Housing Help Group Gets Cool Greeting in La Colonia

Vincent Godina makes his way down a narrow alley in the dark, peering through a chain-link fence at one of the scenes in La Colonia that fill him with disgust: a pile of rotting lumber that used to be a garage.

“Why isn’t anyone cleaning this up?” snaps Godina, a 52-year-old carpenter, during a moonlit walk through his neighborhood. “This type of thing just lowers the property values all over La Colonia.”

But Godina has a plan he thinks could help touch off a revitalization effort in one of the city’s oldest, poorest and most crowded neighborhoods.

Godina is president of El Pueblo Unido Reinvestment Corp., a nonprofit group that wants to use federal seed money and the labor of future homeowners to launch a program bringing decent, low-cost houses to La Colonia.

The group would start with between two and four homes using $273,000 in federal money. Under the proposal, El Pueblo Unido would use the profits from the sale of the first homes to buy other empty lots and build new houses, repeating the process as the group sold more residences.

“We want the project to continue on and on by itself,” Godina said.

Godina believes the project--based on the philosophy of the Habitat for Humanity organization, which requires future homeowners to participate in the home construction--could help reverse La Colonia’s decline and move families now living in shacks and garages into economical houses.

But many residents and property owners have come out against the project.

With a pot of $273,000, the project’s critics say the group should be able to build more homes, or at least help several potential homeowners make down payments on existing residences.

What’s more, residents and property owners say El Pueblo Unido failed to meet with community leaders early on to discuss the details of the project, dooming it from the start. “It doesn’t seem to have the blessings of the neighborhood,” said Virginia Ramirez, a 70-year-old Oxnard resident who rents out her former home in La Colonia to another family. “Why is that amount of money being spent for only two houses? It is not going to alleviate very much the housing situation in this area.”

When El Pueblo Unido representatives went before the Oxnard City Council three weeks ago seeking federal money, La Colonia residents and property owners jammed the council chambers in protest.

The council decided to table the issue and urged El Pueblo Unido representatives to continue meeting with neighborhood leaders to gain more community support.

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But Godina did not fare much better at a recent meeting of the La Colonia Neighborhood Council. Residents and property owners stood up one by one to assail El Pueblo Unido’s proposal as ill-conceived and shrouded in secrecy.

“This group did not even check with the lot owners to see if they could even buy the properties,” said Harold Ceja, a 60-year-old truck driver and a former chairman of La Colonia’s Neighborhood Council.

Frustrated but not defeated, Godina said then that he would take his case back to the neighborhood council at its next meeting in March.

“They are trying to kill something before it has been born,” said Godina of the project’s critics.

But despite the dispute, El Pueblo Unido representatives and residents have long agreed on at least one thing: the desperate lack of decent, low-cost housing in La Colonia. The shortage is not unique to the neighborhood, home to more than 8,000 residents.

But as Oxnard’s poorest neighborhood with about a third of its residents living below the poverty level, La Colonia is notorious for its cramped, makeshift dwellings.

“I can see all these chicken coops going up, and you know that there are people living in them when you can see a TV antenna on top of it all,” Ramirez said.

More than five residents on average live in each dwelling in La Colonia compared with a citywide average of about 3.5.

Sal Gonzalez, director of the Oxnard Housing Authority, said city code enforcement officers go after property owners who rent garages that have not been properly converted into housing or who violate other city ordinances.

But Gonzalez said cracking down on property owners may force some families onto the street.

“People are asked to leave the garage, and often we don’t know what happens after that,” Gonzalez said.

Mindful of the neighborhood’s chronic lack of decent housing, city officials say they are doing what they can to improve the situation.

Using federal funds, the city is expected to complete an extensive, $3.2-million renovation of 100 units of public housing at the Felicia Court project in La Colonia in July.

The city has also disbursed more than $280,000 in federal loans and grants in the last two years to private property owners seeking to rehabilitate their homes. And city officials are discussing tearing down 70 units of public housing along Colonia Road and building low-cost houses in an effort to turn renters into homeowners.

New homes would not only provide more space for families but also create a greater sense of community, with owners invested in the neighborhood, officials say.

But Gonzalez said his city agency has limited resources and needs more nonprofit projects like the El Pueblo Unido one.

“I think the project has a lot of merit,” Gonzalez said. “I think the opposition is related more to the personalities involved.”

Godina and others admit neighborhood politics have sometimes gotten in the way of El Pueblo Unido’s project.

Godina said Carlos Aguilera, a former chairman of the La Colonia Neighborhood Council, once had ties to El Pueblo Unido. Known for his strident views on neighborhood issues, Aguilera has both strong supporters and adversaries in La Colonia. Those distrustful of him are also skeptical about the nonprofit group.

And Juan L. Soria, the group’s treasurer, used the Spanish word “burro,” which means “jackass,” to refer to the project’s critics in a December radio interview. The comment sparked angry protests from La Colonia residents.

“I think a lot of it is personal,” said Virginia Ramirez of the project’s troubles in gaining community backing.

But Oxnard housing officials and some residents say resistance to El Pueblo Unido’s project also stems from La Colonia’s long-standing mistrust of any city-sponsored redevelopment project. The neighborhood was originally part of a sweeping city redevelopment plan launched in 1993.

But officials took La Colonia out of the proposal after scores of residents protested at a 1994 City Council meeting.

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Ernie Whitaker, a city affordable-housing official, said residents’ fears date back to the 1960s when the city condemned and razed substandard structures in the downtown area.

But Whitaker said the city has largely discontinued the practice. And El Pueblo Unido has no condemnation power and plans to build its homes on existing empty lots purchased from property owners.

“That image of the city coming in and taking over their properties has remained,” Whitaker said.

The project’s critics wonder if El Pueblo Unido will ever succeed, and question budget plans to pay a project manager $32,000 to oversee the home construction. Other residents in opposition say the homes may eventually end up being built if the group spends more time explaining the project.

“It is a big secret,” said 25-year-old La Colonia resident Vicky Gonzales. “I think they have to inform the residents about what is going on.”

But El Pueblo Unido representatives and others say property owners and absentee landlords are behind a campaign to kill the project. Less than a third of the dwellings in La Colonia are occupied by their owners--the lowest rate of all neighborhoods in the city, where more than half of the residents on average live in properties they own.

Property owners fear new housing could lure away their tenants or force them to make costly repairs, El Pueblo Unido representatives say.

“They are making money off people who rent their garages and houses,” said Luis Teran, an El Pueblo Unido board member, who has also led a separate movement to help relocate hundreds of poor residents living in a cramped Oxnard trailer park. “They don’t want something they think may take away from that. But, the thing is, no one is going to leave their properties.”

Both residents and property owners deny this is the case, arguing they merely oppose El Pueblo Unido’s project because they say it has flaws.

City housing officials say any proposal that could reduce the overcrowding in La Colonia deserves a chance.

“Building one or two or three homes is a small project,” Gonzalez said of the housing authority. “But here is an idea. Let us put it out there.”