County Closes Special Home for Mentally Ill Men

Ventura County mental health officials Wednesday shut down a home for three mentally ill young men in Thousand Oaks after discovering that they had held a late-night beer party that was broken up by sheriff’s deputies.

Mental health director Randy Feltman said the three men, all participants in the county’s semi-independent living program, were removed from a home on Valley High Avenue after the beer bash Tuesday night. Mental health authorities said they plan to close the house permanently.

The men had been warned that drinking liquor and allowing overnight visitors were against house rules, Feltman said.

“They were being irresponsible tenants, and we were acting like a responsible landlord,” Feltman said. The men will probably end up at a board-and-care home, which offers more supervision, he said.

The home was the site of a unique semi-independent living program that has been the target of bitter attacks from Thousand Oaks residents, including city officials, who complained that they were not contacted when it was opened in December.

In January, a group of 228 outraged neighbors signed petitions calling for its closure.

The home is the first to be closed since the county began offering the semi-independent living program 10 years ago, Feltman said. There are 15 other homes in the county.

County officials argue that adults who have mild forms of mental illness can successfully live on their own if they have light supervision and counseling. Residents of the homes are screened and encouraged to pay rent, cook meals and arrange their own transportation.

Although the Valley High residents did not have full-time supervision when the home opened in December, complaints from neighbors prompted the county to send a caseworker to visit the house each day.

On Wednesday, word about the closure spread quickly through the neighborhood.

Neighbors who wanted the home shut down said they were pleased with the county’s decision, but said it was long overdue.

“It was intolerable. They’ve had lots of parties,” said Carol Schattke, who lives four doors away on Ide Court. “I’m very happy that mental health did something about it. If they didn’t, we would have taken other steps to get them taken out somehow.”

Betty Payson, another neighbor, criticized the county’s decision to open the home. She said it did not fit into the community of longtime homeowners and young families.

Payson said she has called deputies several times to complain about loud noise at the home.

“I have sympathy for those kids, but they just cannot be put in an area like this,” said Payson, who has lived in the neighborhood for 30 years. “We’re really a family oriented area.”

Feltman blamed failure of the home on a decision to open the facility in a neighborhood where most of the neighbors owned their own homes and were extremely protective of the area. In other areas, the presence of a group home for mentally ill people has not been disruptive because there were other renters nearby, he said.

He said the Thousand Oaks neighborhood “has never been a hospitable environment. . . . The residents have had to be more isolated. It made it difficult for the residents to feel like part of the neighborhood.”

Lou Matthews, spokeswoman for the Alliance for the Mentally Ill, has defended the Valley High residents from attacks by the neighbors. But she agreed that the residents should have been removed because they broke house rules.

Matthews said she is worried that closure of the home will unfairly tarnish other mentally ill people as irresponsible and unable to manage independent living.

“I see many mentally ill people who are able to live in the community without problems,” she said. “It’s unfortunate they placed people who apparently couldn’t do that.”