SOAR Measures Force Cities Into Sprawl Withdrawal

Ventura County residents can’t have it both ways, the experts say.

They can’t save farmland while building large houses on big lots.

They can’t preserve the open space between their cities without changing the rules of city life.

And they won’t be able to keep their bucolic county the way it is without making some sacrifices along the way.

But people just don’t seem to get it, planners say. Not yet.

Since 1998, when two-thirds of local voters threw up a barricade to save what remains of Ventura County’s fertile topsoil, it’s been mostly business as usual.

No local city has done much in response to a series of SOAR anti-sprawl ballot measures that protect the lands which separate cities.

City councils and planning codes--along with homeowners worried about their property values--still favor large-lot subdivisions and shopping centers with vast parking lots.

New houses and businesses are gobbling up acres at the fastest rate since the 1980s.

So the question remains: How should cities accommodate the 166,457 new residents, 54,586 new dwellings and myriad of new businesses expected as Ventura County’s population grows by 22% over the next 20 years? And what happens after that?

Even now, planning experts say existing growth restrictions should force local cities to reexamine their long-range building strategies.

According to a new Ventura Council of Governments report, local cities have plenty of land zoned for business and industry, but too little land to house the new workers that industry will bring.

That could eventually clog freeways with commuters coming into Ventura County, not just with locals driving to Los Angeles--gridlock both ways.

To grow as projected, seven of 10 local cities need to fit more people onto less land than they do now, the Council of Governments study says.

Their options include building more dwellings per acre, rebuilding run-down neighborhoods or rezoning land now set aside for other uses--such as stores, industry, farms or open space. Or they could allow homes and businesses together in reinvigorated downtowns.

Most cities can’t begin to provide the new dwellings needed to satisfy the growth they forecast for themselves--at least not in traditional ways.

Camarillo and Oxnard, for example, have set aside just a fraction of their vacant land for new homes, but both expect nearly a one-third increase in population by 2020. Ventura and Thousand Oaks also will remain short of housing.

Some cities--such as Ventura and Simi Valley--might also begin allowing construction on hillsides with steep slopes. And Santa Paula--not yet subject to voter-imposed growth boundaries--already is moving to annex more land.

“You can’t just draw a boundary around a city and then let everything else happen the way it’s always happened,” said author and planner Bill Fulton, who was chairman of a “visioning” committee that recently considered Ventura’s future. “And that’s what we are doing right now.”

Growth is coming and it has to settle somewhere. Under city master plans, it will cover virtually all usable vacant land during the next 20 years. Then it will either spill onto farmland on the urban fringes, or turn back on itself.

“We need to look very hard at what land is left within urban boundaries, and how we’re going to use it,” said Nancy Settle, supervisor for regional projects at the county planning department. “It will go fast.”

City leaders could slow that progression by pressing new residents and new businesses onto less and less space--using every acre as if it were the last. By building more on less. By building up, not out. And doing that in creative, attractive ways.

That has happened in isolated pockets--apartments above a furniture store in Fillmore, an executive’s loft above an ambulance company in Oxnard, 26 condos on a single acre in downtown Ventura and, in Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks, family homes on lots so narrow the property line is a neighbor’s wall.

But it hasn’t happened much. And it’s been driven mostly by developers, not city officials.

So by the year 2020, when most of the anti-sprawl ballot measures expire, “virtually every city will be faced with decisions as to whether to expand onto valuable prime agricultural land, or attempt to contain their growth within existing boundaries,” says the Council of Governments analysis. “Ventura County and its cities should begin immediately to consider the issues raised by the continuing conflict between development and preservation of agricultural land,” the report recommends.

Ventura County voters may think they have already decided.

During the last five years, two-thirds of voters have approved a countywide Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources measure that prohibits urban development outside cities without voter consent. Similar measures set urban boundaries in Ventura, Oxnard, Camarillo, Moorpark, Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks. And growth-control initiatives for Fillmore and Santa Paula are expected to qualify for the November ballot.

“Voters think they created an immovable line,” Settle said. “But who knows what the dynamics will be by 2020.”

Fulton, Settle and many other local planners favor new city policies that reflect growth strategies now in vogue across the state and nation.

They champion the use of so-called “smart growth” to encourage compact, efficient urban development. They endorse so-called “livable communities” that provide jobs, housing and shopping clustered within walking distance of each other. They shun the car. They are the anti-commute.

In such communities, residents could live and work in the same building, with shops at street level and apartments above--a knock-off from Main Street America before the suburban sprawl that followed World War II.

This mix has long been a way of life in San Francisco and New Orleans. And it is flourishing in downtown Los Angeles, Long Beach, Pasadena, Santa Monica, Newport Beach and Oakland.

“It’s kind of an irony since we built our communities around the automobile,” Settle said. “But it’s another way of looking at where we’re headed. We say it’s a better way.”

