Bikers to Beamers : Box Canyon: Mansions are cropping up next to older homes and funky shacks as ‘city slickers’ from Los Angeles move in.

On one side of the road is a tin shack and on the other a castle, a sign that things are not quite what they used to be in Box Canyon.

“And the guy in the mansion doesn’t want the guy in the shack there. And the guy in the shack doesn’t want the guy in the mansion there,” said William Windroth, director of the Ventura County Building and Safety Department.

The rock-studded canyon southeast of Simi Valley has been undergoing a transformation from a ramshackle rural community to an upscale hideaway for affluent professionals from Los Angeles. The area has about 700 residents, planning officials said.

Canyon housing prices have skyrocketed in the last three to five years, real estate agent Bob Wood said.

“I’ve gone from selling houses from $300,000 to $2.2 million,” Wood said. “It’s gone from bikers to Beamers.”

Three years ago, code enforcement officials began aggressively pursuing Box Canyon residents who were building substandard housing or who refused to clean up their junk-strewn property.

The stepped-up enforcement was prompted in part by complaints from the newly arrived city slickers, whose idea of canyon life was often different from that of longtime residents.

Although some progress has been made to clean up the canyon, county officials said problems persist. They said they get about 12 to 15 complaints a month about exposed trash or illegal building in the area.

Stubborn property owners and a lack of building code enforcement officers--there are only two in the county--are the main reasons for the continuing problem, Windroth said.

“We have one person for the entire east end of the county,” he said. “It’s tough to keep it covered.”

What makes that officer’s job more difficult, he said, is the refusal of some canyon residents to respond to complaints filed by their neighbors.

“Some of them have the mountain-man or pioneer spirit that, ‘It’s my property, and I’ll do as I damn well please,’ ” Windroth said. “They don’t like people looking over their shoulder.”

That attitude isn’t unique to Box Canyon, he said, but when the campaign to step up enforcement of building codes in the canyon was launched, it was met with more than the usual amount of resistance. One code enforcement officer was shot at, and the other had his tires slashed, Windroth said.

But Windroth doesn’t place all of the blame on property owners. He said the two code enforcement officers involved in the incidents were overly aggressive in dealing with building code violators.

“They had a police mentality,” he said of the officers, who are no longer with the department. “They liked to wear a uniform, and they were very aggressive.”

Windroth said current code enforcement officers sometimes dress in street clothes when working. He said they also tend to walk up to residences instead of driving onto the property.

He said a more sensitive approach is needed because “people up there are so suspicious and defensive.”

Indeed, the canyon is lined with no-trespassing signs addressed specifically to government agents. One sign painted on the side of a boulder warns, “This property is protected by shotgun law.”

Sheriff’s Sgt. Frank O’Hanolon said that on occasion, his deputies have to accompany code enforcement officers when they are serving notice of a complaint to a resident.

“Some of the people up there are of the feeling that building permits be damned,” he said. “But . . . it’s like anyplace else. You have your eccentrics.”

One of those labeled eccentric was longtime resident Phil Shiver, who was cited two years ago for violating the county’s storage laws. A judge gave Shiver the choice of cleaning his hilltop parcel, which was strewn with farm machinery, or going to jail. He chose jail.

“Your land is your life,” the retired construction worker was quoted as saying at the time. “I would teach someone how to make a pipe bomb to protect their rights.”

Shiver did not return telephone calls for this story.

Windroth said that in the past few years, about a dozen county residents have been prosecuted or placed on probation for failing to clean up their property or for refusing to stop constructing illegal buildings. He could not determine how many of those were Box Canyon residents.

Windroth said that if a property owner refuses to comply with requests from building department officials, the county can take action that would make it difficult for the property owner to sell his or her land until the necessary modifications are made.

“That usually gets their attention,” he said.

But if not, he said, the county will take them to court.

Other than a recent rash of burglaries, crime is relatively low in Box Canyon, O’Hanolon said.

“It seems they don’t call police unless it’s a real emergency,” he said. “They tend to take care of their own problems.”

Howard Shirley, who has lived in the area for 13 years, described the typical Box Canyon resident as “one that likes his independence and doesn’t like to be bothered.”

Shirley, 73, said that although the canyon once had a reputation as a dumping ground, it has been cleaned up a lot in the past few years.

“That’s been pretty well taken care of,” he said.

The retired contractor said his father was among the first to build a cabin in the canyon as a weekend retreat for his family in the 1920s. Shirley said he and his wife decided to renovate the cabin and move from their home in Canoga Park to the canyon 13 years ago.

It is the rural character of the canyon and the fact that “we’ve got Saks Fifth Avenue four miles from here” that make it so attractive, he said.