Don Shift Sends: Analysis of a Suburban Home and Neighborhood for SHTF – A Case Study, Part Two

See Part One HERE.

Neighbors

You really wouldn’t want to be one of the people with a house that backs up to open, transitional spaces like Lynn Rd. or Hickory Park. By living on the corner, you have exposure to only two other houses; other similar tract homes may have four or five neighbors depending on how the lots are split.

The home to your rear/east, 4107 Gladhill St., has the aforementioned problems with the backwall you share. Because the streets to the east and northeast (Winfield St. and Glenmont St.) are cul-de-sacs, the odds of someone hopping the fence once they’ve breached the houses behind you are unlikely. It’s more likely that those homes face a greater threat of fence hoppers from other streets. Assaults in urban areas usually go from the outside to the inside.

For 956 Ravenwood (the house to the north of yours) it only has one public exposure (the street side). That front window would make you nervous but that’s not your problem. The neighbor does have driveway cameras so that’s good. The left gate is too flimsy for your taste. The boat should be removed as it is a fire hazard and could provide concealment and light cover to an attacker. Otherwise, this house is more defensible than yours.

934 Ravenwood (two houses north) is blurred on Streetview. The person blurring it could be a local politician who might be targeted for a protest mob. The obfuscation may make researching criminals curious as to who lives there, what they might have to hide, etc. Most criminals don’t do that kind of research, instead preferring to target houses that look nice or are otherwise easily accessible. I’d be more worried if the controversial local state senator lives there.

Cover and fighting positions

There is no cover in front of your house. Cover in the neighborhood sucks. It’s the nature of suburbs. You will need to improvise fighting positions by digging in on lawns or making sandbag type fortifications when you need a fixed fighting position.

The hollow-core bricks of your yard walls will provide some ballistic resistance but more than couple shots concentrated against them will likely penetrate. There are a few retaining walls on your street that could be used as cover but only for fire in limited directions. Your front courtyard and its low wall do provide some angles to use the house itself as cover but the ballistic protection isn’t going to be great. You’ll also draw return fire towards the house.

Concealment

There is a lot of concealment in the form of landscaping across the neighborhood. One could easily advance or retreat in bounds yard-by-yard using hedges, etc. to conceal their movements. This works for both good and bad guys, however, bad guys have to worry about homeowners shooting from inside the house.

One of the good things about the landscaping that it provides plenty of opportunity for concealment, perhaps for mini-ambushes. Those Italian cypress trees to the south of your house? Bad guys walking south might not see anyone hiding behind them until they are already passing the trees.

The downside are the straight lines and open spaces. Moving across the street is hazardous. If you toss smoke to hide a dash across the road, the enemy won’t have a clear shot will know someone is using the smoke to conceal their movements. If you have to move, go over the fences and walls in the backyards (just make sure the neighbors know it is friendlies who are moving).

If the streetlights are working, in a tactical situation the illumination works both ways. The open ground (street) will be illuminated and the houses shadowed. A smart adversary will move along the houses in the shadows, but this runs the risk of alerting the residents and dogs. A mob will move down the street (path of least resistance).

Gunfights

Fields of fire suck, also a suburban thing. There are homes in every direction you shoot. You can get lucky at longer ranges and have things like cars, retaining walls, and trees get in the way but no miss is safe. An accurate shot that doesn’t over penetrate is the best way to ensure that no innocents in a house are hit. However much you might care the bad guys won’t care where their bullets go.

The longest shot from your property is approximately 200-250 yards; iron sights or a red dot sight with good eyesight is sufficient. Target identification at the far end may be difficult. Shots beyond 300 yards in your neighborhood are unlikely because of the topography, curving roadways, and landscaping. An AR-15 will be sufficient (and you keep some Freedom Week 30 round mags and a proper magazine release tucked away). Curving streets and the rise and fall of roadways that follow the terrain along with landscaping obscures longer range shots.

Because it is an arterial road, Lynn Rd. is the most likely avenue of approach. Most raiders aren’t going to be smart enough to infiltrate overland from the open land to the south. This tends to indicate intruders will move from uphill to downhill. Anyone shooting up from downhill will have an advantage as the slope crest may obscure their target. The slight curvature of the streets makes long distance shots difficult, so defenders have to close in to engage.

