Oxnard Gaining City Within a City : Farmland Yields Bumper Crop of New Homes in Northeast Community

The map of the new housing development resembles a giant Monopoly board with little red tacks pinned on lots where homes have already sold.

Gliding her hand over the bird’s-eye drawing of the subdivision, home sales agent Lisa Montanio says she is on a roll.

The models in the Village of Santa Rosa just opened five weeks ago. Five red tacks on the map. Montanio has already sold five homes.

Not bad, especially considering the builder, Standard Pacific, has so far built only nine houses.

“It is just the tip of the iceberg of what is scheduled to come in,” said Montanio, standing inside one of the plush model homes that serves as her office.

As part of a massive development planned for an 856-acre area in northeast Oxnard, Standard Pacific and other builders intend to build more than 3,000 residences on what is now mainly farmland by the year 2009.

Since property owners began talking about developing the land more than eight years ago, St. John’s Regional Medical Center and Robert J. Frank Intermediate School have been built on what was once mainly a lush stretch of strawberry patches, lemon groves and vegetable crops.

But if the so-called Northeast community continues to develop as planned, Oxnard will essentially add a mini-city within its borders with new homes, three more schools, parks, office buildings and shopping centers.

A city report predicts that about 9,500 residents will eventually call this new community home, making its population larger than the city of Ojai.

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“It is going to have everything,” Montanio said. “It has a hospital next to it. It has a major shopping center. It is two minutes to the freeway. If people really understood what is going to happen here, I think they would be smart to get in on the ground floor.”

But some Oxnard residents--including some who live in the older Rio Lindo and La Colonia neighborhoods that border the area--are less enthusiastic about the coming changes.

“A lot of people bought out here because they like the rural feeling,” said Eleanor Branthoover, chairwoman of the Rio Lindo Neighborhood Council. “If we wanted a lot of shopping centers and homes around us, we would have bought in the San Fernando Valley.”

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Yet others, like La Colonia resident Paul Candelaria, said children need new schools and residents need new places to live.

“It is just the way it goes,” said 69-year-old Candelaria, whose house overlooks the Robert J. Frank Intermediate School on the site of a onetime lemon orchard.

When completed, the Northeast community will actually lie cheek to jowl with La Colonia, one of Oxnard’s poorest neighborhoods.

A police storefront and community policing efforts have reduced the crime rate there, but the neighborhood remains notorious for its cramped, makeshift dwellings. About a third of its residents live below the poverty level.

But that hasn’t stopped home buyers from considering the new houses nearby.

“I get a lot of calls from people looking to buy into that neighborhood so whatever they are doing over there I think is working pretty well,” said David Keith, a Police Department spokesman.

Brenda Shively, a 40-year-old La Colonia resident, said she finds it odd that a new community is taking shape so close to her neighborhood.

“People pay top dollar to get out of Colonia and now they are paying top dollar to get back in,” Shively said.

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Despite some La Colonia residents who view the new development with suspicion, City Councilman Dean Maulhardt predicts the new homes, schools and businesses will have a positive impact on the whole area.

“As the old saying goes, a rising tide raises all ships,” Maulhardt said. “One of the goals was to make sure that whatever is built there is an upgrade to the area and that we don’t compound the problems.”

On a recent weekday, construction workers were putting the finishing touches on the prim, beige houses in the Village of Santa Rosa, the first housing development in the Northeast community.

Montanio estimates up to 200 potential home buyers a week tour the models located off Rose Avenue on a new, tree-lined street complete with retro street lights and white picket fences.

But in the future, other developments are also expected to stud the landscape, offering everything from low-income housing to homes costing more than $230,000.

Nearby, farm workers picked strawberries in the shadows of bulldozers preparing the earth where the Oxnard Elementary School District plans to build the Norman R. Brekke Elementary School.

Plans for the Northeast community call for a second elementary school and a new high school on a 50-acre site at the corner of Gonzales Road and Oxnard Boulevard.

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Still surrounded on three sides by strawberry bushes and other crops, the Robert J. Frank Intermediate School, completed in 1994, remains the only finished school in the area.

The state recently named the institution with its 1,300 students a “A 1996 California Distinguished School,” an honor Principal Peter Nichols said could hint at the character of the neighborhood sprouting up around it.

“The community could point to the school and say this is one of the best intermediate schools in California,” Nichols said. “I think the whole thing is coming together, and it is an upwardly mobile community.”

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The new community will also feature affordable housing, including a development of about 200 low-cost homes on a parcel at Lombard Street and Camino del Sol. But that project is being held up as city officials negotiate an intricate land swap deal with real estate speculator Donald T. Kojima, who sold the city land for the project in 1994.

Overall, the land in the Northeast community area belongs to about 10 landowners and partnerships. The rectangular project area is bordered by Gonzales Road on the north, Camino Del Sol on the south, Oxnard Boulevard on the east and Lombard Street on the west.

Environmentalists essentially wrote off the plot after it was targeted for development in the General Plan adopted by the city in 1990. Nevertheless, slow-growth advocates said they continue to mourn the loss of yet another large patch of farmland.

“When it is paved over, it’s gone,” said Cynthia Leake, vice president of the Environmental Coalition of Ventura County. “It is just so sad and depressing.”

An environmental study on the proposed Northeast community concluded the overall project could increase air pollution, traffic and could hamper views. Yet other city reports also said the project’s 36 acres of business parks and 20 acres of office buildings could draw up to 7,500 new jobs to the area.

Kevin Bernzott, who manages about 10% of the land in the development area for the McGrath family, said that once the hospital was built in 1992, it made sense to build on the land encircled by development.

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“It’s the hole in the doughnut,” said Bernzott, who is president of the Oxnard Chamber of Commerce. “[The development] does not represent a significant decrease in agricultural land. If people were to stop moving to the county and stop having children, we would not have to build houses. The truth is, we have plenty of food and a shortage of houses.”

Bernzott praised the Northeast community plan, saying its “neo-traditional town plan” design means the layout will make it possible for many residents to walk to parks, shopping centers, schools and even work sites.

According to Matthew Winegar, a city planning official, the Northeast community is perhaps the first new quarter in Oxnard to conform with the city’s “Vision for a More Livable City.” This planning document strives to make Oxnard more pedestrian-friendly by creating essentially self-sufficient neighborhoods instead of subdivisions isolated from schools, parks and commercial centers.

“We tried consciously to form a true neighborhood,” Winegar said. “We are going to try to . . . avoid the common mistakes that have created walled-off subdivisions.”

Oxnard environmentalist Jean Harris was president of the Oxnard Elementary School board when the city began considering the Northeast community development in 1992. Although she said it pains her to see developers pave over farmland, she also said she could not oppose plans to build new schools.

She said that once the plot was surrounded by development when the hospital was built four years ago, it no longer made sense for environmentalists to try to protect it.

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“Once it is truly infill, I think it is foolish to waste energies on trying to preserve it,” Harris said. “I think what you need to do is make the best community you can out there. I do think the plans seem to be positive.”

Danielle Hawthorne, a 33-year-old secretary who was visiting the model homes at the Village of Santa Rosa with her family, shared the mixed feelings many residents have.

“It’s nice to see there are some new places coming up,” said Hawthorne, an Oxnard resident who is shopping for a new home. “But I kind of hate to see the agriculture go away, especially the strawberries.”