Pleasant Town Becomes Pleasant City : Camarillo: Coastal climate and affordable prices blend with small-town feeling to lure new residents.

Don Jose Pedro Ruiz must have been pleased by his 1834 land grant from Spain, giving him title to 10,000 acres of prime California farmland. The property, which eventually became eastern Camarillo, spreads across fertile land toward the Oxnard plain.

The property eventually was sold to Don Juan Camarillo, whose descendants (none of them named Camarillo) still own about 4,000 acres. The property was originally named Rancho Calleguas, but gringo rail travelers found it easier to just say “Camarillo,” the name of the family that owned the ranch when the railroad came through.

Today the area is home to the nearly 50,000 residents of Camarillo, a pleasant example of California’s new cities. It is something of a bedroom community, a collection of solidly built housing tracts linked by shopping centers. The streets are clean and the yards well kept, and the serenity is broken only by an occasional leaf blower.

Jim Fitzgerald, 56, the great-grandson of Juan Camarillo, recalls the days when what is now the city proper was generally known as the Calleguas Ranch, “with a prominent Catholic church--the center of the old town--and, of course, that landmark row of eucalyptus trees along the highway that sort of divided the settled area.

“It’s still an agricultural center, with fairly well-controlled growth, some light industry and some commuters,” he said.

Fitzgerald, a retired advertising artist, still ranches (“We were among the lucky ones who mostly escaped frost damage this winter”), but noted that, as is typical in Southern California, farmland is being increasingly hemmed in by development.

“Some of the farmers feel unfairly put upon by the inroads of housing and other building, but I eventually sold a piece of farmland. That’s how it goes,” he said.

Camarillo’s climate, air quality and other good features have resulted in a steady rise in real estate prices. The cost of buying a nice house in the city is now in the neighborhood of $300,000.

Al Bruni and his wife, Dusty, moved to Camarillo in July, 1990, from La Jolla because it is affordable and “it’s real friendly here, with kind of a small-town feeling,” said Dusty Bruni, an accountant for a company that drills water wells. She said they paid “a little over $300,000” for a new two-story, four-bedroom, 2 1/2-bath home on the mostly new north side with a large yard and security and fire alarm systems.

She and her husband, a vice president with Vista Steel Co., needed to move to the area and “wanted Santa Barbara, but couldn’t afford it.”

“You can get a very nice home in Camarillo for plus or minus $300,000,” said Randy Churchill, co-broker with Bill Mason at Mason-Churchill Better Home and Gardens Realty. He cited homes like the Brunis’, with about 2,000 square feet on a lot of 110 by 80 feet.

“The old tracts, which started springing up in the early 1960s, have three-bedroom houses you can get into for about $180,000. The average sale price in November was about $289,000.”

Churchill ticked off the pluses of life in Camarillo:

Good air quality resulting from the Mediterranean climate near the coast, a building height limitation of four stories, a slow-growth ordinance allowing no more than 420 “living units” to be built per year, community involvement in sports and youth activities and a prospering business corridor by the U.S. 101 Freeway, which runs along the south side of the city.

Churchill acknowledged that it has a “bedroom community” feel to it, being a city without a downtown that is mostly surrounded by farmland and mountains.

Many people in the area recall when Camarillo was only a “wide spot in the road,” known mainly for the state mental hospital (which is actually outside the city limits) and the old row of huge eucalyptus planted as a farmer’s windbreak--removed for safety a few years ago--along the 101.

Maurice Hill, a marine biologist, said he drove through the area many times before realizing that a community even existed north of the highway.

“All I noticed was the farms and the eucalyptus trees,” he said. He bought his three-bedroom, two-bath home on the east side last August for $244,000 when his job required him to move north from Huntington Beach.

The house, built in 1986, is in some ways a classic example of what has happened in California over the last 30 years. Below Hill’s house is the now dry Calleguas Creek bed, and behind that is a wide spread of farmland bordered by a eucalyptus windbreak that shelters a large apiary from the northwest wind. It is a peaceful rural scene, with the hills ringing the north side of the city below, and the Channel Islands visible to the west on a clear day.

But, Hill pointed out, in typical California fashion, the farmland below is already earmarked for housing as bulldozers continue to bite the dust for housing tracts.

Asked if he misses the hurly-burly of Orange and Los Angeles counties, Hill said there was plenty to do in the neighborhood, notably biking, hiking and dining out. Does it get boring? “Well, it is quiet. It’s a quiet family town,” said Hill, who is single.

Still, he noted, there is a lot of life in the Camarillo-Oxnard-Ventura triangle, and he takes a scenic 40-minute drive to Santa Barbara occasionally to try a new night spot.

Pat Rose, whose first husband farmed on the plain in the 1970s, has lived in Camarillo, Oxnard and Ventura since 1965. She has “come back home” to Camarillo because “it’s a nice, quiet area. You pay more for the Camarillo address, and you can get a fancier home for the money in Oxnard, but Camarillo is just a better town overall.”

Rose paid $320,000 for her two-story home in the Las Posas North tract--”out in the strawberry fields,” she said, referring to the farms that still stretch out behind the greenbelt that is under construction on the east side of her tract.

She has seen many changes in the farmland of the Oxnard plain since the 1970s.

“It’s still a quiet area of not much but farms and housing. Kind of a crazy city in a way, fragmented with little shopping centers here and there.”

For serious shopping, Rose said, Camarillo residents travel from The Oaks center in Thousand Oaks to the malls of Ventura, which has drawn shoppers from as far as Santa Barbara for many years.

“But still, it’s a distinct community and has a different feel from Ventura and Oxnard,” she said.

The hills behind Las Posas North form something of a jeweled crown for Camarillo, as many of the homes at the top are in the estate class, with prices to match. They cost up to nearly $2 million, realtor Churchill said. The Summit development of $800,000 homes offers valley views on one side and ocean vistas on the other. A sign on Vista del Mar Street advertises a one-acre estate with six bedrooms and six baths.

The big homes are a sure sign that Camarillo has grown up. As Fitzgerald put it: “It used to be a pleasant little town. Now it’s a pleasant little city.”

AT A GLANCE Population 1990 estimate: 49,400 1980-90 change: 30.7% Median age: 34.9 years Annual Income Per capita: $17,044 Median household: $43,169 Household distribution Less than $15,000: 11.1% $15,000-$30,000: 20.0% $30,000-$50,000: 29.4% $50,000-$150,000: 38.7% $150,000+: .8%