Change in the Winds

When crossing through Southwinds park these days, Oxnard resident Ron Holton more often hears the whooshing sound of soccer balls flying through the air than the wail of a police siren.

It wasn’t always this way.

This sprawling patch of green in south Oxnard used to be a seedy haven for drug dealers, gangbangers and drunks, recalls Holton, chairman of the Southwinds Neighborhood Council.

“We wouldn’t be standing in this park, even in the daylight, five years ago,” said Holton, sitting on a park bench on a recent weekday afternoon as men playing soccer tore across the nearby green.

While the 50-year-old salesman puffed on a thick cigar, a group of youngsters zipped past the bench on in-line skates as other children crawled atop a jungle gym behind him.

Holton and other Southwinds residents interpret the changes at the neighborhood park at the corner of Clara and Courtland streets as a sign that this tough, crime-plagued part of Oxnard is finally turning around.

“Before, people came here to drink, fight and rob people,” said Leon Socorro , a 40-year-old farm worker, who was watching his 20-year-old son, Ernesto, play soccer. “Now people come here to play and hang out. The whole neighborhood is getting a lot better.”

With about $1,500 in redevelopment money, the neighborhood council recently installed soccer goal posts and new tennis nets--a move that has doubled the number of people who visit the park daily from about 50 to more than 100, Holton said.

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The latest infusion of federal funds--money set aside from existing property tax revenues that an area can ask to have pumped back into the neighborhood--represents a portion of the more than $1 million that has streamed into the neighborhood in the last decade:

* Using $278,000 in redevelopment money, Oxnard’s Community Development Commission--the city’s redevelopment agency--opened a police storefront along Hueneme Road in 1993, boosting the police presence in the area.

* More than $100,000 of this special money has helped repair cracked sidewalks and pot-holed streets and clear alleyways of graffiti and abandoned mattresses.

* And $450,000 in federal dollars is being used to build a 2,700-square-foot neighborhood recreation center with several activity and meeting rooms at one corner of Southwinds Park.

“This is probably the neighborhood in Oxnard that has seen the most change,” said Denise Paul, an Oxnard resident, who is urging the city to put a special utility tax on the November ballot to raise $5.25 million for Oxnard’s Police and Fire Departments. “It’s a Cinderella story.”

Statistics for robberies and aggravated assaults for the area bordered by Pleasant Valley Road, J Street, Hueneme Road and Saviers Road show crime overall may be dropping in the Southwinds area.

After neighborhood robberies and aggravated assaults peaked in 1989 at 59, they dropped to 24 in 1994 and rose again to 40 in 1995. Analysts say 1996 could be a low year with only 16 robberies and aggravated assaults reported through last Wednesday.

But Southwinds is still no fairy tale neighborhood. A 14-year-old boy was shot to death in Southwinds last month in an apparent gang-related crime. Residents say they believe Ralph David Rico Jr.’s slayers came from outside the area, but many admit the shooting still left them rattled.

“It is scary,” said 28-year-old resident Yolanda Castillo, as she walked past the park with her husband, Mario, to pick up their daughter from school. “That is why I say that if I could move my family to a better neighborhood, I would. But the neighborhood is progressing.”

Gary Lumas, a police officer who patrols the area and often works out of the storefront on Hueneme Road, said the area has shaped up dramatically since a heavy-duty police crackdown in the neighborhood in 1988.

“You used to see 14 or 15 prostitutes on Hueneme Road at 3 in the morning,” Lumas said. “You don’t see that now because of our efforts and because of community involvement.”

But visions of the old Southwinds neighborhood resurface on a recent weekday. About 4 p.m., police officers speed down Cuesta del Mar Drive--once regarded as Ventura County’s most dangerous street--to arrest a young woman who has evaded authorities on a felony warrant.

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On nearby Perkins Road, two young men swig whiskey from a bottle in front of an apartment complex across the street from Haycox Elementary School. Spotting the young men, Lee Perkins, a 23-year-old Oxnard College student, takes hold of her nieces, Chantelle, 4, and Elaine, 2, and leads them back inside.

“I always stay in the house all the time unless I am going to school or to the store,” Perkins said.

But others, like lifetime Southwinds resident Michelle Weekley, say they feel safe in the neighborhood. Instead, what Southwinds sorely lacks, they say, is an indoor place for youth to congregate. That’s why Weekley, 33, and her son, Keith Epps, 8, brightened when they heard about plans for the new recreation center.

“There is nothing to do here,” said Keith, who had just gotten out of class at Haycox Elementary School. “It’s boring. Is the center going to have a pool table?”

Holton said the recreation center represents just one of many projects the neighborhood council wants to bring to Southwinds with the help of redevelopment money. The council also has launched a program to encourage police officers to buy homes in the neighborhood by offering them low-interest mortgage loans.

Holton’s wife, Kathy, wants to see part of the existing tennis courts at Southwinds Park converted into basketball courts.

“I would like to see hoops over there,” said Kathy Holton, 50. “Kids here shoot hoops.”

Oxnard Mayor Manuel Lopez predicts that the construction of the recreation center will firmly establish Southwinds Park as the neighborhood’s hub, touching off further improvements in the area.

“This is a neighborhood that has historically had a lot of problems,” Lopez said. “The park is kind of like when you have a house that is painted in the neighborhood and all the neighborhood starts cleaning up. I think that it can be a central focus that will radiate out to the community.”