Crowded Trailer Park a Slum, Critics Say : Housing: State officials may take legal steps against real estate investor to improve conditions at Oxnard facility. He blames the residents for deterioration.

Richard M. Walbergh’s critics have called him a slumlord, a Malibu millionaire squeezing out his fortune by emptying the pockets of poor farm worker tenants.

They have accused the 65-year-old real estate investor of turning his back on decay at the Oxnard Mobilehome Lodge, a cramped and crowded trailer camp on the city’s southeast side.

But Walbergh said he has been unfairly cast as an uncaring absentee landlord.

He said he has made only modest profit on the five-acre park since purchasing it nearly 30 years ago. He said he has poured thousands of dollars into correcting repeated health and safety code violations at what affordable housing advocates have called Ventura County’s worst slum.

“When we bought that park it wasn’t a slum and we didn’t make it a slum, the tenants made it a slum,” said Walbergh at his ranch-style Malibu Canyon home. “I really think the tenants have a pretty good deal out there. Even if we were to close the park up, where would the people go?”

State housing officials say that question represents the underlying dilemma in enforcing health and safety law at mobile home parks such as the Oxnard Mobilehome Lodge.

Despite his receiving hundreds of notices to correct health and safety violations since 1985, a search of state records revealed that Walbergh has never been fined or criminally cited for failing to make repairs. But state officials said last week that they are considering legal action against Walbergh to bring the park into compliance.

“We have not taken as hard a line as we should have,” said Jack Kerin, field operations manager for the state Department of Housing and Community Development. “We’re at the point now where something has to be done.”

Kerin warned, however, that legal action against Walbergh could result in mass evictions at the park, where many of the tenants also have been warned to make repairs to their old and broken coaches. The lodge has 1,100 residents and an average of 28 trailers an acre.

“That’s the reason we’ve held off all these years,” Kerin said. “We’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t.”

Opened in 1949 as Punky’s Trailer Court, the park has a history of alleged health and safety code violations.

By 1953, when the name was changed to the Oxnard Mobilehome Lodge, the previous park owner had been ordered to correct drainage problems and remove fire hazards, according to state records. Shortly after Walbergh bought the park in 1964, state officials reported no problems at the site.

It was not until early 1985, when fire destroyed three trailers and left two dozen people homeless, that the state conducted its first significant inspection. Inspectors reported 293 violations by the park and 290 by tenants, according to state records.

In the state’s file on the Mobilehome Lodge, which is as thick as a couple of big-city phone books, the district attorney’s office identified 500 new park violations in 1986. There has been no follow-up since, a spokesman for the district attorney’s office said.

Meanwhile, problems at the park have mounted.

According to state records, inspectors in late 1991 reported 1,197 violations, of which more than half were blamed on the park owner. Two months later, another inspection discovered that 687 of those violations had not been fixed, 510 of them listed as Walbergh’s responsibility.

However, Walbergh has maintained for years that he has done his best to make repairs to the park. In fact, the most recent inspection last month reported 156 violations at the park, with only 108 Walbergh’s responsibility.

“We are spending money in large chunks every month to bring things into compliance,” Walbergh said. “But remember everything breaks there frequently.”

Members of the city’s Mobilehome Park Rent Review Board were so dissatisfied with conditions at the trailer park that last year they denied a rent hike usually considered routine.

Walbergh appealed that ruling to a private arbitrator who last week overrode the rent review board and granted an increase that will raise monthly rents from the $158-$229 range to $163-$236. Some tenants pay more than others because they lease more space.

Walbergh has applied for another rent increase for this year. The city’s rent review board is scheduled to consider it next month.

“We have increasing costs like everybody else does,” Walbergh said. “I don’t think that’s gouging.”

But tenants are outraged at the decision, saying that Walbergh, who according to property records owns millions of dollars of Southern California real estate, has put little of his capital into fixing the trailer park as it has deteriorated over the years. Problems at the park include shoddy electrical wiring, inadequate laundry facilities and roads pocked with potholes.

“He hasn’t done anything for us,” said Luis Teran, a disabled farm worker who heads the park’s tenant association. “He has all the power in the world to make things better, but they have stayed the same if not gotten worse.”

On a recent day, Teran walked through the pothole-plagued park, which sits in the shadow of a defunct drive-in theater.

Poor laborers fill every nook, converting kitchens, patios and toolsheds into places to sleep. Cars bump along rutted roads, near children who take to the asphalt because they have nowhere else to play.

“We have no place to park our cars, there is no park for our children,” Teran said, surveying the camp where tangled webs of power lines crisscross overhead and sometimes shower sparks. “Here’s the real test of how much money has been spent here. Show me where things have improved.”