Oceanside’s New Housing Helps It Forget the Seedy Past

OCEANSIDE, Calif. —  Forget how the Beach Boys extolled California beach life.

All the experience meant to Leanne Cressman was a stabbing on her front porch, peeping Toms, dope deals and legions of prostitutes (the most attractive ones being transvestites, she insists).

The beachfront neighborhood in Oceanside where Cressman has lived for six years was so odd that she and her fiance, Sean McDaniel, stocked few women’s bathing suits when he opened a surf shop nearby last year.

“We didn’t think anybody lived around here except hookers and drug dealers,” said Cressman, 32. “We didn’t think there were any women here.”

Unflattering stories about the community’s unseemly past have lingered like a chronic cough but, almost suddenly, Oceanside’s once grungy and crime-ridden coastal neighborhoods have begun to thrive.

After almost 20 years of decline, absentee landlords are selling dilapidated rental homes to permanent residents who are upgrading the sagging old dwellings. And, most visibly, stylish condominium projects are turning the area partly into an enclave of vacation homes and tourist rental units.

Property along most of the state’s southern coastline is expensive and already built up. So for the last two years, increasing numbers of buyers have been taking a chance on Oceanside. And native residents are taking back their own streets.

The courage to revive the ailing coastal neighborhoods was largely inspired by two events. The city rebuilt its crumbling pier a few years ago. And a key developer, with his partners, built the San Miguel condominium project, rekindling enthusiasm for Oceanside’s beach area.

Even Cressman, who said she was “scared to death” the first time she saw Oceanside and would not take walks outside after dark, strolls to the pier at night.

“Now, this is just a little paradise,” she said.

Despite her glee, Cressman acknowledged there are occasional problems near her fiance’s surf shop, the South Jetty, a few blocks from the beach. She said they have been threatened, “stupid things, people wanting to break into our shop or break our windows.”

Cressman lives in North Strand, one of six neighborhoods between the picturesque Oceanside Marina to the north and the upscale St. Malo residential area to the south. The neighborhoods, all within the city’s redevelopment area, are a few blocks west of the downtown and the railroad tracks.

This coastal part of the redevelopment area makes up 1 1/4 miles of the city’s four-mile coastline.

Some of the neighborhoods, such as South Pacific Street, have remained stable and relatively unscathed by crime and blight just a block or two away. But problems have caused the entire area to be stereotyped as a danger zone.

The area declined in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, when downtown became rife with sex arcades, bars with topless shows and other attractions largely catering to young Marines.

Many Marines returned from Vietnam and left the service but remained in Oceanside, their last duty station. Some were adrift and jobless, easy prey for the prostitutes and drug vendors who took root in cheap rental houses and apartments near the beach.

“We had some of the slimiest slime in Oceanside,” recalled Pat Hightman, assistant director of the city redevelopment agency.

“It was so bad, Hollywood’s vice squad came here to train.”

In the ‘70s, erosion turned stretches of beach into virtual cobblestone, removing the last incentive for people to visit much of Oceanside’s coast.

Finally, the city closed the strip joints, adult bookstores and pornography theaters, while police beefed up patrols in the coastal neighborhoods. Crime tapered off, according to police and redevelopment officials, but the area remained run-down.

That’s about the time developer Rich Cicoletti came along.

The Long Beach native first visited Oceanside in 1966 and found it “a raucous military town with a red-light district.” He described the downtown as “a grim sight” and recalled that the pier “was literally falling down.”

Years later, in 1981, the city invited Cicoletti to hear pleas for developers to take an interest in Oceanside. He toured the long-neglected beach area and decided “from a real estate perspective, this is a great piece of property. From a demographic standpoint, it’s a disaster.

“They needed a large development as a catalyst to turn the beachfront around for residences,” he said. He competed with nine other developers and won an agreement in 1983 to build a multiple housing project.

Despite the city’s zeal for the project, Cicoletti and his partners couldn’t get a real estate loan from the bank. They had to put up their personal assets to secure a credit loan.

First, Cicoletti replaced “shacks” with 50 affordable units that sold in the mid-’80s for $50,000 to $75,000. Then, he built the first 54 units in his San Miguel project, on The Strand and 6th Street, and in 1986 sold the ocean-view units at market price for $165,000.

When he recently completed the third phase of the four-phase, 243-unit San Miguel project, “that same unit sold for $399,000,” a sum well below the $500,000 to $600,000 a comparable condo would fetch along the coast of Orange County, he said.

Real estate sources in Orange County agreed, reporting that lower-end condos with coastal access there go for about $400,000 to $500,000, while a top-price beach condo costs about $800,000.

“Oceanside is still undiscovered,” Cicoletti said.