No Home on the Range

For several years, you could barely give a horse away in Southern California. Now, as the healthy economy brings equestrian life back to a full gallop, horse owners are finding stables in short supply.

The number of boarding stables in the historic cowboy town of San Juan Capistrano dropped by nearly half during the past decade, from 14 to eight. Several Orange County equestrian centers, including the county fairgrounds, have waiting lists.

“There is a tremendous need in Orange County for a well-maintained equestrian facility and it’s forced my family out of the area,” said Aldren La Joie, a Laguna Hills resident who is looking for equestrian property in San Diego County for his 12 horses. “The community lacks accommodations for show horses . . . existing facilities are overcrowded.”

The Los Angeles Equestrian Center in Burbank, which can board up to 550 horses, is 95% full, said George Chatigny, events coordinator.

“The economy is good and the . . . quantity of horses boarded at this facility are up,” he said. “So are the number of horses brought here for shows.”

The stall shortage is particularly acute in Orange County.

UC Irvine evicted 26 horses in February to make room for a $15.3-million student center. The 175-stall Live Oak Canyon Stables in Trabuco Canyon closed last year. The owners of Stoneridge Riding Club sold their Laguna Canyon stable about three years ago after they had to evacuate horses several times because of floods and fire, said Joy Lingenfelter, animal control officer. And the Creekside Equestrian Center in San Juan Capistrano recently became a breeder’s private stable. Other stables were pushed out of business by development or money troubles.

Tim Poussard, who operates the Huntington Crest Equestrian Center in Huntington Beach, recently renewed a two-year lease, but the property owner has long-term plans to sell to a developer.

At first, few noticed the closures because few people were looking for a place to put a horse. Seven years ago, the lackluster economy touched off a fire sale of horses through Southern California, as workers laid off from their aerospace and other jobs no longer could afford monthly boarding fees of $200 to $400. Purebred Arabians that had sold for $40,000 during the 1980s suddenly were fetching prices as low as $1,500.

Jan Austin, an Arabian horse breeder in San Juan Capistrano, said boarding stables during that time had plenty of empty stalls or were locking up the horses of owners who failed to pay monthly fees.

She bought her first mare in 1990 from the bankrupt Albalisa Arabians breeders in Orange. Although most of the 50 horses were sold to private owners, some choice purebreds were bought at auction by slaughterhouses, she said.

“The prices were really high in the 1980s and then the bottom dropped out of the horse market and they couldn’t sell them,” she said.

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Nancy Huffman, who opened River Trail Stables in Orange in 1989, said that starting in late 1991, horse owners were asking her to keep their steeds rather than allow them to be sold to slaughterhouses.

“No one could afford to board their horses so they were giving them away,” she said.

Suddenly, all that has changed.

At the Orange County Fairgrounds Equestrian Center, manager Larry Gimple says he can’t recall ever having a full stable during the five years he has been there--until the arrival of 20 displaced horses from the closure of Creekside Equestrian Center within the past two weeks brought them to the limit.

“We just started a waiting list,” Gimple said.

Nationwide, there are 6.9 million horses. California, with 642,000, has the second largest population next to Texas, according to a 1996 study by the American Horse Council.

Dr. Patrick Ryan, a Los Angeles County veterinarian, said the county’s horse population is about 50,000. The most recent figures for Orange County date to a 1980 equine census by the California State Horseman’s Assn., when the county had 21,639 horses.

The demand for stalls has led to a spate of newly planned horse centers.

After a series of stables shut down in the Thousand Oaks area of Ventura County during the mid-1990s, lack of horse stables led the local park district there to make plans for an equestrian center on publicly owned land.

In San Juan Capistrano, which has a quarter of the boarded horses in Orange County and where riders can navigate a 29-mile network of trails, two stables are planned, in addition to expansion plans at four existing stables.

The city is planning a 10-acre horse center on public land. Another stable is proposed by Sherry and Randy Malis, a couple who operate a summer horse camp for needy young people at Rio Vista Stables. They plan to build a 188-stall equestrian center this fall on property leased from the owners of Capistrano Wholesale Nursery.

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Randy Malis said supportive property owners made the project possible.

“They had generous offers for that property and went with us because they liked our kids program,” Randy Malis said.

In addition to the new stables he will be constructing for the Malises, builder Robert Fish said he has been contracted to build two equestrian centers elsewhere in south Orange County.

“Nothing has been built in quite a few years,” Fish said.

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Times staff writer Kate Folmar contributed to this story from Ventura County.