Indeed, the Ventura Council of Governments--the regional planning body for local cities--adopted the Livable Community Principles as a guideline for future growth in 1995.

But hardly anyone noticed.

Fillmore did.

Look no further than that farm town’s quaint main street, Central Avenue, to see how a move back to the future through mixed-use projects might work.

There, Virginia Griffin lives in one of six apartments owner Ron Stewart built atop his grandfather Ballard’s furniture store after the Northridge earthquake knocked it for a loop in 1994.

Griffin, 68, a retired businesswoman, has positioned her computer by the window so she can watch people go by on the sidewalk below.

She pays $700 a month for a two-bedroom apartment and shares a courtyard with her neighbors--three young couples, an older man and a young man who just moved in. They all have garages on the alley. And they are protected by a security gate.

“It’s like a little community up here,” she said. “We sit outside on our porches and gab. And we all feel very fortunate to be up here.”

She has a car, but Griffin walks just about everywhere.

“I can buzz across the street to the post office or go next door to the Hallmark store,” she said. “I get my perms a couple of doors down. The [movie] theater is on this block. There’s the Fillmore Cafe for breakfast and lunch, and La Fondita for dinner. I can walk to Von’s and Rite Aide.”

Her daughter’s family lives up the street. And her twin sister just moved to town.

“I love this downtown,” she said. “It’s perfect.”

It didn’t happen by accident.

After the devastating quake, city officials worked with Stewart.

“They even suggested the apartments on top,” he said. “And that was the difference. I don’t think I could have made the payments on the construction loan if I’d built it one story.”

On vacant downtown lots, and as buildings crumble along the century-old city core, it is Fillmore’s policy to replace single-story storefronts with street-level shops, plus a second floor for residents.

Ventura developer Ron Hertel is planning mixed-use projects on two downtown parcels right now, Councilman Roger Campbell said.

“It’s really good for business and for the environment,” Campbell said. “You help all the businesses in the area and you don’t have to drive every place you go.”

SOAR Measures, State Squeeze Cities

Ventura County has seen its population swell 5 1/2 times since 1950. And throughout the county, building is booming again in subdivisions, shopping centers, office buildings and industrial parks.

Nearly 3,600 new houses were built locally in 1999, up from 2,425 the year before and double the number constructed in 1994. Three-fourths of those homes are in Simi Valley, Thousand Oaks and Camarillo--all upscale communities where growth is stoked by new high-tech businesses.

The county grew at a rate of 1.6% last year, a little less than the state overall. That has been the pattern for a long time. And city officials look for more of the same. In new forecasts submitted to the state, cities project nearly 20,000 new dwellings will be built here from 1998-2005.

And most of those subdivisions will look nearly the same: large two-story stucco houses with red tile roofs on lots big enough for a vegetable garden or a backyard pool.

But Everett Millais, executive officer of the Local Agency Formation Commission, the county agency responsible for city annexations, said that has to change. And not just because of the SOAR ballot measures.

By state law, each local city has to do its fair share to accommodate future population growth. And officials cannot just say they have run out of land, he said. If cities refuse to act in good faith, the state can reject the housing portion of the city’s General Plan, opening it up to lawsuits by developers.

“It’s interesting,” Millais said. “The cities have guidelines required by the state. And now they have mandates from the voters as to their urban boundaries. And they’re going to have to deal with both.”

City officials may not step forward eagerly to embrace new types of densely packed housing--considering the inevitable not-in-my-backyard uproar. But they must step forward.

“They’re going to have to look at increasing densities,” Millais said. “In a sense, it’s change being forced through the backdoor.”

Pressing the issue further are state rules that require cities to build dwellings that are affordable by low- and very-low income people--a family of four earning less than $47,800 a year. In Ventura County, about 36% of all new dwellings must fit that category, according to new guidelines by the Southern California Assn. of Governments.

To provide cheaper housing, cities in the affluent east county have to be creative. There a single 5,000-square-foot vacant lot now costs $150,000, according to the building industry.

That puts a premium on using land wisely. It creates change through the marketplace, if not through the city bureaucracy.

Small-Lot Homes Sell, Builders Say

Simi Valley is ground zero in a growing debate about whether building houses on small lots is a wise use of a limited resource, or a move toward unsightly crowding.

Builders say buyers want small-lot houses, and if Simi Valley officials would just get out of the way, the market would accommodate growth and take care of the city’s need for affordable housing.

“We’ve had a very strong buyer response. People want it as an affordable option,” said Dee Zink, spokeswoman for the Building Industry Assn. “But I don’t think it’s politically palatable. So I’m concerned it’s politically impossible.

“People voted for SOAR because they didn’t want to see one more parcel built up near them,” she added. “It’s easy to vote; it’s harder to accommodate the trade-offs.”

