Neighbors Assail Townhouse Plan’s Wall : Oxnard: La Colonia residents say the barrier is designed to separate rich and poor. The builder says privacy is the goal.

A proposal to build 110 townhouses near Oxnard’s La Colonia neighborhood has angered some residents who say a wall surrounding the project would segregate the new homeowners from the poorer Latino neighborhood.

“The people say they will knock the wall down if they build it,” said Esther Lara, president of a group representing 430 subsidized housing units next to the site of the proposed gated community.

Lara and other members of La Colonia Village Tenants Improvement Assn. said Tuesday that the townhouses will be welcomed into the neighborhood. But they said the six-foot surrounding wall is viewed as an attempt to separate the rich from the poor.

“We are all humans,” Maria Gutierrez, treasurer of the group, said in Spanish. “Just because we are poor and Mexicans, they want to build a wall between us.”

The project proposed by Standard Pacific of Ventura won approval this month by the Oxnard Planning Commission. A final decision on the project will be made by the Oxnard City Council on Sept. 17.

The project would be built on 10 1/2 acres of agricultural land on Colonia Road near Marquita Street that is being used to grow strawberries. The townhouses would be priced between $150,000 and $190,000.

Officials said construction would begin in January, and the first residences would be sold next fall.

City officials and the developer of the project say the wall is not meant to segregate residents but to provide privacy and security for the new homeowners.

“We are really not trying to build a barrier that is going to be offensive,” said Steve Boggs, a spokesman for Standard Pacific of Ventura, which is based in Westlake Village.

Assistant city planner Alejandro Herrera said the project would be the first upscale development in the mostly working-class Latino neighborhood. He said he has received a few telephone calls from residents who complained about the wall.

“I guess it’s an issue anywhere a gated community is proposed,” he said.

The wall would be made of brick but would also include portions of wrought-iron fencing in areas where the townhouses face Colonia Road, Herrera said.

Across the street from the project site on the south side is a row of city-subsidized apartment units. On the west side is a church and an elementary school.

Boggs said he heard complaints about the wall months ago. But he said he thought that he had addressed the concern by including wrought-iron fencing along the southern portions of the project.

Harold Ceja, president of La Colonia Neighborhood Council, said he believes that the project should be completely open to the rest of the neighborhood.

“I disapprove of the wall,” he said. “The developers are not thinking about the people of La Colonia, they are just thinking about themselves.”

Lara, Gutierrez and others said they plan to speak out against the project when it comes before the City Council. “We all pay the same taxes, and we all should have the same rights,” Gutierrez said.

Residents say the wall and plans to move the Zoe Christian Center, the county’s largest homeless shelter, into La Colonia show that many people in the city have negative images of the neighborhood.

“Everyone thinks La Colonia is ugly,” Lara said. “They have a bad image of it.”

But she points out that doctors, lawyers and other professionals grew up in the neighborhood.

“Just because we are not blond and don’t have blue eyes doesn’t mean we don’t have rights,” Gutierrez said.