Camarillo Seeks New Image for Old Town

Urban planning experts and some residents say that Camarillo symbolizes the very worst of cookie-cutter California suburbia.

Nondescript thoroughfares with wide medians regulate traffic to such a degree that even a short drive becomes a navigational challenge for motorists.

Unwelcoming brick walls and barren stretches of sidewalks give pedestrians a sense of trekking through a visually unappealing urban desert.

Sliced by the Ventura Freeway and diced by sterile strip malls, plenty of lucrative sales tax revenue is generated, but there is little sense of community among its predominantly commuting population.

Then there is Old Town. The mile-long strip of oft-forgotten businesses on Ventura Boulevard lies hard against the freeway--and on hard economic times. Yet this enclave, isolated from 80% of Camarillo in a place many residents dismiss as part of the past, has supporters who believe it can contribute to a more livable future.

“You need an area in the community where people can stroll and feel comfortable doing it,” said Camarillo native Bobby Hernandez, 67, who fondly remembers when Camarillo boasted a bustling city center. “I think that’s what truly defines a community as being something special. . . . What we’re doing is creating something that Fillmore, Santa Paula and Ojai have that we don’t have at the moment.”

The man charged with creating that special something is Tony Perez, recently hired as redevelopment coordinator for the city of 60,000. Perez, 38, is a respected urban planner who helped transform tiny downtown Fillmore into the quaint, eclectic, pedestrian-oriented people-place it is evolving into today.

The question is: Can he coax people to venture to sleepy Old Town, and, once there, leave their cars behind to stroll, browse, eat and shop?

“It’s a challenge,” he acknowledges. “The goal is to make it a vibrant Main Street with local and regional serving businesses. Every town deserves one.”

The challenge is what drew Perez to the job.

He gave up a higher-paying position with the city of Oxnard--and a job offer from a nationally renowned Pasadena-based urban planning firm--for the hands-on opportunity to shape the heart of Camarillo. Already, Perez’s expertise and enthusiasm are winning praise from and inspiring the confidence of merchants who have long despaired of a viable solution to their economic plight. “The city really has a gem in him,” said Russ Nelson, manager of Decor West, which is expected to be among the first stores to overhaul its building facade later this year. “He’s having fun, and that enthusiasm I’m picking up on. . . . When I have some enthusiasm from the city, I feel like I’m part of a team.”

Perez’s enthusiasm comes from a genuine love of city centers. As a child his parents would often take him to see the community-oriented downtowns of Mexican cities on their annual vacations. It’s perhaps not surprising that Fillmore today boasts a genuine town square that harkens to the zocolos of Mexico.

Perez grew up in a 1928 Craftsman house on Main Street in Isleton, a small community on the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

“When I was 5 years old, my mom would safely send me down to the market and get things, so I’ve always had a connection with main streets, why urbanistically you need them,” he said. “Main streets are typically where neighborhoods come together physically.”

It is in Old Town where Perez will attempt to bring together Camarillo’s disconnected neighborhoods. In the city, strict zoning has produced a car-oriented culture of segregated, homogeneous areas that miss the kind of diversity that planning experts such as Peter Calthorpe contend lead to more healthy neighborhoods.

“Once people are in their cars, the meaningfulness of their neighborhood tends to slip away,” said Calthorpe, a nationally renowned leader of what’s called the New Urbanism, or neotraditional planning movement. “People, it turns out, get to know their neighbors a little bit more if they walk. . . . Wherever you build a place that is walkable, people flock to it.”

Such thinking explains the popularity of Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade or Old Pasadena. Or why people drive miles to take in Ventura’s thrift stores and specialty book stores. And it’s why people flock to what Perez notes is really just an upscale strip mall with fancy architectural frills like the Promenade at Westlake.

How hungry are Camarillo residents to experience similar opportunities to mingle, to linger, to people-watch?

“One of the most popular places to go walking right now is the outlet center, believe it or not,” Perez said. “Residents here want [that experience], and that’s why you see them walking down at the outlet mall.”

Creating a Place to Walk Is Key

Perez said the reason piazzas and squares are so popular is because they provide a feeling of comfort. “It’s not the architectural aesthetics of buildings, it’s the place,” he said. “New Urbanism, as it’s now being called, says everything has to relate to the scale of the street, the car, the person.”

Which is the goal behind the careful nurturing of Old Town Camarillo. “The idea is that you make it conducive to walking,” said Chris Lorelli, a member of the Camarillo Redevelopment Agency’s Citizens Advisory Committee. “Camarillo grew so much, there is no real town center. . . . They are trying to make Old Town a more comfortable gathering place.”

Lorelli, 38, represents both the hopes and challenges of Old Town.

Born in Camarillo, he affectionately recalls the downtown area before the freeway severed it from the rest of the city. He wants that downtown back.

But two years ago he moved his bicycle store from the part of Ventura Boulevard that is being redeveloped to a busier shopping center. It was either that or watch his business fold for lack of traffic.

