Pride and ‘the Projects’ : Residents of Westview Village in Ventura Say Their Home Has an Undeserved Stigma Based on Past Violence

There is a deep old stain on Ventura’s Westview Village low-income housing project that does not show.

The pastel walls look newly painted on these 180 one-story clapboard and cinder-block houses west of Ventura Avenue. Young green grass pokes through the beige pallor of the clean lawns. Fresh laundry flutters on breeze-blown clotheslines.

But residents of “the Projects” say their home is stuck with a bad reputation, an undeserved stigma that has clung to this family neighborhood from a few turbulent years in its past.

Wanda Sumner grew up in the Projects from age 4. She moved away for a few years in her late teens but returned to live with her parents.

A few years ago they died, leaving Sumner, 34, to raise her son here alone.

“It’s calmed down around here the last few years,” she said, sitting in a small, well-kept living room surrounded by family photos and two gregarious cockatiels. “When I was a kid I could tell you, ‘Yesterday we had the biggest riot down here, and people got their faces bashed in with a broken beer bottle and cars were blowing up.’ But it’s boring now.”

Sumner said she feels safe after the Ventura Housing Authority took a firmer grip on the Projects.

Gang members used to shoot at each other in the streets and torch unattended cars, residents say. Then, in the early 1980s, the Housing Authority installed street lighting, towed away the burned-out wrecks and evicted the residents who were attracting--and causing--the trouble.

Now, police say, the neighborhood is marred only by sporadic turf fights involving gangs and random vandalism.

On Thursday, residents formed a Neighborhood Watch program to help police discourage crime and keep tabs on gang activities, but they say the Projects already are safer and quieter than they were just seven or eight years ago.

“If anything was to happen tonight, I could pound on the wall and Hilary would know something’s wrong,” Sumner said of her neighbor. “We take care of our own here.”

Hilary, a 43-year-old artist, has lived in the Projects with her two sons for seven years.

She has grown to appreciate the neighborhood’s sense of unity and to resent outsiders’ attitude toward it.

“There are no facades here. People are generally too poor to have one, so you get to know people pretty quickly,” said Hilary, who would not give her last name.

But being from the Projects, or even from the Ventura Avenue area, can be an instant blot on your image, she said.

According to Sumner, outsiders say, “ ‘Oh, are you from the Avenue?’. . . . Their attitudes make me sick. If you’re going to live somewhere, you might as well be proud of it. It may be a gutter or it may be a mansion, but if you live there, you have the right to be proud of it.”

Westview Village fills three blocks along Warner, Barnett, Flint and Vince streets and parts of Olive and Riverside streets.

Encompassing 25% of the city’s 714 low-income housing units, the Projects are the largest and oldest concentration of housing for the poor in Ventura, said Abby Aguilar, who manages the Projects for the Housing Authority. Similar housing for the poor exists in Oxnard’s Colonia Village, she said.

Rents in the Projects, which average $186 a month, range from zero to $831, depending on the needs of the 600 or so residents, Aguilar said.

There is a list of about 1,000 people willing to wait the 18 months that it usually takes to get public housing, and the Housing Authority screens them much more carefully than it used to, Aguilar said.

The Projects’ bad reputation is as undeserved as that of Ventura Avenue, she said. “Maybe we do have a few more people that have a record than they do in the east end, but it’s no worse than any other neighborhood. There might be the occasional broken window on a car or on a residence, but it’s no different from anywhere else.”

There are occasional gang rumbles on the Avenue, in Westpark or after hours outside DeAnza Junior High School, but most of the trouble is outside the Projects, police say. Last year, a police SWAT team broke up a crack house just outside the neighborhood on Olive Street, and a fight six blocks away in Westpark last February ended in one youth being wounded by a shotgun blast.

Crime inside the Projects usually involves squabbles between gang members and nonviolent offenses, no different from incidents that happen all over the city, police said.

