Pueblo Bonita manager asks board to expand criteria

Golf courses and luxury homes have supplanted acres and acres of agricultural fields in the last decade. The number of farmworkers living in Bonita has trailed off with the loss of land.

"Back in the old days, it was a lot different," said Dave Orsburn, an environmental specialist who oversees migrant housing with the Lee County Health Department . "I think there's a lot less workers down there. Of course, you have some farmworkers but more and more I'm seeing construction workers."

Orsburn started working in the Bonita area in 1979 when mostly tomato fields hugged East Bonita Beach Road.

When Pueblo Bonito opened in 1999, the low-income community with 80 units reserved for farmworkers had a waiting list 30 to 40 farmworkers deep seeking housing.

Soon after the 1999 opening, two Bonita packinghouses closed, leaving Pueblo Bonito to rely mainly on workers from the Gargiulo packinghouse and area nursery workers to fill its units, said Carlos Lizano, manager of the community. Some companies still subcontract fieldwork on a daily basis.

It's getting more difficult to fill the spaces.

"Because of the lack of fields, there's a decrease of people to choose from. When you have a lot more people, you can be very exclusive of what people you choose," said Lizano, who expects other area farms to relocate soon.

He has six families coming to Bonita from Quincy to work at the Gargiulo packinghouse on the list for three farmworker units that will be available at the end of the month.

There are 128 families on the waiting list for the 20 recently-opened units open to all low-income residents, he said. Pueblo Bonito is the only state-designated affordable housing in the city.

"The list is huge. I have a lot of people for the low-income units and they're saying, 'Why can't we qualify? We make as much as they do.' There's a lot of people with unskilled jobs."

This month, Lizano asked the Pueblo Bonito board whether they could explore changing the status of the 80 farmworker units to low-income.

"I'm the type of person that believes in prevention. You look for symptoms and you try to solve them before it becomes a problem," he said.

David Hanson, president of the nonprofit group behind Pueblo Bonito, said Partnership in Housing will likely contract a study of the farmworker community to find out where the workers are going and if there is a statistical decrease.

"You can tell that what the trend is. They're becoming less and less prevalent ... Once we get a handle on what the statistics are doing, we can formulate a plan," he said.

Hanson said the board would prefer to maintain the farmworker designation and attempt to attract farmworkers to Pueblo Bonito from surrounding areas through a marketing plan "because that was the reason we built it in the first place."

"As a last resort," the board will contact lending agencies about changing the farmworker units to low-income, he said.

Gerry Franck, who founded Partnership in Housing with her late husband Don Franck, said she'd gauge the numbers of farmworkers when she and others minister at farmworker camps and give them food starting Nov. 22.

"I'll know more after that," she said. "We would go through our lending agencies and where we got grants and make sure we can do that. There has been other places that have transferred to low-income."

Councilman Jay Arend blamed the decrease in farmworkers on the building of better housing in Immokalee, where most farmworkers are now employed.

"Therefore, 'Why would I live in Bonita if I work in Immokalee?'" he said, adding that there is still a major need for affordable housing for landscapers and constructions workers in the area.

If Pueblo Bonito does seek a designation change through financing agencies, Arend hopes the city will support the community to expand the units available to low-income residents. The councilman said he noticed the largest drop in tomato business in the area with the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994.

"Our tomato fields have become golf courses," he said.

(Contact Staff Writer Janine Zeitlin at 213-6036 or jazeitlin@naplesnews.com )