On ‘The Avenue’ : Home Buyers, Priced Out of Other Areas, Are Slowly Changing the Face of Ventura’s West Side

Friends had warned Max and Barbara Gerdts to avoid Ventura Avenue.

With its low-rent side streets, seedy bars and oil-patch machine shops, the city’s West Side was no place for a young professional couple in search of a new home, they were told.

But when the Gerdts’ saw the expanse of Mediterranean-style, pink stucco houses that had recently sprouted along the Avenue’s northern hillside, they knew that something was up in the old neighborhood.

Encouraged by that prospect, the Gerdts did in March what several years ago would have been unthinkable: They sank $200,000 into a three-bedroom home perched above the poorest community in all of Ventura County.

“It’s pretty much the only area left,” said Max Gerdts, a 35-year-old laser optics salesman. “I can’t help but think it will be a fashionable type of district someday.”

That prediction no longer seems an improbable scenario for Ventura’s oldest yet most dramatically changing neighborhood.

A swell of development already has begun to alter the face of the rough-hewn community and, with plans for a California State University campus on nearby Taylor Ranch, Ventura Avenue appears ripe for investment.

Best and Worst

It is a transition, however, that promises to be both a blessing and a curse.

Although widely considered the bad side of town, the neighborhood, known simply as “The Avenue,” evokes reverence from those who call it home. To many, it is Ventura’s backbone, the last repository of homespun character, a cohesive community whose soul would be erased by an upscale face lift.

“We are like the last guard,” said John Powell, 40, an Avenue bicycle mechanic. “We are trying to keep the tradition of the small town alive. This has retained its flavor, its color, its character. The rest of Ventura has become a hodgepodge of grays.”

Even more troubling to some residents is the potential impact on the poor. While rents remain among the city’s lowest, the skyrocketing increase in resale value of homes--20% to 40% over the last year--threatens that refuge.

“Nothing is being done to protect the interests of the folks for whom this is a last resort,” said Pat Driskell, executive director of Project Understanding, a private nonprofit agency on The Avenue assisting Ventura’s homeless. “As prices escalate, they’re going to get pushed out.”

But with little new land in the city left to develop, The Avenue has become one of Ventura’s last frontiers. Its southern boundary is now marked by the Mission Plaza shopping center, and to the north stands the 101-unit Brock Hills Paseo Del Mar tract to which the Gerdts were drawn.

The most imposing changes loom on the west, on a scenic hillside across the Ventura River, where Cal State is hoping to build a classroom complex for 2,000 to 3,000 third- and fourth-year students.

Cal State officials, who are negotiating to buy a 550-acre parcel on the ranch, have indicated that the site might eventually house a full-scale, four-year university.

The increased population and the prestige associated with being near a Cal State campus is expected to encourage development in The Avenue neighborhood, according to an engineering report on the project released last winter.

Those improvements, coming after two decades of declining production in the surrounding oil fields, have been welcomed by city officials as signs of renewed vigor.

“The area’s certainly on the way up,” said Everett Millais, Ventura’s community development director. “I think it’s going to come back and be a really vital part of the city.”

Still, a walk around Ventura Avenue serves as a reminder that much of the motley community has yet to be touched by sweeping changes.

Its 20-block-long heart, full of small, aging homes from Main Street to Stanley Avenue, remains a low-rent retreat for many of the city’s poorest families.

Current estimates based on 1980 Census data show the neighborhood’s most impoverished segment has a median annual household income of $14,355. That area, which lies west of Ventura Avenue, is the poorest of any census tract in Ventura County, where the median household income is $35,659.

Home for Minorities, Exiles

The Avenue also has become a home for minorities and a haven for exiles from an otherwise predominantly Anglo, middle-class city. A large Latino population, a growing colony of young artists, an influx of homeless people, and a Hells Angels clubhouse ensure that no one will mistake this for Ventura’s more homogeneous east end.

That contrast, too, is found in The Avenue’s odd mix of businesses, such as Serene’s Boots & Booze, where a roustabout can pick up a new pair of work boots and a fifth of Jack Daniels in one stop; the Bike and Bird Shop, where customized 18-speeds and South American macaws are sold side by side; and the Moo-Moo, Oink-Oink, Cluck-Cluck Restaurant, which had to disconnect its telephone several months ago because of a deluge of livestock-themed crank calls.

Sometimes it seems that only The Avenue could be home to such colorful fixtures as Walt Stine, 77, a burly, beer-guzzling landscaper, whose 1964 Ford truck is inscribed with the reminder, “Every Tree is a Miracle”; TV repairman Bill Williamson, 56, who is confined to a wheelchair by cerebral palsy and draws friendly waves as he putts along the street in a tiny, electric three-wheel car; and Joe Martinez, 55, who has been sitting on a stoop in front of Russell’s Donuts drinking coffee with a dozen other old-timers every morning for the last 10 years.

“If one of them doesn’t show up, we say ‘What’s wrong with so-and-so?’ ” said Martinez, a disabled plumber. “When we see a stranger, we treat him right, too. We’ll buy him a doughnut or a cup of coffee if he doesn’t have any money.”

The Avenue wouldn’t be complete without Players Poker Club, the only licensed card club in the county; Avenue Pharmacy, the oldest drugstore in the city still at its original location; the B-Z Market, where customers can pay their phone and utility bills; bars with salty names like The Derrick Room and The Rock House; and Johnny’s, a taco stand that draws customers who might otherwise never venture west of downtown.

“We’re real people. There’s no smart alecks or high mucky-mucks down here,” said Mabel Owen, 85, whose advocacy for The Avenue has earned her the title of unofficial mayor. “Those big shots who built their beautiful homes out on the east end think they’re above us or something. But we don’t care.”

