Sullied Past, Bright Future

VENTURA —  The boom times whisper like a ghost across Ventura’s west side. The boarded windows, rusted machines and dinosaur-like oil pumps frozen in time hint of dreams that literally ran out of gas.

This isolated side of town has many names, none that flatter: Wrong side of the tracks, Ventura’s ghetto, or simply “the Avenue” to the people who live and work along the thoroughfare that bears the city’s name.

The population is mostly working-class poor and Latino. The specter of industrial pollution lingers like a hangover since the nation’s biggest oil companies mined petroleum and then left when it was gone.

Now, a determined group of civic leaders is trying to bring prosperity to the Avenue. But in a new twist, boosters are seeking to capitalize on the community’s sullied past to build its future.

The strategy calls for tapping heavily into state and federal programs intended to restore idle land to productive uses. That has struck a sympathetic chord with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which last year added most of the west side to its 5-year-old Brownfields Economic Redevelopment Initiative.

The program provides low-interest loans and grants to help revitalize blighted industrial and commercial properties suspected of being contaminated. In two months, the community could win a coveted designation that makes it eligible for even more federal money. State and private sources also are being sought.

“This is very, very important,” said Rochelle Margolin, economic development associate for Ventura. “This is going to bring money at a faster pace and open up lots of new opportunities. What it means for the west side is a concentrated effort to revitalize the entire area and provide jobs.”

Low Property Values, High Jobless Rate

Even along California’s golden coast, it would be difficult to find a more perfect setting than the western portion of Ventura. Cradled in a narrow valley, the Ventura River flows lazily by as shorebirds poke in the estuary for a meal and the tall peaks of Los Padres National Forest reflect sunsets like a drive-in movie screen.

The climate is mild, and the air is clean and largely fog-free. From the Avenue, travel about one mile south and the Pacific beckons, or turn left and be in downtown Los Angeles in little more than an hour, or turn right and shop or dine in Santa Barbara, 35 miles to the north.

Yet property values are lower than in any other beach community in California. The unemployment rate is about 8.5%, double that for the rest of Ventura, while per capita income is less than half of what people in the rest of the city make, Margolin said.

“Look, if it weren’t for extension cords going between garages and trailers, many of these people would be living under freeway bridges,” said Lauri Flack, chairwoman of the Westside Community Council revitalization committee.

About 40% of the neighborhood is Latino. Many of the children go to Sheridan Way Elementary School, adjacent to the freeway and a park where homeless people snooze the day away. When the kids grow older, they attend De Anza Middle School, where the playground is dwarfed by mountains of scrap that feed the giant magnetic cranes at Standard Industries, the metal recycler next door.

At the south end of Ventura Avenue, it’s a tossup as to which activity produces more ear-splitting noise: The factory that clangs out truckloads of steel rods from beneath a tin roof, or the burst of semiautomatic weapons fire from the public gun range perched on a bluff. In either case, an abandoned rock quarry that vaults above Rocklite Road is a perfect amplifier.

About half the liquor licenses issued in the city have gone to establishments on the west side, though only about 11% of Ventura’s residents live there. Prostitution, gang fights and drugs have plagued the area, though officials say those vices are receding.

But it is the grinding blight that is most conspicuous throughout the west side. In a parasitic relationship, the low-rent lots served as hosts for junk that local industries needed to unload. You name it, it’s here by the truckload: Old boats, stacks of tires and wood pallets, gas cylinders, metal heaps in various stages of corrosion, orange road cones, lumber, steel girders, forklifts, faded washing machines and truck skeletons long ago cannibalized for parts.

Near Shell Road, rows of big tanks, many of them empty, some labeled “vapor recovery,” stand like sentries. Texaco, Union Oil and Shell used to operate in this part of town. Pipelines crisscross the neighborhood, slithering through weedy lots like steel snakes.

It wasn’t always this way along the Avenue. Not long ago it was a busy hub of commerce. Indeed, this is where civilization began in Ventura County.

In 1782, Father Junipero Serra built San Buenaventura Mission near the spot where, years later, Ventura Avenue and Main Street would converge. Vineyards and Indian enclaves occupied the area until the Gold Rush, when settlers arrived and filled the river valley with apricot orchards, said Charles Johnson, librarian at the Ventura County Museum of History and Art.

But it was crude oil hidden underground that transformed the region. The first gusher on the West Coast occurred in 1867 in Ojai, 11 miles away. Soon, wooden oil derricks were erected up and down the Ventura River and along the coast, and the boom was on. The population on the west side doubled between 1920 and 1930. Ventura County crude oil would power warships fighting the Japanese in World War II, be burned as gasoline on Los Angeles highways and become lubricants for factories.

Oil Prices Crashed in ‘80s

But it all came crashing down in the 1980s, when crude oil prices tumbled and wells began to run dry. Shops closed, skilled workers were laid off and people moved on, leaving a century of industrial mess behind.

It’s noon at Taqueria Tepatitlan, and patrons from the Avenue shuffle into the Mexican restaurant for fish tacos, ESPN and the hospitality of owner Juan Gonzalez.

The clientele, diverse as the community, includes artists and body shop workers, young lovers and an occasional downtown businessman. He greets many of them by name, even knows their favorite dishes by heart. They talk about sports, about how Gonzalez’s niece is feeling, about life on the Avenue.

