Family Ties
Tired of the confines of condo living and eager to fulfill his longtime dream of owning a Spanish-style house, Oscar Hernandez began searching a year ago for an affordable fixer that would keep him close to his work and family.
Last September, the 37-year-old fashion designer bought a spacious tile-roofed home in San Fernando, a working-class city of about 25,000 residents in the northeast San Fernando Valley.
Attracted to the city’s small-town atmosphere, Hernandez quickly has come to appreciate the convenience of having stores and friends nearby.
“I can walk everywhere,” said Hernandez, who designs clothes for Spanish-language television programs and produces lines of children’s wear for a nearby clothing manufacturer. “The people are so friendly. My next-door neighbor is the mayor.”
Hernandez paid $175,000 for his 1926 three-bedroom, three-bath house. Arched doorways lead to sunny rooms filled with Mexican sculptures and artifacts. A series of portraits painted by Hernandez enlivens the walls.
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He plans to refinish the home’s original hardwood floors, the first phase of an ambitious redecorating project that he says will maintain the Spanish flavor of the house.
Nestled by the San Gabriel Mountains, San Fernando--named after the nearby mission--is bordered on the south and west by Mission Hills, on the north and west by Sylmar and by Pacoima on the southeastern portion of the city.
The city is about 90% Latino, according to data from the Los Angeles County Urban Research Department. About half of the city’s population consists of second- or third-generation residents whose roots run deep in the community, said John Ornelas, San Fernando’s city administrator.
Ornelas credits the San Fernando Police Department’s swift response time and accessibility to the city’s five council members as reasons for San Fernando’s popularity among longtime residents.
The housing market in San Fernando is tight, in part because homeowners tend not to leave town or trade up, Ornelas said.
Adding to the shortage is the fact that many San Fernando homeowners pass their houses down to succeeding generations rather than putting them up for sale, said Ana Maria Colon, owner of ERA Rocking Horse Realty. First-time buyers, she said, make up the bulk of the market.
“Lots of immigrants come here to improve their quality of life,” Colon said. “Their kids go off to college, then return here to settle, usually with the help of their parents.”
Homes in San Fernando range from $140,000 for a two-bedroom, 1 3/4-bath house to $300,000 for a three-bedroom, two-bath house on a half-acre lot in the Huntington Estates area.
The typical home was built in the 1950s, is one story and has three bedrooms and 1 3/4 baths in about 1,200 square feet. It sells for between $165,000 and $175,000.
Colon said that the San Fernando housing market was rocked by the recession in the mid-’90s, when foreclosures accounted for about 35% of area sales. Like most of Southern California’s markets, San Fernando’s has bounced, Colon said.
“I think my house will only increase in value,” Hernandez said. “I’ll make sure it always feels like old San Fernando.”
Virginia Barragan, 64, grew up in that “old” San Fernando, where 50 years ago unpaved roads led to dozens of olive and citrus groves, the area’s major source of employment and revenue.
Before World War II, Barragan said, most of the town’s Latino residents lived on the west side of the railroad tracks but worked on the “other side” of the tracks packing oranges, lemons and grapefruits for the growers, who lived on ranches in the foothills.
“This community was segregated by housing when I was growing up, but now it’s a melting pot,” Barragan said. “I heard that Indians stopped in our town on their way to the mission. Then and now, it’s a nice place to hang around.”
In 1797, the Spanish established Mission San Fernando, where thousands of local Native Americans were converted to Catholicism and worked well into the mid-1800s.
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The area grew into a bustling rail town when Southern Pacific Railroad completed a line through San Fernando in 1874, the same year Charles Maclay, a former state senator, submitted a township map to the Los Angeles County recorder. The city was incorporated in 1911.
Upon the 1913 completion of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which diverted water from the Owens River in the Sierra Nevada to thirsty Southern California 233 miles away, many San Fernando Valley cities were annexed by Los Angeles. But San Fernando, with its own supply of well water, managed to maintain its independence from the metropolitan mammoth that eventually surrounded it.
