Lemonwood Residents Sour on the Area : Neighborhoods: It is one of Oxnard's most ethnically diverse communities. But as the population grows so has the crime, police say.

By FRED ALVAREZ

June 13, 1993 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

On a dusty baseball diamond at Lemonwood Park--a gang-plagued, graffiti-scarred playground on Oxnard’s southeast side--youngsters buzz around the red-clay infield chasing big league dreams.

Under the watch of skipper Dave Padilla, who trains bus drivers by day and Little Leaguers by night, the Ocean View Cardinals practice in a pocket of the city that many residents fear is spiraling out of control.

“This park is an indication of what this community is all about,” said Padilla, putting the best face on a working-class neighborhood where he spent much time as a boy.

“Look around you,” he said, scanning the playing field. “How can you say anything bad about this neighborhood?”

But this clearly is not the Lemonwood of Padilla’s youth.

Crowding, Danger

It is a neighborhood far more crowded and more dangerous than the one first dug out of lemon orchards more than two decades ago. It is a neighborhood where gang fights and gunfire have become common, almost accepted.

It is a place with a dark reputation and an uncertain future, a community steadily sliding into decay.

“I have never felt as strongly as I feel about this neighborhood right now,” said Debbie Springer, PTA president and mother of two children who has lived in Lemonwood for about a decade. “If we could be out of the neighborhood tomorrow I would pack up and move.”

Hundreds of hard-working families live in this residential island, divorced from the rest of Oxnard by the Pacific Coast Highway on one side and farmland and a bustling business park on the others.

On the neighborhood’s south side, there is a single commercial strip with a couple of convenience stores, a Laundromat and a video rental outlet. On the north side, at one of only a handful of entrances to the community, there is the 160-space Kona Kai mobile home park.

There are ballgames and weekend picnics in Lemonwood Park. Ice cream vendors guide push carts through the streets of this mostly Latino enclave of about 10,000 residents.

Lemonwood School, a kindergarten-through-sixth-grade institution at the heart of the community, is widely heralded by parents, teachers and students.

“I love my neighborhood, I love my neighbors and I adore my school,” said Joyce Clark, who has lived and taught in Lemonwood since 1977. “I think the parents in this neighborhood are probably some of the most concerned parents you could find anywhere.”

Clark readily acknowledges Lemonwood’s problems.

She said her home has been burglarized once, and that its windows are now shielded by heavy metal bars. Gunshots, gang fights and graffiti are more apparent now than ever before, she said.

But the 24-year teaching veteran, the only instructor at Lemonwood School who lives in the community, said the problems are no different than those faced by neighborhoods throughout the city.

“I’m not scared here at all,” she said. “To me this is no different than any other working-class part of Oxnard.”

Lemonwood is one of the most ethnically diverse pockets of the city, with Latinos making up 62% of the population, whites making up 23%, Asians 11% and blacks about 3%.

“We have a racially balanced neighborhood here,” said Lawrence Stein, an unsuccessful candidate in the last two council elections who has lived in Lemonwood since 1987.

“People have a tendency of overexaggerating the negative and not talking about the positive attributes of an area,” he said. “This is really a quiet place to live.”

Added Clark on the neighborhood’s racial makeup: “I like living in a neighborhood like this, I think it’s healthy. I’d like to think that’s how the real world is, or at least the way the real world should be.”

But for many other residents, mounting problems of crime and gang activity have become all too familiar symptoms of a neighborhood ailing and in distress.

“Living on this side of town, you feel like you live on the wrong side of the tracks,” said Springer, the PTA president. “This neighborhood could be a lot worse, but it could also be a lot better.”

Crowded Households

There are obvious measures of decay in Lemonwood.

According to the 1990 census, about 17% of the population lives in poverty and about 36% of the housing units are overcrowded.

At nearly 5 people per household, Lemonwood grew more crowded over the past decade than any other Oxnard neighborhood, according to housing officials.

Earlier this year, a family of seven adults and 12 children was burned out of a two-bedroom condominium on the neighborhood’s crowded east end.

Two or three families are forced to share a single house or apartment just to pay the rent. Many garages in the neighborhood double as studio apartments, housing officials said.

As the population has swelled, crime has ballooned with it.

Calls for police service are up 40% since 1989, police said, about 14% above the citywide average. There were 393 crimes serious enough to generate a police report in 1989 compared to about 550 last year.

In March of last year, a member of the Lemonwood Chiques gang gunned down a rival gang member outside a market on the outskirts of the neighborhood.

Six months later, 14-year-old Marco Martinez was shot in the head in a drive-by shooting in the middle of the afternoon while standing on the front lawn of his family’s Napoleon Avenue home.

Martinez was not killed, but required an operation to remove shotgun pellets from his skull. The shooter never was found.

“The neighborhood is not as good as when we first moved in,” said Marco’s father, Frank Martinez, a Filipino immigrant who bought a home in Lemonwood 10 years ago. “When I moved here this neighborhood had no fences. Now everybody has fences.”

Martinez, an engineer with the county’s public works department, said he has considered moving away, but doesn’t know where to go.

“I want to raise my boys, but I’m not sure what is safe right now,” he said. “It’s almost getting as bad as Los Angeles.”

Oxnard police spokesman David Keith said neighborhood crime has actually stabilized in recent years.

