Council Approves Low-Cost Home Plan

Following more than a decade of lobbying by housing advocates, Oxnard’s City Council on Tuesday approved an agreement with a team of developers to build low-cost homes in northeast Oxnard.

The City Council voted 4 to 0--with Councilman Dean Maulhardt abstaining--to allow Santa Monica-based Community Dynamics Inc. and Cattelus Residential Group of Irvine to build about 198 homes on a 20-acre parcel at the corner of Lombard Street and Camino del Sol.

But the city must first complete a land swap with Oxnard real estate speculator Donald T. Kojima before it actually acquires the parcel where it wants to put the homes. The city purchased land adjacent to the parcel from Kojima in 1994 for about $4.6 million.

But Kojima has held up the land swap because he was not selected as the housing project’s developer, city officials say. Now the city is negotiating with Kojima, who wants up to $85,000 for work he said he did to prepare the land for development, before he transfers title to Oxnard, city officials said.

Ernie Whitaker, an Oxnard affordable-housing official, said the developers are leery about moving forward with their plans before the city completes the land swap. Whitaker said city officials expect to reach an agreement with Kojima by June 1.

“It is fairly close, but [the developers] don’t want to spend time on the site plan on a site they are not sure they are going to be getting,” Whitaker said.

The city picked Akins Communities Inc.--recently acquired by Cattelus Residential--as the developer for the project in January.

A group of mostly poor farm workers living in a crowded trailer park in Oxnard has been lobbying the city for more than 10 years to help them find alternative housing. These residents of the Oxnard Mobile Home Lodge said city officials told them they would have first dibs on the new homes.

But city officials say they never made a formal commitment to build the new housing exclusively for the trailer park residents and that all low-income residents who qualify should be able to move in.

In addition to purchasing the land where the project will be built, the city has agreed to waive nearly $1 million in developer fees to lower the project’s cost.