Barragan, who said she was one of the first Latinas to be hired by Lockheed Corp. in Burbank, and her husband, Joe Barragan, a longtime General Motors manager in Santa Fe Springs, bought their three-bedroom, two-bath home for $32,000 in 1967, raising their two daughters there.167772161 The couple is retired, and Virginia Barragan, long active in civic affairs, is trying to bring a cultural arts center to San Fernando Middle School. She said that students who feed into the site--from 14 elementary schools in Pacoima, Sylmar, Lake View Terrace and San Fernando--do not have local access to the arts and would benefit from exposure to ballets and concerts.
Students and teachers at San Fernando’s middle school and high school are struggling to bring up standardized test scores, which are affected by the limited English-language skills of the schools’ many Spanish-speaking immigrants, said San Fernando High School Principal Philip Saldivar.
The high school ranked 2 out of a possible 10 statewide on the 1999 Academic Performance Index but ranked 7 compared to schools with similar demographics. San Fernando Middle School ranked 1 statewide and 6 compared to similar schools.
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Last November the high school instituted the Graduation Really Achieves Dreams, or Project GRAD, program to help motivate students, involve parents in the education process and help improve test scores.
San Fernando’s Morningside Elementary School began Project GRAD 1 1/2 years ago and this year ranked 2 statewide and 9 compared to similar schools. Principal Nick Antonio Vasquez said participation in GRAD has made a big difference.
“San Fernando is very family-oriented, and we’ve always watched out for each other’s kids,” said Sally Aguilar, a 59-year resident and longtime teacher who raised five children. “I’ve always felt like I know everybody in town.”
Ornelas said city officials call residents back personally, “usually the same day.”
The Police Department’s quick response time was amply demonstrated to Robert Blondeel-Timmerman and his wife, Alexandra Reif, shortly after they settled in San Fernando last May.
They discovered a man asleep in his car in front of their house in the leafy Huntington Estates area of San Fernando.
“We called the police and they were there in three minutes,” Reif said. “It turns out the man had just had a fight with his wife and spent the night in his car.”
Blondeel-Timmerman and Reif spent four years looking at comparably priced but smaller houses in Chatsworth, Granada Hills and Sylmar before purchasing their 2,800-square-foot ranch-style home for $255,000.
The couple said that the 16,000-square-foot property--with circular driveway, guest house and a large garden--feels like a country estate after they shared a 1,100-square-foot mobile home with their two daughters for 11 years.
Blondeel-Timmerman, a 42-year-old studio production electrician, still can’t believe he’s living in the once-unattainable neighborhood where he and his brothers delivered newspapers as children.
“I never in a million years thought I’d ever live here,” he said. “Every night when I come home, I feel like I’ve died and gone to heaven.”
Built in 1957, the three-bedroom, 2 1/4-bath house features custom closets with built-in drawers, antique light fixtures and window seats in the children’s bedrooms.
Reif originally had ruled out relocating to San Fernando, believing it was a city overrun with gangs.
“We’ve always battled an image problem here,” Ornelas said. “People think we have a high crime rate, but we don’t.”
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San Fernando Police Chief Dominic Rivetti believes the city’s reputation as crime-ridden stems from the gang activity that racked the area 40 to 50 years ago. The more recent gang violence of the ‘80s that afflicted many areas of the county has been all but eradicated in the small city, which last year reported one homicide, 178 burglaries and 70 robberies, Rivetti said.
San Fernando residents say that economic development, not crime, is the primary issue facing the city. Residents and city administrators are trying to bring more upscale dining, shopping and entertainment to the area, whose residents must travel 10 miles to get to theater multiplexes and shopping malls.
Plans are under way to develop a retail center on a privately owned lot at the corner of Arroyo Avenue and Glenoaks Boulevard, where for 30 years local vendors have run a swap meet three times a week.
While many San Fernando residents embrace the idea of a Target or Home Depot in the proposed retail center, others maintain they will lose a traditional meeting place and an affordable marketplace.
“I’m for the shopping center being built,” Virginia Barragan said. “But whatever happens, we’ll still have the closeness of the people here.”
