The level of diversity in Lakewood Village's population is unmatched by anywhere else in Sunnyvale. Nowadays the Lakewood population is a strong mix of Latino, Vietnamese, Filipino and Caucasian residents, whereas Caucasians represent 45 percent of the city's population as a whole. In Lakewood today, Caucasians make up 35 percent of the population, while Latinos and Asians are the other two primary ethnic groups.

But life in the Village (as some residents often refer to Lakewood) wasn't always so colorful. When Jerry and Josie Alvarado moved into the neighborhood in 1961, they were one of only two Mexican families who lived on their block on Palamos Avenue on the Fairwood side of the Village.

Today the Alvarados are different from other residents not because of their race but because they've lived there for so long. Most families have come and gone in the midst of Lakewood's transitions over the years. Indeed, Lakewood Village was built mainly for transitional occupants—military personnel.

History

In the early 1950s Sunnyvale and surrounding cities went through annexation wars. Sunnyvale, Santa Clara and the county all fought for the Lakewood parcel, which included the unused Santa Clara Valley Airport and orchards. The city of Cupertino was incorporated at this time, in large part to prevent Sunnyvale or San Jose from acquiring the land.

In 1955 Sunnyvale finally annexed the area north of Highway 101 on either side of Lawrence Station Road (now Lawrence Expressway).

Within months Branden Construction Company built 2,500 homes that became Lakewood Village. Located on the northeast side of Sunnyvale, Lakewood is bordered by the sound wall of Highway 101 to the south, Calabasas Creek to the east, Tasman Drive to the north and Fairoaks Avenue to the west.

Branden Construction Company began placing advertisements for its homes in the Sunnyvale Standard newspaper, with the catchphrase "Operation New Look: building the homes of tomorrow in Sunnyvale." The company waived the down payment on the homes for war veterans, to cater to Lockheed and Moffett Field employees.

And so residents began to move into the mainly two- or three-bedroom homes, which were smaller than houses in other areas of Sunnyvale.

Robin Mohun moved into Lakewood in 1957 as a child and grew up there. A few years ago, she moved back into her parents' home as an adult. She remembers the Navy families but says the families who stayed gave the neighborhood a strong sense of community. "It used to be a community where you knew your neighbors," Mohun says. Families babysat and shopped for each other.

Mohun recalls Fourth of July parties, barbecues and block parties that almost every family on the street attended. "We used to light our own sparklers out in the middle of the street while our parents played cards inside," says Mohun.

The Alvarados remember getting together with neighbors often. "We used to spend holidays together, and we'd rotate from house to house, mostly because our kids used to spend so much time together. They really brought neighbors together," says Josie Alvarado.

Residents fight back

While residents may have gotten along, from the very beginning it seemed like the city wasn't paying attention to Lakewood. Residents had to fight to gain the same service level that other neighborhoods of Sunnyvale were getting. Lakewood residents felt the Village was a stepchild of the city.

"We're out here by ourselves and the city's largely ignored us unless we make noise," says Brian Smithson, who's lived in Lakewood since 1980 and has acted as a historian for the Lakewood Village Neighborhood Association.

For example, Lakewood Village didn't always have a fire station nearby. According to Smithson, if the Highway 101 overpass crumbled from an earthquake, Lakewood residents in the 1950s would not have had fire service.

"The strength of this neighborhood is its ability to organize to get the things that we deserve. Part of that is a little bit of an attitude," says Smithson.

In 1958 a group of concerned residents formed the Lakewood Village Resident's Association and held social events. They published a newsletter called The Villager and battled with the city to bring more services to the area. The association existed from 1958 to the mid-1970s and was largely responsible for the building of a fire station close to Lakewood Village, preventing a slaughterhouse from being constructed there, and convincing the city to build Fairwood Park instead of more houses.

"We used to pack city hall and shoot down whatever they would bring at us," says longtime resident Bob Lacy.

Jerry Alvarado, who raised three children in Lakewood, says they had to cross Lawrence Station Road to get to Lakewood Park before Fairwood Park was built.

So Alvarado fought, along with Lacy and other members of the LVRA, to petition the city to keep the area as designated open space. Later the same residents successfully fought for a playground to be built there.

