Lofty Ideal Is Less Beguiling When It Starts to Scrape the Sky
If the producers of “Frasier” were to shift the show’s locale from the home of the Space Needle to beautiful downtown Oxnard, its logo, which traces Seattle’s skyline like some sort of wildly fibrillating heartbeat, would be reduced to a pair of spindly spikes. Oxnard’s two most elevated edifices, the 22-story Dean Witter tower and the 14-floor City National Bank building, are the closest Ventura County comes to scraping the sky.
So far.
Breathes there a man with soul so dead who never to himself hath said, “Let’s save our open spaces and agricultural resources?” Thomas Jefferson would second that motion. The surveyor visualized a land of the free and home of the brave comprised of 64 perfectly square-shaped states (California would encompass four or five) regularly punctuated by small villages laid out in checkerboards with blocks of residences or businesses interspersed with verdant common areas.
We may have undershot Jefferson’s dream at the micro-level, however, Ventura County, having forfeited 18% of its farmland in the last 30 years, currently grasps the necessity for preserving the precarious balance of hillsides and homes, nature and neighborhoods bewitching the newcomer at first sight. Following the city of Ventura’s lead, come November some rendering of the SOAR initiative will wing its way to the top of the ballot in Camarillo, Oxnard, Santa Paula, Simi Valley, Thousand Oaks and the unincorporated areas of the county.
In anticipation of SOAR’s success, housing prices are already heading for the wild blue yonder. Real estate agents, especially in the East County, are finding themselves running out of “sold” signs. Properties spend as few as 24 hours on the market. The scarcity of listings results in offers thousands of dollars above the asking price. Desperate buyers are entering into bloody bidding battles.
It’s a great time to be selling a house. It’s not so hot if you’re stranded in the need-it-now.
Although Dos Vientos in Thousand Oaks and Hidden Creek Ranch in Moorpark will probably escape any voter approval requirement if the growth control initiatives pass this fall, don’t look for new starts to take the pressure off demand. Bear in mind, however, that an additional 283,000 souls will augment the population of Ventura County by 2028, according to the state Department of Finance.
We’d all like to see the drawbridge raised now that we’ve arrived. The folks we’d most like to see on the other side of a piranha-infested moat are construction companies.
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The boys with the bulldozers are like those Formosan termites invading the South. Homeowners faced with crumbling floorboards employed what they believed to be an arsenal of potent insecticides. A few years later they were horrified to discover tiny mounds of dried mud appearing on the ceilings of their domiciles. Their attempts to keep the voracious pests at bay simply drove the devious home-wreckers upward.
While urban creep is an established SoCal pattern of land use, developers might fancy the notion of maximizing density for obvious economic reasons. In addition to providing Superman with extra opportunities for broad-jump practice, tall buildings give speculators more buck for the bang.
Most folks hereabouts feel the same way about littering the landscape with structures resembling Oxnard’s brown and silver towers as does a local urban planner who shall remain nameless. He contends that the best use for any edifice over five stories high is target practice for the guys at Point Mugu. Any absence of aesthetics or concerns about crime aside, building big ugly boxes to warehouse people is simply incompatible with the groovy weltanschauung of Ventura County.
What a choice: out or up.
Do you think that’s the reason they named it SOAR?