Gonzalez was under no illusions when he came here seven years ago. Drug deals and trash filled the streets. Gunfire occasionally crackled in the night. And nobody seemed to care--not the residents, not City Hall.

The turning point came in early 1994 when gang members sprayed homes at West Harrison Avenue and Olive Way with bullets from an automatic weapon. That was the last straw for community leaders. The Westside Community Council was formed later that year, and 3,000 people showed up for a town meeting to begin reclaiming the community.

Since then, things have improved on the Avenue. Outside the restaurant, the streets buzz with activity, boys pushing skateboards and working-class men on errands and mothers pushing babies in strollers.

“When I came here 10 years ago and I told people where I lived, they’d say, ‘Oh, that’s the other side of the tracks.’ ” Flack said. “But it’s one mile from the ocean, it has great ethnic diversity and there’s this great sense of community. It’s a real gem.”

Change, subtle but discernible, can be seen in the fresh coats of pastel paint and rose blooms planted at clapboard bungalows on Olive Street. Near West Lewis Street, dozens of new two-story homes in a pocket subdivision called River Trails are almost complete. A Domino’s Pizza opened nearby, and curbs and gutters are being installed on streets.

Southern California Edison is burying power lines along the Avenue, eliminating the thicket of off-kilter power poles that clutter the cityscape.

The De Anza Apartments, where a police SWAT unit once had to subdue a rooftop gunman, has been transformed from flophouse to low-income housing as part of a $2-million renovation. Police opened a storefront shop on the Avenue, launched gang-prevention youth programs and began working more closely with community leaders.

“You can just feel it and sense that it’s a lot safer,” Gonzalez said.

New businesses are moving in too.

The Sine Qua Non winery opened to supply trendy vintages for Los Angeles restaurants. Applied Silicone, a maker of medical supplies, moved in. A company that makes faux architectural pieces for Las Vegas casinos opened too. Long-shuttered mission-style buildings are coming to life with hair salons, restaurants and florists. The city is pursuing $485,000 in grants to install fiber-optic cables in old oil pipelines to lure high-tech companies. Patagonia and Kinko’s set up corporate headquarters here long ago.

“I see the west side has gone through a tremendous transition,” said Roger Case, a Realtor and president of the Westside Business Assn., who has lived in west Ventura for nearly 30 years. “It’s gone from a depressed area to a viable area and now it has come back even better, with more diverse industries and not just oil.”

Ventura Officials Pursuing ‘Brownfields’

But economic growth will always be stunted as long as so much land is suspected of being contaminated. And the best remedy for that problem, civic leaders say, may lie in a federal program that seems an ideal antidote for what ails the west side.

The Clinton administration launched the “brownfields” program five years ago to revitalize blighted industrial areas and abandoned urban cores where a pollution threat, whether real or perceived, hinders reuse. About $2 billion has been spent nationwide.

Ventura officials are aggressively pursuing brownfields aid. The city received a $200,000 federal grant last September to study up to 30 sites that are idle, abandoned or possibly polluted in a two-square-mile area.

By October, the EPA will decide whether the west side should be declared a “showcase community,” a designation that could make the city eligible for millions of dollars in aid from an assortment of federal agencies.

Meanwhile, the California Environmental Protection Agency plans to spend $85 million this year on brownfields, and Ventura officials are pursuing some of those funds for the west side. Low-interest loans of $100,000 and up to $2.5 million in cleanup funds are available for select communities.

The city needs growing room because voters in 1995 adopted an anti-sprawl measure that greatly restricts development on agricultural lands. Community leaders have drafted a blueprint for revitalization to turn the west side into a modern village where people can own low-cost homes within walking distance of good jobs along the Avenue.

“The brownfields program is a catalyst to refocus on that area,” Ventura Councilman Brian Brennan said. “It gives us the opportunity to create jobs, to preserve the village out there to keep residents living and working there.”

But cleanup must precede renewal, and that requires knowing where pollution is--or isn’t. No one has ever done a comprehensive environmental study in the area, and sorting it out will be complicated.

Like hopscotch, nearly a century of oil exploration has left a mess in some places while skipping others, officials say. Among the industrial activities that have occurred in the area are fertilizer manufacturing, oil pumping and refining, refueling operations, chemical storage and an assortment of transportation and support service centers related to the oil fields. Leaks and spills were common, though the full extent of the releases is unclear.

Forty-eight leaky underground storage tanks have been identified on the west side of Ventura, and 60% of those are clustered along a two-mile stretch of Ventura Avenue--the densest concentration of leaky tanks in the county, according to records kept by the state and county authorities. Many of the tanks were used to store chemicals or petroleum products, and some are in various stages of cleanup.

Investigators have identified an additional eight sites in the area where chemical discharges have either polluted ground water or threaten to do so, according to the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board.

Not all landowners, however, embrace the brownfields approach. Some are reluctant to participate, fearing if regulators find contaminant hot spots on their land, they will be forever tied up in a costly legal struggle for control of their land, Case said.

But the greater threat, city officials say, is the mere perception of pollution. Until that stigma is removed, the west side faces a future of unfulfilled potential.

“Once it’s cleaned up, the community can decide what happens,” Brennan said. “If you have a clean canvas, you can paint something new again.”