House Un-Beautiful

It was surely a pretty little house at one time, years ago, when the wood floors were bright and the built-in shelves were full of books. That was back when it stood out here alone, a little farmhouse in the middle of a tomato patch perched between Camarillo and Oxnard.

Now, still tucked right here amid the fields, it has recently become ground zero for the most visible gang graffiti war in Ventura County, on display for a noisy audience of cars on the nearby Ventura Freeway.

The house has been empty for at least a decade, but it was about a month and a half ago, people think, that the first spray-painted tag showed up. Then came another unreadable scrawl, and then another. Now, the little farmhouse has become an atypical battleground.

“That’s what struck me about that house,” said Kevin Quinn, a building inspector with county code enforcement, who saw it from the freeway. “It’s really unusual. It’s in more of the high-density areas where you get graffiti.”

The kids who tagged this house--they tend to call themselves artists--were likely crews from just west of Camarillo, from areas like Nyeland Acres and El Rio, which are more frequently associated with gangs, Sheriff’s Cmdr. David Tennessen said.

It doesn’t necessarily mean that gangs are staking out new territory. They are probably just so-called tagger crews, trying to leave their mark in the county. The house was empty. It was probably dark. And once an initial tag marked the place, it became irresistible to kids with spray cans.

“It’s a sign of a challenge,” Tennessen said.

But what can Ventura resident Chuck Vacca, who has owned this empty house for eight years now, do now that his property has become the target for a tagger battle?

He paints it with a coat of white one day. The next it’s covered in spray paint again, a jigsaw puzzle of interlocking gang tags.

He knows neighbors and farm workers complain among themselves. One man, who works for Pictsweet, in one of the buildings Vacca owns, said workers had to learn to live with the eyesore. But how can Vacca handle it by himself, especially after taggers went on a spree up and down Ventura Boulevard, even hitting the shiny new Camarillo city sign?

“I’ve painted it two or three times. It’s fruitless,” he said. “I’m in a quandary about what to do.”

What he can do, say police officials, is call them for an occasional patrol. Light up the place with lamps. Hire a security guard. Or just give in, and let the Fire Department burn it down, just as owners of a Saticoy home off the Ventura Freeway did a little while ago, said Sheriff’s Senior Deputy Ed Tumbleson.

In the meantime, he could be responsible for taggers’ actions, Quinn said. Under nuisance laws, he could be cited, and the county could demand he tear the house down. Quinn said, however, that with staff tight, and higher priority violations, it’s unlikely anyone will visit the house soon.

Vacca said he wouldn’t be surprised to see code enforcement arrive. When he bought the place--he already owned a lot of the land around it--he had visions of fixing it up, but it cost so much, and he figured nobody would buy a house on the freeway. It wasn’t zoned for office space, so that was out of the question.

So, it’s been sitting there. And it proved a tempting target.

And Vacca and the little wood farmhouse look to be the losers in this graffiti battle.

“The answer,” he said, “may be the bulldozer.”