Down on the River : Days May Be Numbered for Vagabond Village in Ventura

The shantytown pokes out through the brush and the tall grass of a dusty riverbed, an old squatters camp swollen over the years by hard luck and hard times into Ventura County’s largest homeless community.

It stretches more than two miles up the Ventura River, unfolding in a collection of plywood shacks and nylon tents, housing as many as 200 people.

Homeless advocates say this vagabond village is perhaps the last of its kind in Southern California, a stubborn holdout in a day when homeless encampments elsewhere are being banished and bulldozed.

Those who work closest with the homeless have argued for years that something should be done about this place called the “river bottom.” But the money for any alternative has never been forthcoming.

Now, however, the homeless advocates have been joined by a new coalition of environmentalists and political leaders in Ventura who say they plan to push harder for a solution to what they see as a monument to decades of community apathy.

“The absence of direction is allowing this to continue,” said Ventura City Councilwoman Rosa Less Measures, who is leading the push to pull the homeless out of the riverbed. “It’s a depressing, discouraging, sad omen for our society, and I’m committed to doing what I can to make the changes where all will benefit.”

Measures wants to create a campground where the homeless can live and receive help from social service agencies. At the same time, she wants the city to adopt a policy of “zero tolerance” toward camping on all other public property, in effect outlawing river bottom camps.

Some homeless advocates worry that the new campground proposal could turn out to be little more than talk. And beyond the question of whether a new campground will ever become reality is the nagging question of how river bottom residents feel about the issue.

“Most people down here probably won’t go for it,” said Craig, a 32-year-old Burbank native who lives in an oil field lean-to on the shantytown’s north end. “I’ll stay down here as long as they let me. If I could live this way the rest of my life, I would.”

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From a distance, it could be mistaken for a city dump; thick piles of garbage growing up here and there, rusted shopping carts buried deep in the white sand floor. Packs of dogs roam the place, picking through the squalor.

This place has been a friend to the homeless since at least World War II, a hobo jungle created by railroad tramps below the point where the Southern Pacific train trestle straddles the Ventura River.

Today, homeless advocates say the community is as large as it has ever been, accounting for roughly 10% of the estimated 2,000 homeless people in Ventura County.

Theirs is a primitive place: No electricity. No bathrooms. No running water. Only a river polluted by decades of use as a latrine.

And yet, despite its tired and tattered appearance, there is order in this jungle. Troublemakers are unwelcome and have been run out in the past. No one person or group rules the river bottom, but folks look out for each other. There is a sense of community and a code of conduct.

An old-timer named Pack Rat is the self-proclaimed “Chief of the River Bottom,” having made his home in this overgrown nether world for more than half of his 55 years.

“I’ve lived on every inch of this place,” he says, his home now staked out in the yawning gap between two concrete slabs holding up the Main Street bridge.

His real name is Ray Mahala, and he landed at the river bottom when it was primarily home to railroad tramps. He drifted upstream over the years as the city pushed the settlers out of the river mouth.

He has become an institution around this place, in his knee-high leather boots, leather pants and jacket and his badger-skin cap.

“It’s one of the few places left where a man can just lay down and live,” Mahala said.

But there is a darker side to the old squatters camp.

Homeless advocates estimate that 20% to 30% of the residents are mentally ill, and maybe half have substance abuse problems. Alcoholics, drug users and the deranged live together on the river floor with those who are simply down and out.

Police say the area has become a haven for drug use and other criminal activity, and firefighters say they are called to the river bottom at least once a week to put out runaway campfires.

But advocates say that without any alternative, the homeless village will continue to grow. Only recently, a father and his two sons, 11 and 9, joined the exodus to the homeless shantytown.

Farther upstream, Ted Edwards and Peggy Wallace are raising their 2-year-old daughter in a three-room shack piled high with toys and parenting manuals.

A long line of social workers visited the couple when they decided to raise Andrial on the river bottom. The county workers concluded that despite the family’s non-traditional lifestyle, she is being raised by loving parents in a stable home.

