City Poised to Approve Affordable Housing : Ventura: The development agreements with three companies would allow construction of more than 400 units.

After four years of negotiations, Ventura City Council is poised to sign development agreements Monday with three companies to allow construction of more than 400 affordable housing units.

City officials exempted the projects from the city’s water hookup moratorium because they say these projects are too important to young, middle-income, first-time buyers who work in the city.

The signing of the development agreements, city officials said, would fulfill promises by the council to increase the city’s affordable housing stock.

“This is probably the most important public policy statement this council has made in a long time,” Mayor Richard Francis said. “It’s very important for every city to build homes for its police officers, firefighters, nurses, and second-level managers in the private industry.

“Up until now, these people had been shut out of the market.”

All three projects would be located on the east end of the city bordering Saticoy. Wittenberg-Livingston Inc. plans to build 100 houses east of Saticoy Avenue, south of the Southern Pacific railroad tracks and north of the Santa Clara River.

Affordable Communities Inc. would build 153 houses just east of the Cabrillo village and north of the Santa Clara River. KNM Development Co. has plans to build 147 houses in an undeveloped parcel between Telegraph Road and Reata Avenue.

The projects have already received preliminary approval from the council.

If final approval is granted, they would become the first 100% affordable housing projects since September, 1988, when the city adopted a program providing incentives to developers who sell homes at below-market rate prices.

Under the program, developers have to make homes affordable to families earning 110% of the area’s median income, which varies between $35,000 and $55,000 a year, depending on the family size.

If current economic indicators hold up, home buyers would pay $156,000 for a three-bedroom home in any of the three projects, said city housing Project Manager Loretta McCarty. The agreement forbids homeowners to resell the homes at market rates for at least 30 years.

City officials said that even though the new homes may not be affordable to all prospective home buyers, it was hard enough--considering construction and real estate costs in Southern California--to bring prices down as much as they did through a variety of incentives.

In addition to exempting the projects from the water moratorium, the city waived a requirement that developers build permanent sewer lines for their projects, accepting cheaper, temporary lines instead.

When new, market-rate developments are allowed in that area, they will be required to build permanent sewer lines to serve the affordable housing projects, Francis said.

The council also encouraged affordable housing by granting these three projects 400 of the 1,800 housing allocations allowed by the city’s Growth Management Plan for the next decade, city officials said.

Deputy Mayor Don Villeneuve, who chairs the Housing Committee and is the council’s most vocal advocate of affordable housing, said the entire city is responsible for the council’s housing policies.

“We’ve made a bigger gain than any other community in the county in addressing this very critical housing need,” he said. “That we’ve come this far is proof that this city is sensitive to social needs.”

However, city officials acknowledged that the projects’ approval would not come close to solving the city’s housing needs. “This is just a candle in the wind, but we had to get moving,” Francis said.

All three projects have been working their way through the city pipeline for about four years.

They underwent extensive environmental reviews, due primarily to their proximity to the Santa Clara River. Two of the projects were on parcels that had to be annexed by the city. The KNM project went through several redesigns to address traffic circulation problems.

But a few roadblocks still lie ahead. The Affordable Communities project, for example, still needs approval from several state agencies to build a revetment on the Santa Clara River bank.

Furthermore, under the proposed development agreements, construction cannot begin in any of the projects until Caltrans starts working on a bridge above California 118 near the projects. Caltrans is expected to break ground on the bridge in upcoming months, but no date has yet been set.

And about half of the projects’ units would be further delayed until Caltrans secures about $2 million in state funding to straighten out a dogleg turn on California 118 and other traffic circulation improvements in the Saticoy area.

State officials will consider funding such a project in September, and city officials are optimistic, but, as Francis put it, “with the state, it’s anybody’s guess.”

Villeneuve was equally skeptical. He predicted that, at best, construction would begin early next year.

Like the old saying, Villeneuve says, “ ‘It ain’t over till it’s over,’ and I’m not going to pop the champagne until then.”