“It’s got a higher crime rate than most neighborhoods in Oxnard,” Keith said of Lemonwood. “But it’s better today, even with its problems, then it was in the mid-’80s.”

Then, Keith said, about a half-dozen hard core juvenile criminals lived in the neighborhood and caused many problems. Through a special police program, the offenders were taken off the street, and what were spikes in crime became flat lines.

But Keith acknowledges that Lemonwood continues to be a problem-plagued slice of the city.

“It got better,” he said, “but now it’s slowly starting to go downhill.”

Police and residents agree that only a good measure of community involvement can pull the neighborhood out of its long, slow nose-dive. But so far, the community appears to be going in the wrong direction.

The Lemonwood Neighborhood Council, which acts as an advisory body to the Oxnard City Council, has been inactive for several months following the resignation of the neighborhood council president.

After years of winning districtwide membership drives, the Lemonwood School PTA now consists of three mothers. A recently formed Neighborhood Watch group near the school was disbanded after the block captain moved out of the area.

“You can’t tell by looking,” Martinez said, “but this area is in a social decline.”

‘Like a Cancer’

From their new home in a new housing tract on Oxnard’s north side, Mark and Rabia Yeaman see Lemonwood very differently.

Three years ago, the couple bought a Lemonwood home owned by Mark Yeaman’s parents. He lived in the home from the time he was a high school sophomore until a couple of years after graduation.

“We had visited his parents frequently, and when we’d visit I’d see the neighborhood and be concerned,” Rabia Yeaman said.

But where she saw problems, Mark Yeaman saw a community in need. He organized a Neighborhood Watch group that monitored area crime and alerted police to problems.

But two shootings on their ordinarily quiet cul-de-sac convinced the couple to move last summer. The Neighborhood Watch group disbanded: the sign warning troublemakers to stay away has been mangled almost beyond recognition.

“To me, it’s a shame,” Mark Yeaman said of the deterioration that has settled in over the years. “The neighborhood has great potential.”

Marlene Doyle lives in a neighborhood separated from Lemonwood by Channel Islands Boulevard.

As captain of a newly formed Neighborhood Watch group in her area, Doyle has studied her neighbors to the north and is alarmed by what she has learned.

“Naturally their problems are going to spill into our neighborhood,’ she said. “It’s like a cancer and it’s starting to spread.”

Doyle has invited Lemonwood residents interested in revitalizing Neighborhood Watch groups to join her effort.

“We’re out there to stop it,” she said. “If we don’t, they’ll take over.”

Across town, Mark Yeaman feels as though he’s abandoned his old neighborhood. He’s glad he moved, and likes his new home. but he looks back at Lemonwood and can’t help but feel pained.

“It could be a great neighborhood, it could be fine,” he said. “It’s just a few people, as far as I’m concerned, who are really making things bad.”

An Urge to Move

Through the crackle of a police scanner, Art Carmona has listened as his neighborhood has gone downhill.

Born and raised in Oxnard’s La Colonia neighborhood, the 48-year-old garage owner bought his home new 20 years ago after returning from the Vietnam war.

“It was a good area. Peaceful. Quiet,” he said. “But it has really gotten out of hand.”

On his scanner, Carmona said he hears police respond nightly to reports of gang fights and vandalism. He said he hears officers chase suspects through the back alleys that slice through the community.

“A lot of things have happened in 20 years,” he said. “To tell you the truth, if I could afford it I’d move out.”

PTA member Cindy Lopez has also considered moving away. Shootings in the neighborhood, including one on her block recently, have prompted that kind of talk again.

“It saddens us,” said Lopez, who bought a home on Geronimo Drive 10 years ago. “When you’ve been in an area that long, you would like things to pretty much stay the same.”

On the tract’s west end, on Greenbrook Drive where the homes are fronted by well-manicured lawns, the Myers family has lived for 13 years.

A flagpole rises from the front yard and, on a recent afternoon, supported an American Flag and a Marine Corps flag. There was a red van in the driveway with a bumper sticker reading: “My Child Was Student of the Month at Lemonwood School.”

Valerie Myers, mother of four, said she believes the community has been unfairly saddled with a rotten reputation.

“One street can bring the whole neighborhood down,” said Myers, a native of Bangladesh who married her Marine Corps husband and came to the United States 16 years ago. “But it’s not bad everywhere. I think this neighborhood is a good area.”

Myers’ next-door neighbor is Taiwan-native Margaret Wang, who also married an American and moved to this country more than a dozen years ago.

“I like living here,” said Wang, whose 10-year-old son Arnold is a fourth-grader at Lemonwood School. “We’ve become more worried lately (about crime), but we talk with others and every area is the same. We are just careful, that’s all.”

Near Lemonwood Park, 42-year-old Raymond Lopez pulled his 13-month-old son, Tommy, along the street in a red wagon.

“It’s like every other neighborhood,” he said. “It has basic problems, but it’s a nice neighborhood. I’ve lived in Los Angeles and believe me, this area could be a lot worse.”

Lemonwood at a Glance Population:11,158

RACIAL BREAKDOWN Latino:62.4%

White:23.1%

Asian:11.3%

Black:2.8%

Other:0.5%

EDUCATION (residents 25 and older)

High school degrees:14.8%

College degrees:5.3%

Median

household income:$35,316

Residents