Hearing the Cry of Poverty in Canoga Park

“All signs point to a wonderful future for the new town of Owensmouth.”

--From a 1912 tract on what is now Canoga Park.

Like the dusty pages of a family photo album, Canoga Park reveals itself slowly to those who venture along its streets. Each house holds secrets of yesterday’s lives.

Here is a ranch house built in 1918 when sugar beets and other crops grew for acres on land touted as the “richest in the state.” Here, in the 1960s, Rocketdyne workers produced engines that put men on the moon and helped fuel a nation’s pride. And here, in these houses, white residents lived out the substance of suburban dreams in an era when such promises were more readily fulfilled and life seemed more secure.

But here, too, along forgotten side streets and avenues, is a quietly emerging presence no less a part of the Canoga Park story than its varied past: poverty, the kind that has seeped into many Los Angeles County suburbs as the divide separating affluence from need is blurred by ethnic and economic change.

The kind of poverty that dots Canoga Park and the still largely affluent West San Fernando Valley is not always loud, the kind that makes itself readily known in the numbers of homeless walking the streets or the sprawl of a housing project. Here it is the face of Carina, 7, Filoberto, 5, and Gladys, 3, who sometimes cry when there is no food. And Martha, their 32-year-old mother, who hears but knows she can turn no miracles.

“When there is no food,” she tells them, “there is no food.”

Health care for the children is a patchwork of trips to the county clinic nearby and visits from a public health nurse--visits that have all but ceased because of county budget cuts.

The nurse, Marlene Naumann, does more than tend to their health. There are hugs she gives the children and the dollar bills she leaves behind, as well as the help she offers in finding food.

“It hurts me,” Martha says. “Sometimes I am ashamed.”

Unemployed, unmarried and living on public assistance, she does not turn it down.

Martha named her baby girl--the youngest of her six children--Cindy Marlene, after Naumann.

Along these streets, looks are deceiving: Worn single-family homes often hold more than a single family, and the garages come equipped with windows for those who live inside.

“Bootleg units,” Ellen Michiel calls them, standing on the sidewalk, pointing to the signs of overcrowding.

Apartments that rent for $600 can only be afforded when two or three families combine their income, squeezing themselves into a space built for far fewer.

Even census data cannot begin to explain the lives of these residents: They live so near to wealth that their pain is averaged out.

“We are two minutes and across the street from affluence,” Michiel said, driving along Vanowen Street.

Faced with these changes, some in the West Valley have turned to a method of community renewal never before used by local residents. They have formed the West Valley Community Development Corp. and are working to bring affordable housing to the area.

“If the neighborhood can be restored, it has tremendous potential,” said Michiel, an executive director of the Community Development Corp. and a member of Our Lady of the Valley Catholic Church. “For poor people, the way out of poverty is home ownership. It was true for my parents’ generation, it’s true for mine.”

In other areas of Los Angeles, such groups are standard fare, but here they have been met with resistance. With no local precedent, the West Valley organization has received mentoring from a group that recently created 100 units of affordable housing and employment assistance for the residents of Pico Union, west of downtown Los Angeles.

“I understand why some West Valley residents are skittish about affordable housing,” said City Councilwoman Laura Chick, who represents the area. “The [Community Development Corp.] and I see eye to eye on what affordable housing is about.”

The West Valley organization is focusing on an area where Latinos have maintained a presence for generations, said Tomas Martinez, who heads the group and is a professor at Pepperdine University.

“There is a view that this is an impoverished area of only recently arrived immigrants,” he said. “That’s not true. Families have grown up here.”

In the days of orange groves and beet farms, the area was settled by Mexican farm workers. They came again under the Bracero program and have flowed in and out of the community in response to the push and pull of economic conditions on both sides of the border.

The Bracero program, a joint U.S.-Mexican initiative begun in the 1940s, allowed Mexican farm workers to temporarily live and work in America. It was halted in 1964.

When Father John Murray came to Our Lady of the Valley in 1983, the church held one Mass in Spanish each weekend. Today there are four--each well-attended.

At the same time the Latino population was skyrocketing--along with a small but significant Filipino population--the numbers of whites has continued to decline, pushed out by the recession, the loss of aerospace jobs and pulled by the possibility of jobs in other parts of the country.

“When the bottom fell out of the aerospace industry, we lost a lot of good people and a lot of income,” Murray said.

Overwhelmed by the ethnic changes, some church members have gone “to some of our neighboring parishes where they felt more comfortable,” he said. Of those who remain, many are older people.

Perhaps no place has experienced a greater change than the schools.

In 1976, Canoga Park High School was 82% white and 11.9% Latino. Now Latinos make up 67.4% of the population, while whites comprise 18.4%.

At both schools, the majority of students qualify for a federally funded free or reduced-cost meal program.

Their parents make about $5,000 to $7,000 a year if they are new to the country, community development head Martinez said. And some of that may be sent to support families at home.

“But it’s better than Mexico or another country,” said Maria Delgado, a member of the Community Development Corp., who interviewed local residents about their needs. Here “the school pays for the food, so they don’t have to worry there.”

When the kids are not in school there are other worries. A man was killed nearby not too long ago, so Martha keeps the children close to her.

A visitor asks Carina, “Who do you play with in the neighborhood?”

“Nobody,” the second-grader says, sitting quietly on the couch, her legs hugged to her chest.

Some neighborhood projects are already underway.

The Community Redevelopment Agency recently approved a loan to the West Valley development group to acquire and rehabilitate a group of bungalows. The West Valley group is entering into a partnership with Lutheran Social Services to develop new single-family homes.

The neighborhood is teeming with kids who need things to do, said Margaret Pontius, director of the Guadalupe Center, so the center is building a playground. Pontius is excited about the plans, showing the brochures of brightly colored playground equipment.

There will be a soccer field, bright swings and slides and Abuelita y Yo (Grandmother and I) classes.

Right over there, Pontius says, pointing to what is now an empty field.