Many Use Campsites as Welcome Refuge During Hard Times

Though she loves the outdoors, Mary Cox never imagined she would be camping this Labor Day weekend. Especially since her camp-out began 10 months ago.

“This is the worst off we’ve ever been, though I don’t feel like we need anyone’s help,” said Cox, 26, who lives with her husband and two children in a small trailer in Camp Comfort near Ojai. “But this is as far as our money took us.”

The Coxes are one of an estimated 200 struggling families and as many individuals who live full time in one of the county’s 40 private and public campgrounds, according to Ventura County homeless advocates.

County officials say most are like Cox, who works as an insurance company secretary in Ojai, making $1,700 a month but whose family cannot afford to move into permanent housing.

Not that outdoor living is cheap. Campsites cost from $270 to $600 a month depending on hookup service fees. And the families have to uproot themselves frequently and move to the next campground on the circuit because stays in the various parks are limited to from seven to 30 days.

Parks officials said the limits are intended to ensure that campsites are available for recreational campers and not to discourage transient campers.

“Most of these people are at an in-between status” in their lives, said Blake Boyle, head of Ventura County Recreational Services. “The vast majority are good citizens and good campers.”

Saturday, state and county beach campsites were packed to capacity by pleasure campers, many of whom had reserved spots last spring for Labor Day weekend.

Campers who were turned away from coastal campgrounds filled inland parks near capacity. In many cases they set up alongside transient campers, who frequent inland campgrounds with longer stay limits.

The Coxes were camped on one of 15 sites at Camp Comfort, occupied Saturday by otherwise homeless people. They landed in the county park after gang violence prompted them to move last year from Bellflower in Los Angeles County.

“I couldn’t go out wearing this shirt I have on,” said Cox, who at that time was renting a $750-per-month apartment. “It’s red, a gang color. I wouldn’t be safe.”

The couple, who had been earning nearly $40,000 a year, decided to move to Oregon. They quit their jobs--she as a word processor and he a school groundskeeper--and spent $5,300 on a used pickup and trailer. Within two months, they exhausted their savings and hit the road with less than $100, she said.

Cox pays a $13 daily campground fee and moves to Lake Casitas Recreational Area one day a month to meet the park’s requirements. Her husband has done sporadic odd jobs but has been unable to find permanent work.

Manager Barbara Warfield said raising children at a campground is difficult but preferable to a tenement. “It’s become a little bit like a neighborhood here. The kids are very special since they are out playing with Mother Nature and not running in gangs.”

Mike Bongard, his wife and two children have lived for a year in a trailer in Dennison County Park near Ojai. Bongard’s family must move after Labor Day because the county did not renew its lease with the park’s private operator, Larry Jensen.

David Jensen, who manages the park for his brother, said he and his brother did not enforce a 30-day limit and permit transient campers to stay indefinitely.

“We didn’t see why these people had to live like . . . hobos, and force them to move out for a day,” said Jensen, whose 36 sites cost $10 a day. “A lot of times people didn’t have the money to pay. We didn’t toss them out. We let them work it off.”

Bongard, 49, is among those who worked for his rent. His family is by no means destitute now, he said, since his wife works and he finds temporary employment.

Until the Lake Casitas Recreation Area changed its stay limits last year, as many as 150 of the 300 sites were taken up at times by people who could not afford normal shelter, said Doug Ralph, assistant park supervisor. Of the families living outdoors, as many as half were housed in tents.

Sheriff’s deputies occasionally had to be called in to quell domestic disputes set off by the tension of living in tight quarters, Ralph said. But the problems were but a small percentage of the group, he added.

Since the tighter restrictions were imposed, no more than 10 sites are generally taken up by transient campers.

Myron Schoenfelder, a truck mechanic, has been living in campgrounds for the past four years with his wife and children after the three-bedroom Ventura house they were renting for $400 a month was sold.

Myron, 35, and his wife, Mary, 33, accepted a broken-down bus from a friend. After overhauling the engine, creating a rear bunk bedroom for their children, installing a kitchen and bathroom and setting up a bed for themselves behind the driver’s seat, the Schoenfelders lived for two years in various county parks.

Schoenfelder, an independent mechanic, said work has been steady for more than a year, which has allowed him to move his family into the Ventura Beach R.V. Resort, where rent runs $600 a month, including pool privileges and other amenities. He probably could afford to move into an apartment, he said, but is holding off because of a planned move to Northern California.

“Living in a bus, we do really well, since we have no utility bills or anything,” said Mary Schoenfelder, who provides home instruction to her three children, ages 7, 9 and 11. “If the kids need shoes, we can afford them.”

Cox, whose son starts kindergarten on Tuesday, hopes that she and her husband will be able to save enough money to resume their trip north. But savings are hard to come by, even when living frugally outdoors.

“You get in a place that’s tough to get out of,” Cox said.