Secluded Valley Tries to Keep to Its Rural Roots : Residents fear influx of newcomers will bring suburban sprawl to Ventura community.

By DENISE HAMILTON

April 16, 1989 12 AM PT

<i> Times Staff Writer</i>

These days in the Santa Rosa Valley, trucks hauling hay share the road with cement mixers, and giant wooden skeletons of half-built homes sprout where avocado and citrus groves once stood.

But don’t look for garden-variety housing developments in this 24-square-mile valley, which is wedged between Moorpark and Thousand Oaks but isolated from the rest of Ventura County by hills.

New homes here fetch from $500,000 to $1 million. Minimum lot size is an acre, and Spanish chateaux sit cheek by jowl with Tudor mansions and Santa Fe-style adobes. Many have long driveways, wrought-iron gates and guest houses. Some straddle mountain peaks with stunning views. Others have swimming pools, tennis courts and stables.

When Dr. Jeffrey and Karen Sycamore moved here last year from Thousand Oaks, they opted for a Country French-style, custom-built house. The Sycamores, who were drawn to the area’s rural, horsy ambiance, typify the new breed of residents who are making the little-known Santa Rosa Valley an increasingly popular place to live.

“There aren’t many areas that are in the country like this and yet still close to the city,” says Karen Sycamore, who is rearing six children from ages 4 to 14 amid horse trails and grassy hills.

Short Drive to Work

Best of all, she adds, her husband is only 15 minutes away from Los Robles Regional Medical Center in Thousand Oaks, where he works as an anesthesiologist.

Fred Meyer, who heads the Santa Rosa Homeowners Assn., bought a 5-acre spread 15 years ago after numerous squirrel-hunting expeditions to the area.

“I wanted to have a ranch and I wanted to enroll my kids in a 4-H program,” said Meyer, a physics teacher at Moorpark College who harvests a small avocado crop each year and keeps horses, pigs and chickens.

Betty Staben, by contrast, is among the old-timers in this valley of about 2,000 residents. She and her husband moved here in the late 1940s when it was predominantly agricultural, and have raised avocados and citrus on a 35-acre ranch ever since.

“Farming is our life. I was born on a farm and so was my husband,” Staben said.

Transition to Residential

But times have changed, and today the Santa Rosa Valley is a checkerboard of small farms and homes on acre lots, and friction between agriculture and residential growth is becoming an increasingly hot topic.

“Forty years ago, there were only six houses on our street,” Staben said. “But now, we have houses on three sides of us and you can’t continue to farm with people all around you.”

Staben’s plight illustrates the transition under way in the Santa Rosa Valley, which is bounded by Moorpark Road on the east, Yucca Street on the west, Presilla Road on the north and the base of the Wildwood Park foothills on the south.

For one, property values are going up faster than a crop of lettuce after a spring rain.

“The lots out there have gone crazy,” said Santa Rosa Valley realtor Jack Chiurazzi. An acre lot that cost $15,000 in the early 1970s now goes for $300,000. For existing homes, “absolute rock bottom means half a million dollars and 2.5-acre spreads can easily fetch more than $1 million,” Chiurazzi added.

Fear Suburban Sprawl

Already, some residents say the area has become a ranchy, rural Beverly Hills where property owners erect architectural marvels of 7,000 square feet or more on their acre parcels. And much as in Beverly Hills, some of the new homes are vastly over-scaled for the size of the lots on which they sit, longtime residents complain.

Plus, after watching nearby Moorpark and other cities gobble up land and disgorge what they consider suburban sprawl, longtime residents and recent arrivals are worried that high-density builders are turning a hungry eye to their hidden valley.

Concern about the valley’s future is prompting some hard analysis in Ventura County government, where planners are studying measures that could boost population in the Santa Rosa Valley by 25%. A group of farmers has petitioned the county to rezone their land from agriculture to residential, and an environmental impact report is under way.

But the proposal that has sparked the most debate is a plan by the family of actor Joel McCrea to build a 250-unit housing development, a small commercial center with a “village” theme and a trolley line that would close a portion of Moorpark Road.

The McCrea property lies just inside the city boundaries of Thousand Oaks, but the project would adjoin homes in the Santa Rosa Valley.

Closing Moorpark Road

The proposal would also require the closing of Moorpark Road at the Norwegian Grade, an incline reportedly named after the Norwegian families who settled there during the last century. It is the main thoroughfare for Santa Rosa residents traveling to Thousand Oaks to work or shop.

(There isn’t so much as a convenience store, industrial park or coffee shop in the exclusively residential Santa Rosa Valley.)

Homeowners’ President Meyer recently enlisted neighbors to write letters to Conejo Valley merchants warning that they will lose business if the Norwegian Grade closes.

But Peter McCrea, who is handling the development for the McCrea family, maintains that the road should be closed because it’s dangerous. At any rate, he predicts that the inconvenience would be minimal--a 2 1/2- to 5-minute detour at worst.

Hearings are scheduled later this year, Thousand Oaks planners say, but meanwhile, Ventura County Supervisor James R. Dougherty, who represents the Santa Rosa Valley, has come out in opposition to the grade’s closure and says he plans to monitor the McCrea proposal closely.

‘Preserve the Openness’

“We want to preserve the openness out there, and if we have development, we want it to be open and spacious so that it’s not just another suburb,” Dougherty said.

That would please Carol and Jack Mogler, who moved to the Santa Rosa Valley almost three years ago from Thousand Oaks with their children, now 14 and 17 years old.

She is a homemaker; he manages two manufacturing companies in Camarillo. They own a 5,400-square-foot home.

“We wanted more space around us, and this reminds us of back East where we came from many years ago,” Carol Mogler said. “It’s a wonderful community and very friendly. Peaceful. And we’re just not that far from anything.”

AT A GLANCE Population

1988 estimate: 60,000

1980-88 change: 21.1%

Median age: 34.5 years

Racial/ethnic mix

White (non-Latino): 79.9%

Latino: 13.6%

Black: 1.5%

Other: 5.1%

Annual income

Per capita: $15,378

Median household: $40,595