50 Housing Vouchers OKd for Ventura Squatters : Assistance: Former river bottom residents may apply the federal warrants toward rent on one- or two-bedroom houses or apartments.

Two months after raging floodwaters tore through the Ventura River bottom, Ventura has received 50 federal housing vouchers for the squatters who once lived along the river’s banks, city officials announced Wednesday.

“We’re just delighted,” said Carol Green, assistant to the city manager. “It’s an important part of what we’ve been working for.”

Green said the city had just received confirmation of the vouchers from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, but did not know when the vouchers would be arriving, or how the city would distribute them.

The vouchers are worth, collectively, $2 million, are valid for a five-year period, and can be renewed, city officials said. Forty of the vouchers are for one-bedroom units and the remaining 10 are for two-bedroom houses or apartments, officials said.

If residents receiving the vouchers earn an income, they must pay 30% of that income for rent. The federal government will pick up the rest of the cost. If they do not have an income, the federal government pays the entire cost of the rent--up to $620 for a one-bedroom unit and up to $750 for a two-bedroom unit.

“Oh, my goodness, how wonderful!” said Mary Ann Decaen, community services director for Catholic Charities, upon hearing the news. Catholic Charities is a nonprofit organization that provides aid to the homeless.

“It’s going to give (local homeless people) a much more hopeful future,” she said. “Now their life isn’t hanging.”

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Ventura council members had spent years debating how to kick transients out of the river bottom without embroiling the city in messy civil rights litigation. Depending on the season, 100 to 200 people made their homes along the river’s dusty banks, living in everything from sleeping bags to elaborate shanties with carpeting and attic space.

Pressure mounted on the council last summer and fall, when merchants began to complain loudly about the multitude of vagrants milling about downtown. The store and restaurant owners said the transients smelled bad, looked unseemly and frightened away their middle-class customers. They demanded that the council take action.

But numerous attempts at a solution failed. The city simply could not afford to provide the squatters with other options once it forced them out of the river.

Then, on Jan. 10, the river itself performed the task. Ripping across the flood plain, rushing across land that is normally dry, it cleared in a matter of hours the encampments that had bedeviled city officials for months.

Council members vowed that afternoon that no transients would ever return to make their home again along the river banks. Since then, the city has scrambled to provide for at least 100 uprooted homeless men and women--placing people in group homes, church recreation rooms, and an empty wing of the state mental hospital.