Today that is still the case for many of the business owners struggling to eke out a livelihood on the street. “There’s no foot traffic,” said Roger Jaep, standing in the empty confines of his Past Times Bookshop one Friday afternoon. “[Business] is pretty bad.”

But Perez believes better times are ahead for Ventura Boulevard.

Camarillo formed its redevelopment agency in 1996, resurrecting several abortive efforts to resuscitate its old downtown over the years. In the 1970s the city spent more than $1 million to bury utility lines, build large curbside planters and install larger trees.

It was a beautification effort that failed because nothing else was done to spark an economic revival, said Tony Boden, planning director and deputy executive director of the redevelopment agency.

This time city officials have a more coherent and aggressive strategy in mind. They have spent the last two years painstakingly assembling a strong redevelopment program. And officials have closely watched other Ventura County redevelopment efforts, learning from mistakes and noting past successes.

Of course, it helps that Camarillo is relatively affluent. And that despite what some may think of Old Town, it has not reached the depths of economic desperation and disrepair other downtowns have done. The 1,000-acre redevelopment zone encompasses newer shopping centers, such as the Camarillo Town Center and Camarillo Premium Outlet Stores.

Those cash cows, which have sent Camarillo’s sales tax revenues soaring in recent months, will also help raise much of the money for redevelopment via property taxes.

“It’s like big brother helping little brother,” Boden said. “We need that to generate revenue so you can go back and work on those areas that need sprucing up.”

Redevelopment does not use sales tax revenues or raise taxes for city residents. Instead, a device called tax increment financing freezes property values at the time a redevelopment district is created and cities borrow against the expected influx of property tax money that accrues from new investment.

Officials estimated in 1996 that the city would rake in an estimated $163 million over the next 45 years for redevelopment--this in a city whose annual general fund was about $10 million at the time.

That money is providing the $400,000 set aside to help merchants improve the facades of their buildings. The program can provide up to $16,000 in aid for merchants, much more than is typically available in other cities.

That money will be tapped to pay for the ambitious street improvements that could cost between $4 million and $7 million as outlined in a 45-page document of design guidelines the city adopted last summer.

An economic analysis completed in October suggests that the incremental process is underway that will re-energize the cluster of almost a dozen antique stores, seven book and collectible shops and other niche market outlets.

The relatively recent establishment of a Saturday morning farmers’ market offers a tantalizing glimpse of the benefits of attracting people to such open-air events, the report noted. Merchants agree.

“What we found is that people who go to the market walk past the store,” said Nelson, who goes so far as to provide storage facilities, power hookups and restroom facilities for market vendors. “It’s a draw for my business.”

Taking the cue, organizers of the annual fiesta usually held at Constitution Park next to City Hall have moved the event to Old Town on July 18-19 and christened it the Camarillo Fiesta & Street Fair, complete with entertainment, activities and craft booths.

In recent weeks, the pace of redevelopment has picked up.

Officials are soliciting proposals for development of the old City Hall that is presently lying vacant.

Last week dignitaries turned out to watch two rather bemused city workers erect the first of a dozen brown directional signs that will point people toward Old Town.

“These signs are a big deal,” said Mayor Charlotte Craven. “It’s really a symbol that we’re starting to bring the redevelopment program into existence.”

Two weeks ago the City Council adopted an ordinance creating an Old Town Zone, which allows for a business and residential mix in order to encourage pedestrian traffic.

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It is a practical response that many hope will lead to fundamental change, said George Kerrigan, manager of a hardware store and president of the Camarillo Old Town Business Assn. “I used to live over a restaurant in New York,” he said. “Where did I eat every night?”

In addition to the building facade renovation, the redevelopment project will include narrowing the street to slow traffic, widening the sidewalks to encourage pedestrians and adding light poles and other street ornamentation.

But it’s still unclear when much of the renovation will take place.

The timing of the project depends in part on the timing of a state project that will redesign freeway on- and offramps in the area in the next two years.

When completed, the revamped freeway access will bring a steady stream of potential customers. But the combination of the two projects will also tax the financial resources of what are in many cases already shaky businesses. “We’ve got to make sure the merchants can stay in business while we’re doing the construction,” Boden said, noting the travails of Santa Paula merchants when that city tore up its downtown a few months ago.

If it can survive, Old Town’s prospects will look better than they have in years, officials said.

Officials tick off the positives:

The tens of thousands of potential customers that zoom by on the Ventura Freeway. The folks who could be enticed from the nearby booming Outlet Center and two cinema complexes. And the development of the Cal State Channel Islands campus nearby, which could eventually impart a hip college-town atmosphere to the area.

For all the jargon of redevelopment, the academic theories behind it and the millions that will be spent on it, officials say the success of Old Town boils down to this: Create an interesting place people want to be.

“It’s simply the collection of people doing more than one thing,” Perez said. “Shopping centers and malls close. Main streets don’t.”

About This Series

“Heart of the City: The Rebirth of Downtown” is an occasional series describing the efforts to revitalize the shopping districts in Ventura County’s cities. Today’s story focuses on Camarillo.