East Ventura Is Placid, but Popular : Suburbia: Many residents say they’re happy with their quiet corner. But some suggest that the area would benefit from a development plan.

Sheri Vincent thinks that her neighborhood is boring.

And she’d like to keep it that way.

“There isn’t really anything to do out here, but that’s OK,” said Vincent, who bought her white stucco slice of the American Dream four years ago and has lived happily near the intersection of Telegraph Road and Petit Avenue ever since. “I don’t want entertainment. I will drive for that. That’s why I live in east Ventura.”

Bounded by the Franklin Barranca on the east and congested Victoria Avenue on the west, the sea of single-family homes loosely called east Ventura has its own unique atmosphere.

“I always call it the part of Ventura that’s really in Orange County,” said Bill Fulton, a Ventura resident who publishes the California Planning and Development Report, a statewide newsletter. “East Ventura is really just a bedroom suburb.”

Of course, definitions of what constitutes Ventura’s eastside differ widely.

Some insist that eastern Ventura starts around the Ventura College area, on Telegraph and Day roads. Others would place the division east of downtown, where the thrift stores peter out and the houses and other types of retail shops begin.

Finally, Ventura old-timers, remembering when Ventura Avenue was the city’s primary neighborhood, sweepingly refer to everything but the Avenue neighborhood as “east Ventura.”

But unlike the city’s other neighborhoods, where bustling commercial districts lie only blocks from quiet residential streets, the community east of Victoria Avenue is suburban sprawl. A few strip malls with supermarkets and video stores, an occasional citrus orchard and the Southern California Edison plant are virtually all that lie between one housing tract and another.

Professional planners say the fields and vacant lots dotting the area could give way to clusters of cheery shops, offices and restaurants, transforming the housing tracts into communities where residents walk and bike their way through most of their errands.

But City Council members say, after more than two decades of concentrating on the city’s eastern half, they’ve now turned their attention to the west, where they hope to enhance such neotraditional communities.

“We’ve pretty much set the direction on where we want to set our efforts for the next 10 to 15 years,” Councilman Gregory L. Carson said. “We’re mostly focusing on the downtown and the (Ventura) Avenue area.”

Which is just as well, as far as Vincent and many of her neighbors are concerned.

Cheryle Estes, a resident of the Woodside Greens tract near Harper Drive and Kennebec Street, said that between her neighborhood’s great Chinese restaurant and all the activities offered through the local elementary school, she’s happy.

“I don’t see the need for any more than we already have out here,” she said. “I like the open areas. It’s nice to keep the space.”

Only 30 years ago, east Ventura was all space--space and citrus groves, with a few homes sprinkled between. City planners looked out over the verdant fields and saw a new suburban frontier, said Everett Millais, Ventura’s top planner.

“The vision at that time was (that) one day, there would be no agricultural land left,” he said. “There would be development from the shore to the hillside.”

Housing tracts began to snake across the fields, aided by construction in the mid-1960s of the Ventura Freeway and the Santa Paula Freeway, which made it easier than ever to commute home to Ventura’s east end.

Home buyers such as Jack Tingstrom, then a manager at GTE, flocked east to purchase the new, affordable units and stayed to raise a family. Now a City Council member, Tingstrom lived at the same address on Concord Avenue until last year, when he moved to an eastside condominium. Tingstrom said his family liked the original home’s price, as well as the idea of being the first people to live in the house.

City Council members began having second thoughts in the mid-’70s about the development drive. Trying to preserve some of the area’s remaining farmland, the council created an agricultural greenbelt that winds about the housing tracts, offsetting acres of sidewalks and single-family units with rows of orange and lemon trees.

Beginning in 1979, the City Council backpedaled even further, putting strict limits on the number of housing units approved for construction each year. From 1990 to 1993, the building of new housing across Ventura came to a screeching halt as the city declared a drought-imposed development moratorium.

But before Ventura imposed the moratorium and after it lifted it, developments continued to sprout along the wide boulevards and neighborly avenues of the east end, interrupted every few miles by a strip mall or corner gas station.

Excluding Montalvo--a community in the area’s southwest end that is one of the oldest neighborhoods in Ventura--the sea of newer tract homes that is east Ventura boasted 38,476 people in 1990, according to U. S. census data.

That means that more than a third of Ventura’s total population, estimated in 1990 at 92,575, lives east of Victoria Avenue.

The median household income in the east end is $46,450. Eighty-four percent of all residents 18 years and older graduated from high school and 22% graduated from a four-year college, according to census records.

By contrast, the median household income for Ventura as a whole is about $40,000. Eighty-four percent of Ventura residents 18 years and older graduated from high school, and 24% hold bachelor’s degrees, census records show.

Racially, the area mirrors the larger city, with 77% of its residents white, 18% Latino and 5% black, Asian or other minority.

