Streets Are Next Home for Many : Poverty: Officials say thousands of residents who qualify for federally subsidized housing reside in garages or hotels or share homes with others.
Thousands of Ventura County residents have failed to profit from the region’s increasing affluence and are living in overcrowded or substandard housing to keep from joining the 2,000 to 5,000 who already are homeless, officials say.
No government agency has kept track of the number of residents who have had to move in with relatives or friends, or resort to other means, such as living in trailers in county campgrounds, to keep a roof over their heads.
But housing officials say that thousands of residents who qualify for federally subsidized housing are living in garages or hotels or sharing homes with others while they wait up to five years for available apartments.
Many of these people are the working poor who earn the minimum wage of $4.25 an hour to clean offices, pick crops and prepare food.
“For every homeless person, there are 10 other people living in real marginal situations, just hanging on by their fingernails,” said Nancy Nazario, the county’s ombudsman for the homeless.
Even in Simi Valley, the county’s most affluent city, some single-family houses are shared by as many as four or five families.
“It’s shocking--I can’t believe people live like this in Ventura County,” said Otilia Pacho, a teacher’s aide at Sequoia Junior High in Simi Valley, who recently discovered that a student was living with six other children and three adults in a garage and sharing a bathroom with 15 others.
Ventura City Councilman John McWherter predicted that the 1990 census will show a considerable overcrowding problem in some sections of the county.
“Six years ago, when I walked the precincts to be reelected, it was unusual to find three voters living in the same house,” McWherter said. “But two years ago, when I was running again, it wasn’t unusual to find five voters in the same house.”
The shortage of affordable housing probably will worsen as wage earners who cannot afford to buy homes continue to flood one of the tightest rental markets in the state and push up prices, said Dick Fausset, a spokesman for the Ventura County Economic Development Corp. A typical two-bedroom apartment already costs about $730 a month, according to the Building Industry Assn.
Although the median family income in Ventura County shot up 85%, from $23,612 in 1980 to $43,600 in 1989, only 12% of the county’s residents could afford to buy a home last year, according to the California Assn. of Realtors. The median price of a home was $247,619, making Ventura County the second most expensive place in the state for housing after the Bay Area, said association spokesman Jeff Hershberger.
As housing costs continue to soar out of reach of the least affluent, “the lucky ones will keep doubling or tripling up,” said Rochelle Stephens, deputy director of the county’s Area Housing Authority. “Then there are those who will become homeless or just give up and leave the area.”
Loretta, 21, a native of Ventura, and her husband, James, 32, are among those who have reluctantly given up searching for affordable housing in Ventura County and plan to move inland.
Unable to pay market-rate rents because James was laid off from his job as an oil worker, the couple and their 6-month-old baby were breaking the rules and staying with Loretta’s father in federally subsidized housing until someone reported them last month. Now they are staying in a homeless shelter while they wait for James’ tax refund, which they will use to move to Bakersfield, where rents are lower.
“I grew up here, and I’d like to stay,” Loretta said recently. “But I’m not going to have any kid of mine grow up on the streets.”
Others aren’t so lucky. With only one shelter bed available during the winter for every 10 homeless people, the county’s riverbeds, back roads and fields have long been illegal campsites. There are about 300 beds available countywide in the winter, and there are 2,000 to 5,000 homeless people, according to estimates from various social service agencies.
“The biggest problem is there is no place to send them,” said Martharuth Lefever, emergency services director for the American Red Cross.
The city of Ventura has appropriated $400,000 for shelters, but the crisis over water, brought on by a drought entering its fourth year, probably will delay any new construction, Mayor Richard Francis said.
“At this point, the money is in absolute limbo,” Francis said.
Longtime area residents Kimberly and Randy Wood have avoided becoming homeless by paying $400 a month to live in a tiny trailer in a county campground. Since July, when Wood lost his job as a compressor mechanic for an oil company, the couple and their two children have been parked at Camp Comfort alongside other impoverished families.
The Woods, who receive monthly welfare benefits of $800 while they look for work, do not have a car, running water or a refrigerator. Kimberly, 27, frequently walks a mile to the supermarket, stores supplies in an ice chest and washes dishes in the communal restroom. The family’s living quarters are so cramped that 10-year-old Christie and 12-year-old Joe Mac, who is deaf, must share a twin bed.
“Sometimes I feel like I’m in a box and I’ll scream if I can’t get out,” Kimberly said.
A report released last week by the California Coalition for Rural Housing concluded that 16,263 low-income housing units should be built annually in the county. But the report said only 437 were constructed last year. The study did not count several thousand rental units that are federally subsidized.
Critics of county and city housing policies blame politicians for failing to balance slow growth with aggressive efforts to develop affordable housing for families such as the Woods.
“The county for years has been sleepy, provincial, slow to get with it--that’s been part of its charm,” said Rodney Fernandez, executive director of Cabrillo Economic Development Corp., a nonprofit group that has built 427 units of low-income and farm-worker housing since 1975. “But now that urban problems are mounting, people don’t know what to do about it and there’s still a strong sentiment that’s against letting ‘those people’ move in next door.”
County Supervisor John Flynn, whose 5th District includes poor areas of Oxnard, conceded that the county “has not done a very good job of managing the problem.”
But Supervisor Maggie Erickson said there is also a lack of low-cost housing in areas that have allowed virtually unbridled growth, such as Orange County.
“No place in our country has resolved the problem of how to provide housing for service workers in affluent communities, and Ventura County is no exception,” Erickson said. “The county does not have the resources to buy land and develop housing. It’s up to the cities.”
City housing officials, in turn, say that obstacles such as expensive land prices, limited federal funding and public opposition prevent them from easing the shortage by building enough apartment projects for low-income people.
“We’re making some strides in developing affordable housing,” said Sal Gonzalez, director of housing for Oxnard, which owns 780 low-rent apartments. “But there’s nowhere near a sufficient supply to be able to meet the need.
“These people have no choice but to live in crowded conditions.”
Farm worker Enrique Garcia and his wife and four children were paying $475 a month for a garage in La Colonia, Oxnard’s teeming barrio. Outside the garage door, one of the 15 other tenants on the property had rigged up an outhouse. One day late last year the flies and the stench got to be too much for Garcia, and he complained to California Rural Legal Assistance, a nonprofit law firm for farm workers and other rural poor.
Garcia and his family were given priority for federally subsidized housing because their housing situation was considered dire. Today, they pay $239 for a three-bedroom cottage with a back yard and a washer and dryer in La Colonia.
But Marco Antonio Abarca, the CRLA lawyer who helped Garcia, acknowledges that hundreds of other families still endure living conditions that the Garcias escaped.
