Focusing on Housing in the House of the Lord

When the Rev. Virgil Nelson focuses on something, people pay attention. That is because when Nelson, an ordained Baptist minister, tackles a problem, it gets solved.

Along the way, he has helped launch such agencies as Project Understanding, Habitat for Humanity and Food Share.

When Project Understanding opened its doors in 1975, “our whole year’s budget was $2,800,” Nelson recalled.

Today, the agency’s yearly budget tops $300,000, which goes toward providing a range of aid to impoverished people--food, shelter and health care. Nelson, who was its director for several years, has since demoted himself to volunteer and church relations coordinator.

In 1978, he helped start Food Share “under two orange trees.”

Today, operating out of a 24,000-square-foot building in Oxnard, Food Share handles 7 million pounds of food a year. It provides nourishment to 33,000 Ventura County residents a month through dozens of satellite groups it has spawned.

“But I’m just a volunteer there, now,” he said.

Nelson also played a big role in organizing Habitat for Humanity in Ventura County. He first helped buy a little house trailer as a needy family’s transition home by literally passing the hat at a meeting.

Habitat volunteers donate labor to help county residents build their own houses, which they purchase for low cost. The agency acts as their “bank.”

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The local Habitat for Humanity chapter, which was spun off from Project Understanding into its own entity, is building 22 homes in Piru in partnership with the owner families.

Nelson still keeps a finger in Habitat’s doings. “The target is to be able to build a house for a family that’s living on minimum wage,” he said.

His longtime interest in Habitat for Humanity offers a hint as to what the Ventura Avenue resident is going to focus on in 1998: housing.

“If there was really a will in Ventura County to create affordable housing, there would be a way,” Nelson said.

He himself was a beneficiary of “affordable housing” before the term existed, when as a child he migrated with his parents from San Diego to Oxnard after World War II.

“There was a tremendous housing shortage everywhere back then,” Nelson said. “We moved into what was called a ‘crackerbox’ house in Oxnard. There were probably a thousand of them built all at one time. They were plywood shacks really, but they lasted longer than anyone thought they would.”

And they allowed Nelson’s family to have a roof over its head.

“So that was an example to me,” he said. “All it shows is that when people decide to solve the problem, we can.”

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Nelson doesn’t dream of utopian communities in Ventura County. Rather, he visualizes the fruition of modest ideas like creating efficiency apartments from existing two-car garages.

“It would create jobs for people doing the conversions, extra income for the homeowners and small units for single people that they could afford,” he said. “It’s no mystery to me why there are homeless people. . . . We are creating good housing, but we’ve torn down the old single-room-occupancy units that used to exist. We haven’t replaced them with anything that someone living on minimum wage can afford.

“So in 1998, we’re going to try to create additional permanent housing.”

When Virgil Nelson talks, he delivers, said his old friend and fellow volunteer Bill Wakelee, now retired from Ventura County Mental Health Services.

“The thing that strikes me about Virgil is that he practices what he preaches,” Wakelee said. “He lives his faith. He can inspire every sort of person to do things they didn’t think they can do.

“When we acquired the old fire station on Vince Street [in Ventura] for Project Understanding, we all thought we couldn’t afford to buy it,” he said. “Virgil said we could. Somehow we did, and we paid it off in three years. Right now he’s focused on an apartment house in Oxnard for transitional six-month housing, and he’s looking at creative ways to make use of the old Oxnard High School building.”

The father of three grown children, Nelson isn’t the only one in the family involved with Project Understanding and its spinoffs. His wife, Lynn, directs its tutoring program.

He was pastor of Oak View First Baptist Church for many years and is interim pastor of the First Christian Church in Santa Paula, “even though I’m American Baptist ordained.”

“Virgil’s activism is beyond his particular faith,” Wakelee said. “He just happens to be a Baptist.”

Nelson himself wishes that people would somehow take the spirit of giving they adopt during the holiday season and keep it alive.

“There’s such an outpouring of people who want to help at Christmas--serve, visit rest homes. But what about July? Who goes to visit on Valentine’s Day?

“On the holidays, some people get so much candy they get sick. Let’s ask ourselves every month to think about others.”

To remind themselves to do just that, the Nelsons keep a pair of doves in their family room.

“When the doves coo, it’s a reminder for us to pray for peace, to stop and be aware of God’s presence,” Nelson said.