Equestrian Lifestyle Is Reined In by Development : Thousand Oaks: Some residents say they feel hemmed in and are ready to leave. Others praise planners for maintaining trails despite growth.

It is a sign of the times in once pastoral Thousand Oaks: Homeowners in a subdivision built around a 12-acre equestrian center have asked for city permission to reclassify the land and possibly tear down the stables.

The reason? No one uses it anymore because mushrooming city development has shut off access from the stables to the city’s extensive network of trails. The last horse was moved out at least four years ago.

In other equestrian neighborhoods across Thousand Oaks, horse lovers say they are beset by similar problems. While many riders say the city’s aggressive policy to preserve open space has helped maintain its equestrian ambience, others say they are hemmed in by housing tracts and heavy traffic. They talk of leaving for greener and emptier pastures.

“It just wasn’t safe to ride our horse, because of all the development,” said Bruce Baum, president of the Rancho Conejo Homeowners’ Assn., which is seeking to reclassify the use of the equestrian center property on hilly land between Newbury Road and the Ventura Freeway.

Baum said the center attracted him to move to Rancho Conejo nine years ago, although few residents other than himself boarded horses there. “You’d see horses walking on the roads. You could cross Ventu Park and Lynn roads all the time” to reach the trails, he said.

But he said traffic became so heavy that the streets were too dangerous for horses. Residents say the only animals that frequent the center’s 38 stalls now are coyotes that find safe haven there and, neighbors say, may be eating their small pets.

Baum said the homeowners group now hopes that someone will build a self-contained equestrian center on the site so that neighborhood children can learn riding, even if they can’t leave the site on horseback.

Or as an alternative, the group has asked the city to tear it down and permit the construction of a house in its place.

Principal City Planner John Prescott said the equestrian center was “probably a mistake from Day 1” because the 38-member neighborhood association was not large enough to support it.

Elsewhere in Thousand Oaks, equestrians are holding their own. Neighborhoods such as Lynn Ranch or Waverly Heights are known as horse communities, where ranch-style homes often have a horse trailer parked in a carport and at least one corral in the back yard.

But explosive growth has carried the city far from its days as a bucolic horse and ranching community. It was an era when an old-timer like Bob Olson could ride out the back gate of his house, off Janss Road, and trot along fields of sugar beets and tomatoes up to Cal Lutheran University for a Sunday morning picnic.

The land between Olson’s house and the university, where the crops once grew, is now blanketed with tract homes and severed by the Moorpark Freeway. In the 30 years Olson has lived in Thousand Oaks, the city’s population has grown more than 30 times. According to the U. S. census, Thousand Oaks had fewer than 3,000 residents in 1960. It grew to 35,000 in 1970, 77,000 in 1980 and 104,000 in 1990.

Prescott said Thousand Oaks has now reached 75% of “build-out,” the point at which all space available for development is used. In another 15 or 20 years, he said, when construction ends on the city’s last massive subdivisions--Lang Ranch, Dos Vientos and the Shapell property--development will reach about 90% of the city’s capacity.

Some horse lovers aren’t going to stay that long.

“When I first moved to Newbury Park in 1968, we would just jump on our horses and ride,” said Paulette Gino last week, as she watched her daughter practice horse showmanship with her 4-H Club. In the horse ring, 10 young 4-H equestrians led their horses in formation as evening traffic on a nearby freeway buzzed by.

“It’s a city now and I don’t want that,” Gino said. “I want my daughters to grow up with the same thing I had. It’s becoming another San Fernando Valley.”

So next month Gino and her family are moving to Oregon where her two daughters, Susan and Amy, can keep horses on their 14 1/2-acre property and ride anywhere they want.

Two other women watching nearby, also mothers of 4-H riders, said they, too, are moving.

Becky Haefliger of Thousand Oaks said she has had enough of the traffic, which spooks her horse.

“To get to the trails I have to go down this road and then over the freeway and I’m afraid of the trucks,” she said. She’s moving to Auburn, northeast of Sacramento, to a bigger lot where she can keep horses.