Kill zones and obstructions

There are a few, but not many, large trees that could be cut down and dropped across the road to hinder vehicular travel. To slow down any vehicles racing down your street, you plan on getting with the neighbors to make chicanes out of traffic cones, empty garbage bins, etc. Cutting off the streets by installing concertina wire across the roadway is highly unlikely to be allowed by your neighbors. Once things get dangerous, the street signs are all coming down to confuse intruders who may no longer have GPS mapping on their cell phones.

Having four entrances (Fernhill, Greendale, Briar, and Pinehill) reduces the manpower needs to blockade the neighborhood. The tract is large enough to generate sufficient volunteers for guard duty. All entrances are about 1-2 lots long and have block walls that face the frontage roads. It would be best to block off the Lynn Rd. (northern) entrances and only use (southern) Potrero Rd. for access. This limits how many people you need on static guard duty admitting vehicles. It also presents a major access problem for would-be intruders who do not know about the southern accesses.

On the Lynn Rd. approaches, these can be closed with a line of abandoned vehicles set bumper to bumper lengthwise if you can’t get your hands on K-rail. The first few houses on either side should have barbed wire or razor wire topping the back wall to discourage jumpers. A concertina wire fence across the access streets should be considered if pedestrian access needs to be limited as well.

A singular guarded checkpoint could be established at Reino Rd. and Potrero. Two further fallback barricades should also be established at Briar and Pinehill Avenues. These could be closed and/or guarded if/when the security situation deteriorates. Moveable barricades would be needed to admit vehicular traffic.

These approaches can be kill zones if necessary. The walls/fences contain the intruders and you can pin them between two sets of barricades while your defensive group engages them from the ring road (Blackwood/Greenwood) and the yards. Even if you have to fight them on Potrero, Lynn, or Reino, there is little cover out on those roads.

These small entrance roads, especially if they have barricades already in place, could be great places to trap and disable intruding vehicles in. This would add to any existing congestion and require the disabled vehicles and any barricades dismantled before an assault convoy could enter.

Ambushes

The landscaped areas off of the arterial streets are potential ambush sites. The vegetation provides concealment and elevation of the terrain above the roadway is to the attacker’s advantage. The road also offers little cover and long, straight stretches with no cover—doubly dangerous to any foot patrols. Take note of the area below Hill 956 on Lynn 100 yards east of Fernhill Ct.

The areas bounded by houses are less dangerous because there is nowhere to hide. Unless the ambush is set from the houses overlooking the road. Frankly, I’d stash a couple technicals around the corner and use those as mobile ambushes or as a mobile RRF/QRF. All you would need is a spotter in a house and the trucks could rush out from their hiding places. Technicals could even pursue the enemy/target or retreat in lieu of falling back to cover.

Area contrast, Dos Vientos

The newer development (2010s) to the northwest about a mile is called Dos Vientos; the cross streets are Borchard Rd. and Rancho Dos Vientos. These homes are built in a more cookie-cutter approach on smaller lots. The individual tracts have been worked into the available terrain causing them to be more segmented than they would be on flatter land.

Unlike your tract, many homes in Dos Vientos have hills right behind them. This leaves them vulnerable to fire; in fact a total loss of the development was narrowly in 2013 avoided due to modern building codes and strict brush clearance. The hills would allow an enemy to easily fire down on the homes. The brushy hillsides would also permit infiltration and offer concealment while doing it. Hiking trails, fire roads, drainages, and other access points cut through the hills.

Let’s look at Via Ricardo and Via Mira Flores, for example. This street is a small gated cul-de-sac with high dollar homes on it. The neighborhood has typical brush clearance behind the homes which means that access on foot, aside from the slopes, is fairly unhindered by thick brush. The street landscaping does help obscure the brush clearance from the road although hiking trails cut through the area which can also give access to behind the homes.

The entire development of Dos Vientos could be secured by closing three main roads. Infiltration points are quite numerous but closing the roads will stop the vast majority of looters, rioters, and other assorted troublemakers. It would be a lot easier for Dos Vientos to cordon itself off, and the other Newbury Park neighborhoods as well, than try and create checkpoints off the freeway, etc.