But these days, Lacy says not as many people are fired up on the political issues that affect Lakewood Village. "When we moved here it was a more active neighborhood than it is now," says Lacy.

Changing demographics

Part of the demise of community activism may have something to do with the changing demographics in the Village.

The neighborhood started out with more owners living in the homes than renters. Many of the residents who lived there were just starting their own families and quickly outgrew the homes. As these families as well as military families packed up and left, Lakewood grew into a primarily rental community by the 1960s and 1970s.

With fewer families and more single residents, the community get-togethers of the 1950s and 1960s slowly faded away. "As we grew older, we kept in touch with only a few families. Our kids weren't playing together anymore," says Jerry Alvarado.

Gangs started popping up in the 1970s, and residents began to complain that the public safety department was ignoring crime in the Village.

When Smithson was remodeling his home, he and his wife, Bonnie, stayed in the garage. One night, they caught someone stealing their construction equipment and property. "The police ignored the grand theft. Another time a rival gang came and threw rocks at the house next door. The police didn't even file a police report," says Smithson.

But Smithson went to Fred Fowler, a Village resident who was serving on the city council. With pressure from Fowler, the city agreed to investigate the matter.

Fowler's presence on the council has served Lakewood in other ways. When the Mercado was built, traffic on the Fairwood side of the Village was impacted. Cars would cut through Blazingwood and Wildwood to get to a movie on time. "When a movie like The Fast and the Furious comes out, kids race down these streets pumping with adrenaline," says Smithson.

Plans to alleviate the traffic got put on the backburner. But recently, with a push from Lakewood activist Thom Mayer and support from Fowler, the city made plans to begin traffic-calming measures in 2004.

Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer Brian and Bonnie Smithson have lived in their Lakewood Village home since 1980. They have redesigned their home inside and out, and the American Institute of Architects, a national organization, awarded them Visions of the Valley in 2001. Nowhere else in Sunnyvale would one find a house like theirs.

Over the years Lakewood grew more ethnically diverse, but with the increase in rentals the appearance of the neighborhood began to decline. Code violations popped up all over the Village. Renters weren't trimming weeds or maintaining their yards. People began running illegal businesses out of their homes or constructing illegal rooms without fire exits in garages.

In the 1970s and 1980s the situation turned from bad to ugly. Lakewood Village was no longer the quaint, tight-knit residential community of the 1950s.

A citywide study conducted two years ago found that 39 percent of properties in Lakewood Village had two or more code violations, while just 8 percent of the rest of the city had code violations.

Neighborhood preservation specialist Richard Gutierrez attributes this gap to the fact that there are multiple families living in the same houses. "These families tend to have multiple vehicles that clutter up the street. Those houses are not designed for that kind of capacity," says Gutierrez. Also, there is still a large rental market in the Village, and renters are less likely to clean up a property they do not own, says Gutierrez.

Three years ago, city officials looked the other way, rarely acknowledging code violators. Some of the residents felt that the city turned its back on Lakewood because these same violations would not have been tolerated in other areas of Sunnyvale.

Village resident Mayer says the issue is not just about appearances. Mayer says the state of the neighborhood discourages investment in homes. "One person's house would be worth more money if his neighbor's house wasn't a shack. So he has no reason to invest in refurbishing his own home," Mayer says.

"When the city doesn't enforce the code, the property value of every home in Lakewood Village decreases," says Mayer.

Smithson says minor code violations don't bother him, but if a converted garage is not built to code, there may be safety issues that can result in death.

Former neighborhood preservation specialist Laurie Aguinaga told the Sun in 2000 that the city sometimes ignored violators or didn't enforce fines because some of the residents couldn't afford to fix the violation or pay the fine.

But Lakewood resident Mohun has a different take on the city's past treatment of code violators. "Ten years ago code enforcement came through and unleashed on all of us. They put a lien on one house when a man refused to repaint it," says Mohun.

The situation grew murkier when some residents got involved in informal code enforcement themselves.

