Effort Launched

In a strip mall office off Ventura Road, the war on poverty is on again. Here, 160 state and county officials have launched a county welfare reform effort serving south Oxnard and Port Hueneme.

Of the 8,000 families in the county receiving welfare, more than 1,900--nearly 25%--live in south Oxnard. That situation prompted county officials last year to initiate its CalWORKS welfare reform effort here.

Officials are testing an approach similar to that behind the juvenile justice program: By merging several agencies under one roof, they hope to drastically reduce the hours the poor spend riding buses to social agencies.

Here, state unemployment officials, county welfare workers and, eventually, child-care workers and county nurses will share office space. They meet weekly to discuss individual cases and pinpoint barriers to employment.

Those barriers, officials say, can be severe. Many welfare recipients here do not speak English and most do not have high school diplomas. Making matters worse, the area’s job base is limited. For most, farm work or jobs at fast-food chains are the best options.

But with welfare recipients now facing a five-year limit on federal aid, officials say residents are anxious to enter the job market. In the lobby, lines are forming to get on the computer job-hunt databases. In a resume-writing class, working mothers are busy trading leads on factory job openings.

Virginia Cruz, a 38-year-old mother of four, hopes to land a $10-per-hour job on an assembly line in Camarillo. “I know the clock is ticking,” she said.

About 150 welfare recipients are being tracked to determine whether the program is working and aid the county in developing its plan to take these “one-stop” centers countywide. As of January, about 70 had found jobs at places such as Wal-Mart and Hometown Buffet.

Those numbers are being compared with a pool of welfare recipients using La Colonia’s welfare office, which has none of the special services. There, 47 of 123 welfare recipients have found work. The south Oxnard numbers have encouraged county officials.

“They’re probably about as difficult a population to serve in terms of employability,” said Craig Ichinose, who is tracking the test groups. “But we want to give these people the sense that they can” make it.

Supermarket Arrival Buoys Local Hopes

It’s just a Ralphs supermarket, no big deal to most suburban residents.

But in south Oxnard, the new grocery store on Saviers Road that opened last month is the first big retail store to come here in a very long time.

“That’s a great addition,” said Bob Brown, owner of Harbor Plumbing across the street. “Plus, the lights will be on 24 hours.”

Merchants such as Brown hope the arrival of Ralphs will mark a return of retail to south Oxnard, where the business corridor has been hemorrhaging for at least a decade.

Many trace the community’s decline to the mid-1980s, when the city initiated an aggressive strategy of building shopping centers along the Ventura Freeway. At the same time, a flurry of construction projects added several upscale subdivisions to the city’s north end.

The result, critics say, has been the collapse of the south Oxnard economy, with store owners and shoppers pulling out of the blighted business community. Residents here measure the decline by pointing to what north Oxnard has gained.

North Oxnard has Shopping at the Rose, the River Ridge and California Cove subdivisions, a golf course, a Best Buy and a Wal-Mart; in south Oxnard, JCPenney packed up and left the Centerpoint. Supermarkets and drug stores closed too.

“It’s crazy,” former Councilwoman Jane Tolmach said. “The central city is falling apart.”

Fueling the decline, merchants believe, has been the city’s neglect of streets, sidewalks and other public spaces.

“I went out the other night on Saviers [Road], and there were 27 street lights out between Wooley Road and Bard Road,” says Morey Navarro, a towing company owner who has lobbied the City Council for help. “There’s a lot of good people down here, and we don’t want anything special, just the basic services.”

At Sandy’s Steak and Sea Food, owner Alex Galvan says he has lost $65,000 in the past year, despite a bargain $8.95 sirloin and plenty of personal service. Galvan blames his losses on the area’s reputation for crime--and on inattention from city business leaders.

Each spring, he says, California Strawberry Festival owners decorate the northern half of the city with colorful banners to trumpet the event. But south Oxnard gets only a few of the ornaments, even though the festival is held there, Galvan and others say.

“It’s not right. It’s my neighborhood, and they’re excluding the south side,” Galvan said. “Maybe they’re ashamed, because we don’t have nice streets and landscaping. But that’s [the city’s] fault.”