Rising Cost of Housing

The rest of Ventura, however, has begun to discover The Avenue, particularly as housing prices elsewhere have boxed out many first-time buyers.

The Gerdts, for instance, who have an ocean view from their second-floor bedrooms, said that comparable houses were selling for at least $50,000 more on the city’s east end.

Likewise for shabby, fixer-upper homes, which--although they have leaped from the $90,000s to the $120,000s along The Avenue in the last year--are still viewed as a good bargain by many young couples.

“I look at it as a diamond in the rough,” said Bill Stewart, a Century 21 real estate agent, who takes prospective home buyers through the neighborhood on a tour that he calls the “Avenue Adventure.”

“It’s the hot new area,” agreed Dave Wallace, a Prime Properties agent, who said that The Avenue listings he carries jumped in price by $5,000 immediately after Cal State announced in March that it would begin negotiations for a university center at Taylor Ranch.

“It’s one of the last places in Ventura where an investor can go in and buy something that makes sense financially,” he said.

That realization is also beginning to sink in with Ventura’s neighbors up the coast, as many Santa Barbarans, priced out in their own city, have found The Avenue to be the next closest refuge.

Kinko’s Professional Publishing Co., a 400-shop photocopying chain, announced plans last month to move its headquarters from Santa Barbara to the former home of Vetco Offshore, a gleaming white building that has stood vacant for two years.

Many others from the north, willing to make the half-hour commute, have migrated to the 231-unit Paseo Del Mar townhouses, located next to the new Brock Hills homes.

Ex-Santa Barbarans

From 30% to 50% of the units are occupied by Santa Barbara exiles, said Dennis Johnson, president of the tenant’s association, who himself is a Santa Barbara police officer.

“People just can’t afford to live up there,” he said, adding that perhaps a dozen other officers in his department have moved to the townhouses. “When I saw the older section here, I had some concerns at first. But The Avenue is changing. There’s a lot of new faces and a lot of new people.”

Migration to The Avenue, Ventura’s original settlement, has long ebbed and flowed with the tides of its fortune.

Nestled along the flatlands of the Ventura River at the base of the Ojai Valley, The Avenue was once a scenic hamlet of farmhouses, apricot trees and walnut groves.

All that changed shortly after the turn of the century, when Ralph B. Lloyd, a young geology student at Ventura College, discovered that the Avenue was sitting on a gigantic pool of fossil fuel.

He credited the find to his father, who had narrowly escaped death while riding his horse on a barren hillside one day as a brush fire swept by. The blaze, instead of stopping when it reached the bare patch, however, was ignited by a gas blowout that sent flames shooting toward him.

The horse was burned to death in the incident, which occurred near what would later be the Associated Oil Co.’s Lloyd No. 22--an oil well that by 1926 was the state’s most prolific.

“Overnight, the quiet agricultural vista of Ventura Avenue became a noisy, bustling area of commerce,” writes local historian Judith Triem in “Ventura County: Land of Good Fortune.” “The hills and flatlands . . . began to sprout oil rigs and businesses.”

Although at the mercy of the industry’s boom and bust cycles, Ventura Avenue thrived over the years, buoyed by the growth of several large petroleum companies and a steady stream of transient labor.

But The Avenue--hemmed in by hills, the river and the ocean--could not hold all that Ventura was to become. By the 1950s, when annual oil production peaked at 31 million barrels, the city had already begun its gradual eastward drift.

As development stretched to Mills Road, and later to Victoria Avenue and beyond, The Avenue began to experience the decay and neglect that has been the fate of so many once-vibrant downtown areas. The oil industry, too, began to sag, hitting 10 million barrels a year in the 1970s, and dipping to about 7 million annually throughout the 1980s.

Area for the Poor

Crime and graffiti surfaced in the community, and many of the small bungalows lining the narrow side streets ended up as low-end rentals.

“When people don’t have roots down, I don’t think they really take care of the property as well,” said Lt. Pat E. Rooney, a 19-year veteran of the Ventura Police Department. “It was kind of a rough place for a while.”

In an effort to halt the slide, The Avenue’s southern tip was placed within the city’s redevelopment boundaries. In 1984, Mission Plaza, the 102,000-square-foot home to a Von’s supermarket and a Thrifty drugstore, became the first large shopping center on Ventura’s West Side.

Over the last several years, many homes along The Avenue have been spruced up by new owners, a growing percentage of whom are living there themselves. Police say that problems are now no worse than in other parts of town.

“When I first started here, everyone stuck their nose up and said, ‘Oh, The Avenue,’ ” said Ted Malaimare, an insurance agent there since 1967, who estimated that the amount of his business coming from The Avenue has doubled to 40% in the last decade.

“It’s completely changed now,” he said. “A higher caliber-type person is moving in.”

For many old-timers, who have long weathered the sneers of those who see The Avenue from the outside, that turnaround has been warmly greeted.

“I think the change is good. I want to see it become a nicer place for people to live, so people here don’t feel like second-class citizens,” said Mayor Jim Monahan, 52, an Avenue native, who runs Monahan Construction Co. and American Welding Co. there but now lives in a more upscale Ventura neighborhood.

But others, who see the area as one of the few retreats for the poor, say that new-found respectability could be a double-edged sword.

“Every city needs an area where the low-income people can get a place and feel comfortable,” said an Avenue native who goes by the name “Tattoo Woody” and until recently tattooed clients at Lady Blue’s Ventura Tattoo Studio. “Pretty soon there’s going to be nothing for them down here.”

A few, though, remember The Avenue’s worst years, and wonder if the dilemma is all that bad.

“I’m just so elated by the progress we’ve made,” said the Rev. Luther McCurtis, 56, who founded the Church of God in Christ on The Avenue 25 years ago. “I guess I was always scared that we would never move up.”