Attitudes About Needed Housing

Re “Shootings Scar Progress at Troubled Complex,” May 7.

This article was emotionally charged for me as my parents spent their last 30 years living at Conejo Creek condominiums, originally known as Las Casitas. The article reeked of bigotry, racism and the pretentiousness that spoils Thousand Oaks.

It led off by identifying the negative attitude of Thousand Oaks toward the complex and its people and noted that the complex is not the sort of place people think of when they think of Thousand Oaks.

Officials commented that the complex could not be built today because it did not contain “semirural amenities.” It certainly was not built as a low-cost project, according to officials.

In the early 1970s, Las Casitas opened and its units sold rapidly to middle-class buyers, many of them purchasing homes for retirement. Selling in the high teens at a time when a new home in Westlake was going for $30,000, they seemed like reasonable purchases.

Las Casitas was surrounded by ranchland. My dad taught his grandkids to fly kites on the hills that are now Amgen and housing. We used to hike all over those “semirural amenities” the area was noted for. It was really much different from today’s planned developments, with a one-acre park and houses five feet apart.

Las Casitas, like any community of 2,500 people (more than 2% of Thousand Oaks’ population, Mr. and Ms. Politician), has had problems from its inception. Whenever you have a community, the people bring all of society’s ills with them.

Originally the issues were trying to find board members for the homeowners association who could get this condominium thing right. As people died off or moved to the next stage of housing, our wonderful real estate broker friends realized that Las Casitas was a steal as an investment. In any community, when the residents do not have a stake, the problems appear much more rapidly. The investment community said so what, reaped its profits and left the city and Las Casitas residents with a problem to fix.

The new generation of residents has dealt with a vast majority of the problems. The good families purchasing these units far outnumber the bad.

We recently sold my parents’ condo in Las Casitas / Conejo Creek for $105,000. That may not seem to be a lot to the affluent, but it is exactly the type and price of housing needed by those handling the blue-collar work in town or just getting started.

It is ironic that the type of housing deemed so poor is of a type of community living that we desperately need to create due to dwindling land supplies and the aging of the population. I hope the attitudes expressed in your article do not hinder or prevent the thinking and leadership that will be required soon to deal with new housing issues.

DAVID A. YATES

Moorpark