A product of the development fever of past decades, the community has in the ‘90s evolved into one of the most adamantly slow-growth neighborhoods in Ventura.

“I think it should cease--all of it,” said Wanda Blomberg, who has lived near the intersection of Rubicon Avenue and Telephone Road since 1977. “I do not want to see any more development.”

Today, almost every development proposal for the east end engenders its own war of words and politics at City Hall. Often, those who fight most intensely against encroaching construction are the homeowners whose own tract sits atop a recently razed fruit orchard.

In fact, one of the most searing battles raging through the east end this year concerns a local developer’s proposal to give the city money and land for a park in exchange for the right to build homes on a lemon grove.

Even residents usually opposed to new construction glow when they speak of eastern Ventura getting a large park. Enthusiasts envision acres of grassy soccer and baseball fields, a shimmering outdoor public pool, perhaps even some golf greens, all sprinkled with happy suburban families cheerily engaging in outdoor sports.

“The kids could really benefit from a park, and we really do need more facilities for the children,” said Don Nesbit, a resident of Flagstaff Court, near the intersection of Jasper Avenue and Telephone Road.

But homeowners who recently poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into their new houses next to the city-owned lemon orchard hold a much less rosy view of the proposed land swap.

Developer Ron Hertel has suggested swapping his 94 acres at Telephone and Kimball roads for the city’s 87 acres at Telegraph Road and Petit Avenue. Both properties are now considered part of the agricultural greenbelt and would have to be rezoned for different uses to make the deal work.

Hertel proposes building a park on his present property, which he would help finance with $2 million of his own money. In return, he wants permission to raze the orchard and construct 437 homes on the city’s land.

Vincent, who moved across the street from the lemon orchard four years ago, is leading a petition drive to require each proposed development in the greenbelt to have a citywide vote before it can be approved. The ballot measure--which draws its most fervent supporters from eastern Ventura--grew out of local opposition to the Hertel proposal.

Other development proposals for the east end also wait in the wings:

* Eric Wittenberg, a Newport Beach-based developer, wants to build 439 homes on 33 acres southeast of Telephone Road between Saticoy Avenue and Wells Road. In return, he pledges to donate 22 adjoining acres to the city for a 400-bed veterans nursing home.

* Local builder Brad Jones hopes to develop 467 homes on 222 acres of lemon orchards just east of North Hill Road between Foothill and Telegraph roads. He promises in exchange to build public tennis courts, an 18-hole golf course and a clubhouse, also on the property.

* Retired schoolteacher Bill Martin has applied to build 60 apartments on 23 acres east of Wells Road and south of Darling Avenue. Eventually, he says, he hopes to construct office buildings, markets and retail stores in addition to the apartments.

Professional planners say any future development on the eastside should be of the type that Martin is proposing--an interspersing of businesses and housing, and not just another formless tract of single-family homes.

“The suburban development standard . . . makes a feeling of neighborhood very difficult, because it is focused on automobiles,” planner Millais said. “In terms of planning principles, it’s been found to be a very inefficient use of land.”

Fulton, of the statewide planning newsletter, insists that the city needs to get serious about charting future development rather than approving east Ventura housing developments piecemeal.

“What Ventura has become is a charming county seat . . . with an Orange County suburb tacked on,” he said. “If you want to turn east Ventura into a place that feels like it’s part of Ventura, then you’ve got to plan that area.”

Wally Wolf and other local business owners would like to see that planning include lots of retail stores.

“I opened this on the east end because there isn’t anything on the east end,” Wolf said of his business, Computer Repair & Maintenance, in the Alpha Beta shopping center on Telephone Road. “The east end’s being built up a lot right now and it needs some good, clean businesses.”

Quickly, Wolf ticks off what he considers a few, pressing local needs.

“We could use a small Target-type store,” he said. “We’ve only got one hardware store out here. We could use another. I personally would love to have an electronics store.”

Bob Osborn and his sons, Ray and Joe, opened the Pet Stop, a supplies and grooming store on Citrus Drive near Wells Road, in February and say their clientele increases substantially each month.

“There’s no other pet supply or grooming facility out here,” Bob Osborn said. “I think this area needs to grow up more. There’s more housing being built and, with more housing, there’s more demand for businesses.”

Former Ventura Mayor Richard Francis couldn’t disagree more. Francis lives in the Woodside Cottages tract, near Telephone and Jasper.

“We live in the ‘burbs and I like that,” he said. “We have the best of all worlds. Downtown is dense and alive. Mid-town is a little less dense and a little less alive. And the eastern end of town is quite less dense and quite unalive.

“People live there for that reason.”

East Ventura at a Glance Population: 38,476 Racial Breakdown White: 77% Latino: 18% Asian: 3% Black: 1% Other: 1% Education (Residents 18 and older) High school degrees: 84% College degrees: 22% Median household income: $46,450 Residents living in poverty: 5% Source: U. S. Census