Change, Problems Come to Montalvo : Ventura: Longtime community residents blame apartment boom for rise in gangs, drugs. Others say crime worries are exaggerated.

Sandy Schomaker remembers many things about the Montalvo of the 1960s: the scent of the lemon groves on warm summer evenings, bike rides with girlfriends to the neighborhood stores, morning walks to Montalvo Elementary School.

People didn’t lock their doors then, she said. And they didn’t worry about their kids seeing gangs or people selling drugs at the local shopping center, Schomaker said.

Bounded by Victoria Avenue to the west, Ralston Street to the north, Johnson Drive to the east and the Ventura Freeway to the south, it was a great place to grow up, said Schomaker, 32.

Even though she now runs a beauty shop in Montalvo, Schomaker moved out of the neighborhood as an adult and has vowed never to come back there to live.

“Montalvo has changed in the past two decades,” she said. “It has slowly deteriorated.”

Schomaker and other residents and business owners contend that the change began in the late 1960s as the city of Ventura pushed eastward, eventually gobbling up the hub of Montalvo with new housing tracts.

During that housing boom, developers built 35 apartment houses on three streets south of the Bristol Shopping Center on Bristol Road.

The relatively cheap rent in the 6300 blocks of Hummingbird, Whippoorwill and Nightingale streets created what Schomaker calls “the ghetto” of Montalvo.

Police say at least two gangs claim the apartment district as their territory. Gang fights, drug dealing and tagging have become common occurrences there and at the nearby shopping center, Ventura Police Officer Jim Cubitt said.

A rise in petty crime in the apartment area over the past few years prompted police in March to open the city of Ventura’s first police storefront, said Cubitt, who is overseeing the substation. Although bits of Montalvo remain unincorporated, the “bird streets,” as the apartment district is called, are within the city’s boundaries.

Schomaker said the police substation’s arrival is just the latest sign that Montalvo is changing. What once was a quirky, historic outpost of Ventura--the neighborhood was settled in 1887--is slowly being overwhelmed by crime and blight, she said.

*

But one woman who has lived in an apartment on Whippoorwill Street for the past seven years bristled at Schomaker’s description of her home as substandard. Kathy Kohler said some homeowners in the area are snobbish toward anyone who rents and are unfairly blaming all of Montalvo’s problems on the apartment dwellers.

“This is not the ghetto of Montalvo,” said Kohler, 46, a single mother of an 11-year-old boy. “This is a place to live. These are our homes and we are proud to live here.”

Problems with gangs and drugs are “happening everywhere,” Kohler said. “It’s not just a problem for people who rent apartments.”

Blanca Delgado, 39, agrees with Kohler.

Delgado has lived in an apartment on Hummingbird Street for 14 years. She recently opened a produce store at the nearby shopping center in order to provide a better life for her husband and four children, Delgado said.

Her husband, Jose, works two jobs to help pay the bills, she said.

There are many hard-working families like hers who live in the apartments because they can’t afford to live somewhere else, Delgado said. And while she doesn’t deny the existence of crime in her area, Delgado said it is not a bad place to live.

“We are working hard and struggling to survive,” she said.

Opinions about Montalvo seem to be split by how close a resident lives to the apartment district. Some residents who live or work near that area think the neighborhood is going downhill.

One woman recently put a for-sale sign up on her Katherine Avenue home, close to the Bristol Shopping Center, just months after moving in. People who live in the apartments cross her front yard frequently on the way to bus stops and stores, and leave trash in her yard, said the woman, who asked to remain anonymous.

“They just have no respect for property,” she said.

*

But residents who live just one or two streets removed from the Bristol Shopping Center believe Montalvo has not changed much from its peaceful past.

Hope Conroy, who lives in a home on Greenhill Avenue, said she hasn’t noticed any increase in crime. And the Police Department’s contention that crime is on the rise in the area does not intimidate her, said Conroy, a 19-year resident.

“Just because there’s a bunch of kids sitting around a corner talking doesn’t mean they are doing anything wrong,” she said.

“I’ve never had a problem with them. Not once.”

Some are even offended by the presence of the police storefront, saying it is unnecessary.

Paula Larson, 73, has lived in a home on James Avenue for 43 years with her husband, Don. In all those years, Larson said, she has known of only two burglaries on her street.

“If there’s problems, it must all be over (near the shopping center), because it’s real quiet here,” she said. “I think somebody just blew the crime thing up way out of proportion and it irks me. It runs down my neighborhood.”

Montalvo’s split personality has a history going back more than a century. In 1887, administrators at the University of Southern California eyed a grassy knoll in the area as the possible site for a “Collegiate Institute,” a satellite of the more well-known campus in Los Angeles.

“Montalvo will be the Pasadena of Ventura County!” rhapsodized a local newspaper editorialist of the era. But plans for the campus soon fell through. Montalvo was then suggested as the site for a county insane asylum.

*

But a bust in the 1880s building boom deflated those plans, and Montalvo instead became the area’s main railroad depot in the Southern Pacific chain. The tiny community grew up around the railroad, with houses to the north and warehouses and processing plants to the south.