The Lakewood Village Neighborhood Association, which formed in 1991 with a purpose similar to that of its predecessor, the Lakewood Village Residents Association, made a blunder in 1995. The LVNA's newsletter The Villager published a list of 10 Lakewood Village homes, five considered well-kept and five considered the "ugliest." Controversy arose when residents found out the "ugliest" home was owned by 40-year residents who were dying. Both had died in the month before the publication of the newsletter.

Mohun was troubled by the situation. "Not everyone has a two-income family and can afford to have their houses painted every year," Mohun says. After the LVNA realized its blunder, residents donated money to the couple's adult children to fix up the property.

Persistent efforts by residents such as Thom Mayer and the LVNA finally got the attention of the city in the late 1990s, and the city began to hold "Dumpster Days" in Lakewood Village.

"You really get to know your neighbors and improve the neighborhood on Dumpster Day," says Bobbie Lacy, wife of Bob Lacy.

The community Dumpster Days are representative of a move toward proactive change in the neighborhood. Last year the city embarked upon a pilot program to concentrate on and clean up two streets in Lakewood Village.

Because the citywide study showed the highest number of code violations to be in Lakewood Village, the neighborhood preservation department decided to dedicate one staff member to help clean up the neighborhood up, one street at a time.

Neighborhood preservation specialist Gutierrez was assigned the job of helping code violators improve the appearance of their homes.

Resident Mohun was skeptical at first. "I thought they were going to come in blazing like attack of the barbarians again. But I was really pleased with the way they approached the residents," says Mohun.

In just one year, the city worked with 95 homes on Lakehaven Drive and Lakeknoll Drive. City staff walked around door to door with people who spoke English, Vietnamese, Spanish and Tagalog to outreach to the dominant communities.

"They really held hands with the neighbors and proactively helped us fix things," says Mohun.

During the one-year pilot program, 53 out of 95 properties were improved by code-violation corrections, including fixing garage conversions; removing roof and patio extensions, weeds and overgrown vegetation; and taking care of animal-control violations. Nine of the 95 houses were painted with free paint distributed by the city, and six property owners installed new driveways or expanded their old driveways to prevent vehicles from parking on unpaved surfaces.

The program was so successful that the council kept it in the budget this year and established it as the Neighborhood Enhancement Program, focusing on 185 more homes in Lakewood Village.

Not everything went smoothly, however. The city discovered two residents living next to each other who were housing nearly 100 chickens and around 10 cockfighting roosters on their property. Neighbors had complained to the city that the chicken feed had attracted rats to the area.

The city, along with public safety officers and the Humane Society, investigated the homes and eventually euthanized all of the animals.

Mohun says the best thing about the city's involvement is that it really helped to bring neighbors together. "On Dumpster Day I got to talk to people on this street I'd never spoken to before," Mohun says.

Communication in the Village

That kind of communication between neighbors is not uncommon in Lakewood Village. Language barriers prevent a number of residents from communicating with one another. Despite such barriers, some residents say they wouldn't leave Lakewood Village for the world.

The Alvarados have retired in the same home they've lived in for all these years and are happy in the Village. "We don't pay huge mortgage payments on our house‚ and because of that we can take yearly vacations to Hawaii or Europe. We can take our grandkids to Disneyworld," says Jerry Alvarado.

"We're here to stay," Josie Alvarado says.

Thom Mayer, who's been in the Village since 1989, says, "What brought me here in the first place is that it's the center of the economic activity of Silicon Valley. What's kept me here is the diversity."

But neighborhood cohesiveness in Lakewood seems to have less to do with diversity than with the presence of children once again bringing families together.

When Phyllis Murphy, president of the LVNA, describes the community on her street, her description sounds very similar to the way Robin Mohun and the Alvarados describe the Village in its early years, except that the community is now more diverse.

"Our kids play together and they really bring the neighborhood together. We all get along really well," says Murphy.

Whatever the reason may be, Lakewood Village has lasted long enough to make its presence known in Sunnyvale. Some might view the eclectic collection of homes as a negative factor. But with the neighborhood improving its appearance, all that's left for comment is the diversity of its people. Maybe Lakewood was never meant to be like other neighborhoods in Sunnyvale. One thing's for sure: The stepchild is here to stay.