Drawbacks

The sheriff’s substation is all the way across town, 13 miles or about 20 minutes if traffic is light. The next nearest station in Camarillo is about as close. That means that the only law enforcement presence may be a single patrol deputy who may be otherwise engaged. If you’re lucky, his partner is nearby, a mid-watch cover car, and a traffic deputy may be in the area to get you four deputies who can respond. Most likely you’ll have a cop in about five minutes in normal times.

Alternative infrastructure is terrible. All water is imported; there are no municipal wells in Thousand Oaks. You might have some old ranch well somewhere, especially to the south on the NPS land, but surface water is mostly runoff. If the water system goes, you’re on borrowed time. All utilities are underground, which means that fallen power lines aren’t going to be a concern, but there are large high tension, 500kV lines that run to the west-northwest that could be sabotaged.

The fact that celebrities (Britney Spears; no joke) and very wealthy people live in the hills and unincorporated areas nearby may mean that bold criminals are attracted to your general area. This may lead them into your neighborhood for various reasons or they may see your area as a secondary, or easier, target. A meeting encounter could always occur with a bad guy drawn to somewhere nearby.

Evacuation routes aren’t great. You can go west down Potrero Rd. (narrow, steep, and windy) or northeast basically to the freeway. Going east on Potrero Rd. takes you through an easily barricaded area with a predictable exit. Even so, there are multiple exits even if they aren’t optimal and there are a warren of city streets a pursuer could be lost in. Walking out is doable using hiking trails, especially to the south through the mountains down to the ocean.

Radio

We can’t ignore radio propagation as communication is a vital part of any defense. You will almost certainly be using VHF/UHF radios (2m/60m ham or GMRS), which are line-of-sight radios. GMRS will probably be most popular because of the ubiquity of compatible radios and no license test is required, unlike ham. Sure, Baofengs could be used without a ham license in a pinch or at the end of the world, but you have to have the radios first.

Propagation is poor in Newbury Park. The topography is foothill in nature; ridgelines and hills cut up all of Thousand Oaks pretty badly. In the pre-repeater days communicating with sheriff’s dispatch could get sketchy in certain spots. There are areas of good and poor reception. 5 watt handheld radios of any stripe will only work in your neighborhood and for about a mile in either direction, broadly speaking.

The best coverage is VHF at 50 watts with a full wavelength antenna mounted on top of the house (about 18 feet). VHF works better in the hilly terrain than UHF does, meaning you need a ham license for maximum benefit. So unless you are willing to invest a few hundred dollars in a decent antenna on the roof (doesn’t have to be a tower) and a base station radio, your Baofeng ain’t gonna cut it. Ironically, your Baofeng will likely have a better antenna than the rubber ducky the county issues on our Motorolas (HT1250s).

The reality is that citywide communication will be spotty if you are trying to do things on the cheap and use handheld radios only. For most people this will be the case. You can remediate this with a base station above and putting a 50 watt mobile radio in your vehicle.

Conclusion

The shortcomings here are word count and human factors. I can’t cover everything or go into exhaustive detail, especially about the specifics of people. Actual defensive plans depend on resources, manpower, and participation (consensus). My take is that most suburbanites will not have much interest in taking drastic steps to protect themselves until stuff gets really bad. Even then, people will be untrained, undisciplined, poorly equipped, and lack proper leadership.

You know your neighborhood best. Physical factors and demographics are one thing but the human element is probably greater by far. How your neighbors are equipped, where their heads are at, and how decent of human beings they are will dictate much of your success or failure.

The nature of the real emergency factors in too. Newbury Park isn’t Minneapolis’ Third Ward where urban yuppies were nose-to-nose with the 2020 riots and now its aftermath. Newbury Park will probably be fine while LA burns, aside from South African levels of burglaries/robberies by LA suspects on a road trip. Riots aren’t coming here the same way someone who lives in a cookie-cutter tract behind a Walmart in St. Louis has to worry about empty-handed looters turning on the homes.

So please, look over the maps and apply your own thoughts to the neighborhood. These skills can be applied to where you live as well. For more detail about the principles behind them, please see my non-fiction books: Suburban Defense, Suburban Warfare, and Rural Home Defense. You’ve probably already seen Jack Lawson’s Civil Defense Manual, but also checkout Joe Dolio’s Tactical Wisdom series and Clay Martin’s Concrete Jungle and Prairie Fire.