For their part, city leaders dispute accusations of neglect. According to the city’s street department, for instance, $10 million of the $21 million in city sidewalk and street repairs this decade has been spent in south Oxnard.

All five council members live in north Oxnard--a fact critics cite repeatedly. Yet each rejects the suggestion that city leaders have ignored the south end.

“It wasn’t planned that way,” said Councilman John Zaragoza, who lived on the south side when he was a city administrator.

Zaragoza has been working with Flynn to help south Oxnard merchants organize. Over the short term, he has promised to pursue a landscaping program to spruce up Saviers Road. Meanwhile, City Manager Ed Sotelo, who began work in February, made south Oxnard his first stop in a series of community meetings to introduce himself.

After a recent chat with local residents, Sotelo promised to make new street lights a top priority. As for the long term, city leaders cite the city’s new redevelopment district as a key to revival.

The redevelopment program, approved earlier this spring, could generate $440 million for infrastructure improvements across Oxnard over the next 30 years.

Half those funds would be used to improve south Oxnard, including a program to issue low-interest storefront improvement loans to strip malls on Saviers Road, officials say. The city plans major renovations in aging housing tracts, including Cypress Road, which lacks sidewalks and modern sewers.

While redevelopment districts often prompt serious resistance from skeptics, the project received overwhelming support from south Oxnard residents. “People have finally realized it’s going to take some help,” Navarro said. “There’s hope now.”

Navarro, however, is not banking on city officials to carry through. Dressed in blue jeans, sweaty T-shirt and oily boots, the towing company owner is not your portrait of a slick pitchman. But he may be one of the city’s most influential businessmen.

That is because he is president of the South Oxnard Business Assn., a fledgling group of merchants hoping to give the south side political clout. Navarro--walking door to door at doughnut shops, lumber yards, liquor stores and other small businesses--has signed up 60 members. They want city leaders to pay greater attention to south side businesses.

“We’re blue-collar people,” Navarro said. “Don’t ask me to come in a suit.”

City leaders are taking the group seriously. The Greater Oxnard Chamber of Commerce has announced it is trying to boost its south Oxnard membership, concerned that only four of 30 members on the chamber’s executive committee and board of directors are based in the south end.

The attention from the city and business community has boosted morale on Saviers Road. The new Ralphs has opened. The minor league Pacific Suns baseball team begins play next month. Southwinds now has it own community center, a place where children play and neighborhood patrols meet.

Meanwhile, Flynn wants to convert vacant land at College Park into a driving range and public swimming pool. And, in the latest in a series of unfulfilled plans for the Ormond Beach area, city officials hope to see a sprawling movie production house that would generate thousands of high-paying jobs.

“If we just get a little help from the city,” restaurant owner Galvan said, “we can make it.”

Meanwhile, Flynn aide Paul Chatman, a longtime south Oxnard resident, is spearheading a campaign to clean up the Hueneme Masonic Cemetery, a south Oxnard landmark covered with weeds after years of neglect.

The key now, Chatman says, is for residents to stay organized--and take some of the revitalization effort into their own hands.

Even Cvijanovich, the Santa Clara basketball coach, is weighing in. While watching would-be hoop stars lift weights in the school gym, the coach can’t help but remember all the good kids who have gone off to Berkeley or Cornell--or become big shots right here in Oxnard. And even though the gym isn’t full on game nights nowadays, the Saints still put up winning records.

Then a former student stops by. It’s Navarro, checking to make sure the coach is going to show up to speak in front of his new group, the South Oxnard Business Assn.

He will be there.

Says Cvijanovich:

“I just want to see south Oxnard become part of Oxnard again.”

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South Oxnard: A Pocket of Poverty

The merchants and residents of Oxnard’s south end have joined with city and county leaders to attack the crime, poverty and neglect that threaten to overcome the community.

South Oxnard:

Caucasian: 25%

Asian: 10%

Black: 6%

Hispanic: 59%

Ventura County:

Caucasian: 72.4%

Asian: 3%

Black: 2.1%

Hispanic: 21.4%

South Oxnard facts

Number of people living in South Oxnard: 57,706