Besides the residential tracts and industrial sections, Montalvo grew over the next 100 years to have its own post office, a church, a restaurant, a motel and a school. In two retail centers today, one can find a pet-grooming shop, a karate studio and a pizza place.

Most of the houses built on Grand Avenue in the late 1800s are gone; the homes that make up the heart of Montalvo today were built in the 1940s and 1950s. Many of the homes have wide, spacious lawns, hardwood floors and big back yards.

Another Montalvo institution was built in 1959: Loop’s Restaurant.

Loop’s is a gathering spot for many Montalvo locals. Several residents go to the aging coffee shop every day for at least one meal, said owner Wolfgang Fritzges.

A favorite of customers is the fake Christmas tree that is up year-round, decorated with Polaroid snapshots of the regulars, Fritzges said. Hope Conroy, who dines at Loop’s two or three times a week, says she likes the chance to meet with neighbors and catch up on gossip.

For Conroy, the time-capsule atmosphere of Loop’s represents the real Montalvo.

“It’s small and people watch out for one another,” she said of the neighborhood. “It’s not like living in L. A. It’s a little town in itself.”

Just 4,620 people make up the neighborhood of Montalvo, according to 1990 census records. About one-fourth of those residents live on unincorporated land that is governed by the county instead of the city.

The median household income is $46,602. About 83% of residents 18 years and older have graduated from high school, while 15% hold bachelor’s degrees, census records show.

About 9% of residents live in poverty, according to the census.

By contrast, the median household income for Ventura is about $40,000. Eighty-four percent of Ventura residents 18 years and older have graduated from high school, and 24% have graduated from a four-year college, according to census records.

Montalvo is more mixed racially than Ventura citywide, with 24% Latinos and about 9% blacks, Asians, and other ethnicities, census records show. Ventura as a whole has 18% Latinos and 5% blacks, Asian and other minorities.

Sixty-eight percent of Montalvo residents are white, compared to 77% in the larger city, records show.

Despite problems, Fritzges said that many residents are proud to live in Montalvo.

“I’ve met families who are three or four generations here, who feel very attached to the area,” he said. “They prefer not to move.”

It is perhaps that pride that has frustrated several attempts by the city to annex the remaining unincorporated bits of Montalvo. Ventura has tried at least six times over the past two decades to include all of Montalvo in its boundaries, officials have said.

But it has been hamstrung by an active core of longtime Montalvo residents who gather up votes to defeat total annexation, officials have said. The dissenters have said they fear their water and sewer rates will go up once they become part of the city.

Fritzges, however, has a different theory.

“I think it’s more of an identity and ego thing,” he said. “It’s pride in their birthplace. Most of them grew up here.”

Fritzges, who bought Loop’s two years ago, knows things are changing.

*

He has been touched himself by a recent increase in petty crime and vandalism. About a year ago, his restaurant kept getting hit with graffiti, he said.

“I had a paint bucket ready and if they did it at night, it was gone by the morning,” he said.

Statistically, violent crime has not increased in the area over the past few years, police say. But police have said the area generates more calls for police service than any other in the city of Ventura. Gang fights, domestic disputes and drug selling generate the most calls, Cubitt said.

But officers who patrol the area believe some crime goes unreported, Cubitt said.

“We knew from people talking that there were drugs and gangs and people were becoming fearful,” Cubitt said. “There were even unreported shootings at night.”

Still, Cubitt said, it would be inaccurate to call Montalvo crime-ridden.

“It doesn’t take too many bullies to hold a neighborhood hostage,” he said. “But the area is salvageable.”

The police storefront is scheduled to be open from noon to 9 p.m. daily. However, it is sometimes closed during those hours when volunteer staff members are unavailable.

Officers Juan Reynoso and Gregory Hayes are assigned full-time to the storefront. They often stay after the office closes, sometimes wearing plain clothes, sometimes riding bicycles, always checking out the area, Cubitt said.

But Corinne Harlan, who has lived in the apartment district for seven years, said she has not seen much difference since the police substation arrived.

“There was a gang fight about a month ago, with kids chasing each other down the street,” said Harlan, a single mother of three. “The police weren’t even there.”

Harlan, 41, said she doesn’t like living in her shabby, three-bedroom apartment, but it is the only place she can afford right now. She works as a clerk at a nearby convenience store to support her family, she said.

She would like to see more police surveillance of the streets, Harlan said. In the meantime, she has learned to stay out of trouble over the years and tried to teach the same to her children, she said.

“You know who to stay away from and who to make friends with,” she said. “I don’t trust anybody over here.”

Montalvo at a Glance

Population: 4,620

RACIAL BREAKDOWN

White: 68% Latino: 24% Asian: 5% Black: 0.6% Other: 3%

EDUCATION (Residents 18 and older)

High school diplomas: 83% College degrees: 15% Median household income: $46,602 Residents living in poverty: 9%

*

Source: U.S. Census