Cities Fail to Reach Goals on Affordable Housing Units

If they were scores on a report card, nearly every city in Ventura County would fail.

In Oxnard, the city’s housing plan called for construction of 551 homes for low-income farm workers between 1989 and 1997. Only 13 had been built by the end of last year.

Simi Valley built none of the 122 very-low-income units envisioned in its revised housing plan last year.

Camarillo has also fallen short, building just 22% of the 1,592 homes that planners estimated would be needed for its poorest residents between 1990 and 1997.

The story is the same across Ventura County, with most cities falling short of housing targets set by the state, Southern California Assn. of Governments and cities themselves.

While some question the validity of the targets, housing advocates and planners agree that the situation is dire.

The shortage means that low-income workers pay half or more of their income for rent, pack several families into homes made for one and are forced into substandard housing, said Barbara Macri-Ortiz, a lawyer with Oxnard-based Channel Islands Legal Services.

The crunch forces some people to make difficult choices, she said.

“Do you want to put a roof over your head or do you want to give your son and daughter a good meal?” Macri-Ortiz said. “They can’t afford to do both.”

Douglas Tapking, executive director of the county’s Area Housing Authority, said the recent boom in housing prices has exacerbated the problem.

“It’s getting worse because the cost of housing is going up faster than people’s income,” he said. “I think the communities are aware of it; they just don’t know how to resolve the problem.”

Under state law, cities must draft housing plans every five years.

Those plans--known as housing elements--require cities to show that they have identified enough land on which to house their anticipated populations across the economic spectrum over a five-year period.

Oxnard, hit by a lawsuit late last month after the City Council refused to build a low-income housing project, is one of three cities in the county whose housing plans are out of compliance with state law, according to the state Housing and Community Development Department. The others are Ojai and Fillmore.

While the latest update has been delayed since 1994, the program was reactivated in the budget signed by Gov. Pete Wilson last month.

Although state law requires cities to file housing elements with state housing officials, there is no government enforcement of the targets. Significant shortfalls are common even in cities that have state-approved housing plans.

“It doesn’t require that the local government build housing of any kind,” said Kimberly Dellinger, deputy director of the state Housing and Community Development Department, which checks housing plans for compliance. “It requires the local government to do what it can.”

Some say the targets can be unrealistic, however.

For example, even in cities where there is ample land for housing, governments usually lack the money needed to build housing themselves.

And in more affluent areas such as Ventura County, land costs can often keep developers out of the affordable housing game unless significant government subsidies are available.

But local politics has also played a role in hampering the effort to house the county’s growing low-income population.

“I think most people in Ventura County want to have a rural-suburban lifestyle. They don’t want high density,” said Lynn Jacobs, chairwoman of the Ventura Planning Commission. “The only way to provide housing that is somewhat low-cost is increasing the density.”

The problem cuts across cities and regions.

Some people still associate low-income housing with blight, crime and other community ills, said Jan Breidenbach of the Southern California Assn. of Nonprofit Housing.

As a result, she said, politicians have had to make difficult choices.

“They have to be able to tell them that we’re going to have to spend tax dollars on these people and we’re going to put them in your neighborhood,” Breidenbach said.

Jacobs, who also serves as vice president of the Building Industry Assn. for Greater Los Angeles and Ventura, said the economics of low-income housing are also an issue.

Low-income projects need significant government support to be profitable for prospective builders, she said.

That support has not increased and, in some cases, has actually fallen in recent years, making affordable housing projects less viable across the board.

Support has been noticeably absent on a state and federal level, said Arnold Dowdy, executive director of the Ventura County Council of Governments.

“I think there is a problem with getting consensus on the state level as to how serious they are about this issue being taken care of on a regional basis,” he said.

Thousand Oaks is one city that has taken an aggressive stance on low-income housing development.

While the city has fallen well short of its targets--it built only 18% of the 1,400 low-income units it estimated that it would need between 1989 and 1996--housing advocates say city leaders have been willing to support rehabilitation projects and other innovative support programs despite political pressure to reject them.

“The city has pumped money into affordable housing,” Tapking said. “People don’t agree with it all the time, but they take every advantage they can of putting money into an affordable housing project.”

While acknowledging the political tightrope that comes with spending taxpayer funds for sometimes unpopular low-income housing projects, Thousand Oaks Mayor Mike Markey said cities have a responsibility to address the problem.

“I think you need to really look at what is the right thing to do,” he said. “You can’t just deny something because of an extreme outcry with the public. You set the target and you do the best you can to meet it.”

But Thousand Oaks, like almost every city in the county, faces a growing problem that analysts say is undermining the economic health of the region: the growing disparity between low-income service jobs and the explosion in home prices and rents.

“There’s a big mismatch between what’s being provided in the market and what people can afford to pay in those communities,” said Joe Carreras, manager for comprehensive planning at the Southern California Assn. of Governments.

Jacobs agreed. If tourism and agriculture are to remain mainstays of the county’s economy, she said, cities have a responsibility to keep housing affordable.

“These are industries that pay a relatively low wage,” she said. “If we can’t provide housing for people who make those standard wages, that is a problem.”

Ventura County’s problems are by no means an anomaly.

In Los Angeles County, 48 cities are out of compliance with state law, about 54% of the county. Of Santa Barbara County’s eight cities, three have housing plans that do not pass state muster.

In most cases, as is the case in Oxnard, aggrieved developers and residents are the last line of defense when it comes to enforcing housing plans.

In fact, third-party litigation essentially is the only way that housing plans are enforced, said Dellinger of the state housing department.

The result, she said, is “inconsistencies in decisions throughout the state.”

“Should there be greater state enforcement?” she asked. “That certainly has been debated.”

But Dellinger warned that money and popular support could ultimately be bigger factors than enforcement of state housing law.

“The law can only do so much,” she said.

Much of the solution, said Tapking, of the Area Housing Authority, lies in setting priorities.

“We’ve got to make affordable housing available no matter what the cost,” he said. “Sometimes you’ve got to say that, and that’s a hard pill for a lot of people to swallow.”