The eight houses and nine mobile homes are clustered in a pair of dusty lots on a farm road east of Oxnard, bordered by farms, agricultural warehouses and Pacific Coast Highway.
Most of the houses have been expanded in some slapdash way, with plywood lean-tos a common feature. The houses and trailers have broken windows, walls patched with more plywood, and extension cords stretching from the windows. Inside the homes, county inspectors have found mold infestations, leaking pipes, sinks that don't drain and walls that leave daylight streaming in.
"It's up there with the worst places I've seen," said Ron Perry, a lawyer with California Rural Legal Assistance in Oxnard who represents a family who lives there. On his first visit, Perry said, he saw raw sewage coming up from the dirt behind one house.
Ventura County's farmworkers often live in cramped, dilapidated housing. But on Dufau Road, the conditions are so bad, county officials believe they're criminal.
Landlord faces prosecution
The county has notified the owner of the two properties of a host of alleged code violations and plans to refer the matter to the District Attorney's Office for criminal investigation and potential prosecution, said Liz Cameron, a senior enforcement officer with the county.
A prosecution would be the county's first criminal pursuit of a landlord for substandard housing since 2003, Cameron said. That was when the owners of the El Tapatio apartments, also in the fields east of Oxnard, pleaded no contest to criminal charges. They also wound up paying their former tenants $300,000 in a civil settlement.
The owner of the Dufau Road properties, Esterina Tuason of Santa Barbara, could not be reached for comment. A letter mailed to her home and phone calls to her attorney went unanswered.
Tuason hasn't cooperated with the county, either. Cameron said she came to the Planning Division counter last month and asked for demolition permits to fix some of the code violations but left without obtaining them. "We always strive for voluntary compliance, but when they thumb their noses at us, we have no other choice" than to refer the case to the district attorney, Cameron said.
Perry's clients declined to be interviewed for this article. Other residents who were at the property on two recent afternoons also declined to comment.
Other possible violations
The Dufau Road properties have a long history with the county. The owner before Tuason was cited for code violations in 2003, Cameron said.
When Tuason bought the property, she made some repairs and brought the homes back up to legal standards, but since then, they've deteriorated.
In addition to the suspected code violations, Tuason is being investigated for allegedly raising the rents on her mobile homes faster than the rate of inflation, without permission from the county's mobile home rent control board.
Most of the one-bedroom houses and mobile homes on Dufau Road rent for $800 to $1,000 a month, Cameron said. The two-bedroom units are in the $1,200 range.
There are 17 units on the two properties, but there is no way to tell how many people live there. County inspectors found living rooms and garages turned into bedrooms, and multiple families sharing single-family homes.
Chickens, goats and other animals are kept on the property. That's generally legal in the unincorporated areas of the county, but in this case, there might be more animals than the code allows for, Cameron said.
One home red-tagged
Last month, the county "red-tagged" one home in the complex, deeming it unfit for human habitation. Southern California Edison Co. had disconnected its power, and the home was getting electricity from "an unauthorized source," Cameron said.
County officials offered the people who lived there help in finding a new home, but the residents didn't take them up on the offer, she said.
The question of what to do with a substandard dwelling can be a tricky one. Red-tagging it removes any safety risks, but it can also leave the tenants worse off than they were before.
The risk of being evicted by the landlord or forced out when a home is condemned can make people reluctant to report substandard conditions, Perry said. "Our first interest is to try to keep people from being rendered homeless," he said.
Though most tenants don't know it, there are programs to help them. If anyone is displaced, state law requires landlords to pay "relocation assistance" equal to two months' rent.
Cameron said there probably won't be any other red tags on Dufau Road. The county tested the water that comes from the well on the property and found it safe to drink, alleviating the most urgent health concern, she said.
"We would only order them vacated if there was an imminent danger," she said. "Otherwise, it would be so very disruptive to so many families."
Afraid of landlords
Perry first heard of the Dufau Road properties about a year ago, when a tenant came to his office in downtown Oxnard to see if California Rural Legal Assistance could help her fight her eviction notice.
The answer was no - landlords are allowed to evict tenants without cause, as long as they give 60 days notice - but when Perry saw the family's home, he advised the tenant to report possible code violations to the county.
"This just shows how badly we need safe, sanitary, affordable housing," Perry said. "People don't choose to live that way, if they have any other option."
Perry said the Dufau Road properties differ only in degree from farmworker housing found all over the county. The residents, often afraid of both their landlords and the authorities, rarely blow the whistle.
Perry's clients are legal U.S. residents, as are all of the people California Rural Legal Assistance represents. However, some of their neighbors on Dufau Road are probably illegal immigrants, Perry said.
"If these tenants weren't immigrants, if they were white, English-speaking people, this would never happen," Perry said. "It would never be allowed to happen."
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