Farmworker Homes Sprouting

Standing at the threshold of his new three-bedroom apartment, strawberry picker Gerardo Lopez marveled at his good fortune.

Just two months ago, the 32-year-old widowed father of three was living in central Oxnard in a converted garage where he and his children slept on the floor.

Today, Lopez lives at the Meta Street Apartments in a spacious two-story unit with a dishwasher, washer and dryer and two-car garage. And like most others at the pioneering farmworker housing project, thanks to a federal assistance program, he pays only 30% of his income -- in his case, $340 a month -- toward rent.

“I never imagined I would ever be able to live in a place so beautiful,” said Lopez, just home from a day in the fields, his pants stained red with berry juice. “It’s like a dream come true.”

The Meta Street project, the first large-scale farmworker housing built in Ventura County in more than a decade, celebrated its grand opening Saturday with speeches, mariachi music and tenant-guided tours of the 24-unit facility.

Representative of statewide efforts, the $5.9-million complex was built with city, state and federal funds on the site of a rundown motel in downtown Oxnard. The complex opened March 13, filling up that day with more than 100 residents. The laborers’ commune has a waiting list of more than 60 families.

The units represent a drop in the bucket toward meeting farmworker housing needs in Ventura County. Housing advocates say scores of laborers live in squalor, packed into toolsheds and garages or 10 to 15 per house to pay the rent.

But what Meta Street lacks in scale, it makes up for in symbolism. The complex is the first of many projects to emerge from a campaign to shelter those who supply the muscle for Ventura County’s $1-billion farm industry.

Growers, labor advocates, elected leaders and others are pushing like never before to provide farmworker housing, driven by a belief that the low-wage work force is being hit hard by the county’s soaring rents and skyrocketing home prices.

Nearly 150 farmworker housing units are in the planning stages, including a 24-unit rental project in Santa Paula and a 58-unit project at a former slum housing site in south Oxnard.

The newfound focus comes after years of arm-twisting by affordable-housing advocates, as lawsuits have prompted commitments to farmworker housing. It also is triggered by broader concern for all segments of the work force in a county where the median home price reached $470,000 last month.

But largely the interest has been spurred by a growing belief that in order to keep farmers in business -- which voters have said they wanted to do through the adoption of farmland preservation measures -- steps must be taken to house those who work the harvest.

“I think Ventura County has really continued to lead the way,” said Jeff Deiss, director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s multifamily housing program in California.

Deiss said similar efforts have taken root statewide, including creation last year of a 60-bed migrant farmworker dormitory in Napa Valley. The USDA program lent $24 million last fiscal year to farm labor housing providers across California, he said.

The agency lent $435,000 to Meta Street and is providing rental assistance for most units, assuring that families pay no more than 30% of their income toward rent.

Momentum has been building for years in Ventura County.

In January, more than 300 people crammed into the Santa Paula Community Center for the first farmworker housing summit to review achievements and outline challenges. Attendees vowed to establish committees in each city in Ventura County dedicated to the creation of farmworker housing units in coming years.

“We are just building this tremendous coalition,” said poverty law attorney Barbara Macri-Ortiz, who has been at the center of several housing battles.

“When we were working on these cases in the early ‘90s, we really didn’t have a voice people were willing to listen to,” Macri-Ortiz said. “Now, when we’re talking, it’s not just us. It’s a new day.”

As it is on Meta Street.

The project was born out of the settlement of a lawsuit brought by Macri-Ortiz against the city of Oxnard over a proposed luxury development. Macri-Ortiz said the project failed to provide housing for poor people as required by the city’s housing plan.

The settlement, brokered in 2000, paved the way for construction of a 54-unit low-income project in north Oxnard, where at least 27 units will be set aside for farmworker families. And it laid the groundwork for construction by Cabrillo Economic Development Corp. of the Meta Street Apartments on a vacant parcel once home to a motel pegged by police as a shelter for drug addicts and prostitutes.

What has emerged is a haven of a different kind, a complex of one- and two-story structures highlighted in hues of almond and olive green.

Shoehorned onto an acre in the downtown area, the project is largely made up of three- and four-bedroom units. A basketball court serves as a gathering place late afternoons and on weekends for youngsters, their shouts and squeals of laughter spilling across the walkways.

“It’s very nice here, very peaceful,” said mushroom picker Enrique Raigoza, 37, who lives with his wife and six children in a four-bedroom apartment. He pays $997 a month, two dollars more than he paid to rent a two-bedroom apartment in central Oxnard.

To live in the Meta Street Apartments, workers must earn at least $3,835 a year and a family of four can make no more than $37,350. Tenants must derive most of their income from farm labor.

The project is served by the Clinicas del Camino Real health clinic less than a block away and eventually will offer English as a second language instruction, citizenship classes and on-site legal aid through the Ventura County Superior Court’s self-help legal center.

It also is part of a larger redevelopment effort in downtown Oxnard aimed at revitalizing timeworn commercial and residential neighborhoods.

While the complex sits on a block graced by a popular Mexican bakery and busy Mexican restaurants, it is surrounded by noisy bars and boarded-up buildings. Residents of the Meta Street Apartments now meet monthly with police and city officials to discuss ways to spruce up the community and keep it safe.

“I know we can be happy here,” said Mary Herrera, 68, who shares the project’s only one-bedroom unit with her husband, Fernando, a disabled farmworker. “It’s important for workers, at the end of the day, to have nice places to live. They come home from the fields so tired and that’s so little to expect.”