Linda Rogers of Newbury Park said she and her husband are seeking to buy a 10-acre farm in Colorado Springs, Colo.

The three women said a fear of crime and a distaste for dirty air have fueled their desires to leave Thousand Oaks. But all said their love of horses is the main motivation.

Thousand Oaks has grown too crowded and too expensive for horses, they said. They all seek towns similar to Thousand Oaks as it was 10 or 20 years ago, where they and their children can just jump on a horse and ride.

“It’s almost a losing battle,” said Elaina Gardner, who moved to Thousand Oaks 17 years ago when her native Orange County got too crowded for horses. “During Conejo Valley Days, everybody puts on their cowboy hats and talks horses,” she said, referring to the annual fair that hearkens back to the city’s rural history. “But after that. . . .”

Elaina’s husband, Gerald, an equine veterinarian, said he has seen the number of horses decrease ever since they moved to Thousand Oaks. He said the decline has been especially great in the last two years, which he attributed both to continued development and the bad economy.

“A lot of places that at one time had a full barn now have a partial barn or no barn at all. People who used to have back yards full of horses now have one or two, or none at all,” Gerald Gardner said.

Still, officials and horse owners say, the equestrian community in Thousand Oaks is far from moribund. Many praise city planners for doing their best to maintain horseback riding areas despite development that they recognize is inevitable.

“As unhappy as I am to see the development, I cannot say enough positive things about how hard the city is working to maintain open spaces,” said Kris Salmon one evening as she rode near the freeway on a friend’s gray Arabian. “Sometimes it means we have to take more streets, but that’s not going to deter us from riding.”

Prescott said Thousand Oaks’ horse community is healthy and will remain so.

“It does have a critical mass. I don’t see it getting any smaller or its influence declining any,” he said.

The community includes about 2,500 horses scattered throughout Thousand Oaks and Newbury Park, said Gina Smurthwaite, president of the local chapter of Equestrian Trails Inc. The national nonprofit organization works for the preservation of riding space.

Smurthwaite is one who lauds the city’s trail system. But she said some riders have trouble reaching the trails.

Traffic has made it nearly impossible to cross beneath the Ventura Freeway to reach the Santa Monica Mountains on the other side, she said. Some horse neighborhoods are shut off now from trails except by routes crossing busy streets. And although the city has installed horse crossing signs on some streets, Smurthwaite said, drivers almost never stop.

“There’s always some idiot honking and waving, even though they are trying to be friendly,” she said. The drivers don’t realize that a horse can bolt with fright at the sound of a horn, she said.

Jeff Alexander, owner of T.O. Corral feed and tack store in Thousand Oaks, has been one of the most active people in trail preservation efforts.

When he first opened shop 21 years ago, Alexander said, “horses and livestock were as much a part of the daily routine as getting on the freeway and commuting to the Valley to work.”

Now, he said, the horse community has had to learn to band together with hikers and mountain bikers to lobby for trails. He said the coalition has been successful.

“Compared to Los Angeles County, we’ve got a heck of a lot more clout and a heck of a lot more access to the ears of the community,” Alexander said.

He said horse riders contribute an estimated $6 million a year to the local economy.

Not all of Thousand Oaks’ horse owners decry development.

Although the sugar beet and tomato fields are gone, Olson said he can still reach miles of trails from his house.

“I can go out my back gate and ride for three to four hours,” the 70-year-old horseman said.

Smurthwaite said horses contribute to the “semi-rural” atmosphere that attracts many to Thousand Oaks.

“You can’t get more rural than horses,” she said. “It slows development down a little bit. And keeping horses out here keeps us from becoming another San Fernando Valley.”

But the equestrian community will never have the size or clout that it once had. Developers aren’t building “horse communities” anymore, so the percentage of homeowners who keep horses is declining as Thousand Oaks continues to grow.

Gloria Smith, who lives in the city’s largest horse development at Lynn Ranch, said she knows her neighborhood is unusual.

“They’ll never build another place like this again,” she said, “where you can own half an acre and a horse and be half a mile from the busiest freeway in the country.”