“It’s not that big of a crime problem anymore,” said Ventura Police Lt. Mike Tracy. “The Housing Authority has done a lot of work over the past few years to make it a safer place.”

The teen-age gang members who live there now, many with their parents, are less of a problem than brawling predecessors such as the Warlords of eight or 10 years ago, Tracy said.

Back then, “If you were white, you wouldn’t come down here too often. You’d get shot at and beat up,” said Hank Frederick, 27, who says he fought against Latino gangs as a 16-year-old Warlord.

Now, though, “The kids might have changed, mellowed out some,” Frederick said. “But we’ve got a whole new group coming up, kids throwing rocks at you and yelling, ‘Ven-tu, Ven-tu.’ ”

Police often break up public gatherings of the Avenue Gangsters if they know the youths’ probation forbids them to associate with each other, Tracy said.

“They’re always stoppin’ us on the street, just ‘cause of the clothes we wear, man,” said one 17-year-old whose sharp-creased gray twill pants, black Nikes and ironed sweat shirt backed his claim of membership in the Avenue Gangsters. “We’re just kickin’ out here, and they’re always bothering us. We’re not doing anything,” said the youth, who identified himself only by the nickname “Criminal.”

“I’ve never seen them making trouble, they’re always hanging out here with their friends,” said Leonor Munoz, whose son identified himself as an Avenue Gangster. “I’ve known all these kids since they were 10 years old.”

A few younger kids in the Projects assume gang attire and attitude, earning the nickname “Peewees.” They are tolerated but have not been “jumped in” to the gang, initiated by running a gantlet of older gang members’ punches and kicks.

Frank Gonzales, 15, said he’s not sure he wants to join the older gang members. “I don’t want to get in that much trouble,” he said. “I want to have a job.”

Ulysses Lopez, 12, dreams of being a lawyer, not a gangster. “I want to defend people,” he said.

Most residents of the Projects are poor families, single mothers with children and elderly people on fixed incomes, Aguilar said.

“We keep an eye out for everybody,” said a 30-year-old resident who identified herself only as Alicia.

“I like it because I know all the families here in this little section,” she said, smiling, as children tore up and down the sunlit sidewalk between her home and the others on Flint Street. “I feel safe. I can come and go as I please with no problems at all.”

But although Alicia said she fears no violence in the Projects, she has had static with some of her neighbors.

Last year, her two children got into a fight with some of Anthony and Carol Luvetich’s kids. Soon, the parents began feuding too. Names were called and the families eventually quit speaking to each other.

Anthony Luvetich said he and his wife, both 27, are ready to leave the Projects. He is tired of seeing his new pickup truck vandalized by young teen-agers from other parts of the neighborhood, and he is tired of the bad blood among his neighbors, he said.

But he grudgingly admitted that Alicia’s husband recently scared off burglars who were trying to break down the door of the vacationing Luvetiches’ home.

Relations are warming slightly between the families, he said.

Mary Hicks and Rachel Melton have been neighbors almost since the Projects were built.

It shows in their comfortable banter, the easy smiles that cross their faces as they sit in Hicks’ living room and reminisce.

The homes were new and the lawns nothing but freshly seeded dirt when Hicks first set eyes on them in 1952.

“They finished it on a Friday and I moved in on a Saturday,” said Hicks, 86. After a few years’ worth of neighbors had settled in, “It was like one big family. We ate together and played together.”

Melton, 86, moved in about 30 years ago after leaving Oklahoma.

There was a bad period in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s when hoodlums torched her husband’s ’55 Chevy and slashed her neighbors’ tires, but things have quieted since then, Melton said.

But the bad reputation sticks, Hicks said.

“I’ve had people say, ‘Oooh, I wouldn’t live out there,’ ” Hicks said. “But this is the only place I can live and pay rent and eat.”

“They say, ‘I’d hate to live up there. Do you live up there?’ ” Melton said. “But it’s a nice place to live. You make the place to live nice. It isn’t because of the place you live, it’s the people that make the place.”