Edwards and Wallace, both 40, say they know that some question the wisdom of raising a child on the river bottom. But it is their choice to be here.

“We’ve got a beautiful, healthy daughter,” Wallace said. “We’ve got a solid relationship. Neither of us has ulcers. What else can you ask for?”

The couple never intended to stay this long. When the lease ran out on their apartment six years ago, they took all their money, bought new camping gear and moved deep into the river bottom brush.

Then came Andrial, a bright, rambunctious redhead who holds up an index finger on each hand when asked her age. They thought of moving out, but did not want to pay rent. Instead, they tacked together a shack out of old pallets and scrap wood.

Still, they know they cannot stay here forever.

“We figure we’ve got a couple of more years, and then we’re going to be up there where it’s mean and dangerous,” Edwards said. “No use exposing her to that any sooner than we have to.”

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Public pressure has already put an end to some of Southern California’s largest homeless encampments. In San Diego, the city is dismantling a migrant encampment that once sheltered 700 people. The Los Diablos squatters camp existed for more than 20 years in the shadow of multimillion-dollar homes on that city’s north end.

But under pressure from nearby homeowners, the city condemned the encampment and is tearing it down, said the Rev. Rafael Martinez, who headed an advocacy group that helped the migrants.

“By the end of October it should be all gone,” Martinez said. “Some of the families have been relocated to housing. But most have simply moved on to other camps or are living on their own.”

In Costa Mesa, police say the homeless have been repeatedly flushed out of a Santa Ana River encampment, but continue to return.

And in Riverside, police wiped out a river bottom encampment several years ago, said Arlene Hayes, who led an effort to improve conditions for river bottom dwellers in that city. The homeless simply returned to city streets and parks, she said.

The Ventura River bottom is now thought to constitute the largest collection of homeless residents in Southern California outside of the inner city, homeless advocates and other authorities say.

“I can’t think of another camp of that type on that scale,” said Gary Blasi, a UCLA law professor and activist for the homeless. “These types of encampments are sort of a natural product of people having no place else to go. Whether they exist or not is largely the consequence of what the local attitude is about them.”

But more than ever before, forces are aligning against the river bottom community, intent on bringing it to an end. Over the summer, officials conceived a plan to create a campground for the homeless.

As envisioned, the campground would serve as a gathering place for social service providers, a one-stop factory where the homeless can be repaired and reborn.

A key to any success for the campground proposal would be an accompanying “zero-tolerance” policy that would prohibit camping by the homeless anywhere else in the city, including the riverbed.

Cities throughout Southern California have adopted such get-tough policies, including Santa Barbara, which did so in 1979. That law has withstood legal challenges and has been the model for ordinances adopted in cities from Long Beach to Santa Ana.

The issue has taken on greater urgency as Ventura tries to improve its downtown business district in an effort to lure more tourists. Also at issue is the city’s growing interest in cleaning up the river bottom for ecological reasons and turn it into a nature preserve.

Then there is the issue of the homeless themselves. City officials and homeless advocates say the river bottom settlers have been allowed to live in squalor long enough.

“The river bottom to me has always been a mixed blessing,” said Bob Costello of Project Understanding in Ventura. “It’s kind of out of sight, out of mind, an area where people can live and be left alone. But for a lot of these people, it’s the start of a downward spiral into a cycle of homelessness that’s very hard to break out of.”

Nancy Nazario, Ventura County’s homeless ombudsman until the job was eliminated in budget cuts over the summer, is among those who hopes that something better is provided.

“I am not a strong advocate for people living on the river bottom, getting into fights and drinking themselves to death,” she said. “I’ve been in some of the encampments, and I’ve got a problem with those. I just don’t feel very strongly about the need to have that kind of thing exist.”

From his place below the bridge, Pack Rat sees the tide turning against the riverbed village.

“They just keep pushing us around,” he said. “And now they’ve got us cornered.”