City officials acknowledge the need to build wisely. But they say new dwellings should be aesthetically pleasing and designed to preserve residents’ privacy. And they generally agree with loud citizen complaints about a newly completed small-lot project at Los Angeles Avenue and Madera Road.

There, the city allowed construction of condominiums slightly separated from each other, because state laws make it difficult for condo owners to get insurance if the dwellings are attached.

“SOAR doesn’t mean we need to slam all our houses together just to be efficient,” Councilman Steve Sojka said. “It’s a quality-of-life issue. You shouldn’t be able to jump from one roof to another. And you shouldn’t be able to look in your neighbors’ kitchen window and hear the conversation they’re having. That isn’t any way to live.”

Yet, as residents protest small-lot development, and the building industry lobbies for more of it, John Laing Homes is selling house after house on lots of just 3,000 square feet.

Phase 1 of a Cochran Street project--26 houses--sold out recently in just six weeks, and prices were promptly raised by $10,000 for Phase 2. Two-story houses with 1,800 to 2,040 square feet now sell for $260,000 to $277,000.

That is a deal for Simi Valley. But the trade-off is this: The houses are just eight feet apart. The outside wall of one house sits on the property line of the next--a “zero lot line.” There’s a postage-stamp frontyard and an alley-facing garage where a backyard might have been.

On a recent Friday, Bob and Bonnie Rouch were up from the San Fernando Valley, searching for an escape and bringing a desire for more space, not less. It was their fourth week of looking.

“Is there room for a pool?” Bonnie Rouch, a vocation nurse, asked first. The side yard is tiny. So there isn’t. Not even close.

The couple liked the quality of the amenities, especially the tile in the bathroom and the kitchen. And the upstairs floor didn’t creak when they walked, so the construction was solid.

“But we could go to Santa Clarita and get a big house on a half an acre for $400,000,” Bonnie Rouch said.

Bob, a retired railroad engineer, said finally: “Too small.”

Across Cochran Street, Natalie Chapman came to the same conclusion a few months ago.

“They’re tempting because they’re cheaper,” said Chapman, a reading teacher. “But you go outside and there’s nowhere for a child to play.”

So Chapman and husband David bought instead another Laing home: a country-styled house with a big front porch, balcony, front- and backyards and a detached garage. The house is about the same size--1,865 square feet--but the lot is twice as large. And the price was still only $300,000.

“We like the frontyard, and we like a large porch,” Champman said. “Everyone who comes over mentions the porch swing. We sit out here almost every night. And all our neighbors come by and wave. It’s kind of Leave It to Beaverish.”

Ventura Embraces ‘Livable Communities’

If Simi Valley is a test case for small-lot development in suburban east county communities, Ventura could become a model for how older Ventura County cities reinvent themselves to accommodate growth in the post-SOAR era.

After decades of watching orchards give way to nondescript housing projects, Ventura voters passed the county’s first SOAR initiative in 1995.

Since then, the city hasn’t done much to change the way it grows.

But after years of gearing up, the 134-year-old city is poised for that change, said Councilman Carl Morehouse, himself a veteran county planner.

It has completed its “visioning process,” where a citizens committee analyzed growth options, and came down solidly on the side of compact “livable community” principles. It is now updating its comprehensive plan for future development.

Ventura intends to reemphasize one of its greatest strengths--its oceanfront downtown. Main Street has already made a comeback of sorts. But much of the rest of the downtown area is dotted with vacant lots and sagging buildings.

“We’re trying to remedy some of the errors that drew people and business away,” Morehouse said.

That job goes to city’s new planning czar, Susan J. Daluddung, a veteran of “smart growth” efforts in Portland and Eugene, Ore.

“This is a time of opportunity, and we’re going to take advantage of it,” she said. “The magic ingredient is housing and people.”

She wants to see the downtown dotted with sidewalk cafes, and Main Street lined with a mix of business and residential projects.

She wants to promote the city’s budding cultural groups, and $500,000 is in next year’s city budget to help them expand.

The city has spent $18 million over five years to build a city core--sprucing up Main and California streets and underwriting a four-story parking garage and a new movie theater. That has increased the city’s share of downtown property taxes by $1 million a year.

But, so far, redevelopment is three blocks long and two blocks wide.

The next critical step is new housing. But what will the market bear?

A Spanish-style condo project at the foot of downtown--at Palm and Santa Clara streets--will be the test case.

There, the Olson Co. of Seal Beach, the biggest inner-city housing builder in the state, plans to break ground this month. The city primed that pump by selling Olson the lot for about half its $400,000 value. Now Olson will build 26 three-story condos on a single acre--and plans to sell them for $199,000 to $217,000 each.

Project manager Stan Smith said it’s the right project at the right time. And the restrictions of SOAR will only make the units, which will be just a block from the ocean, more valuable.

“There’s tremendous demand,” Smith said. “This is the trend of the future. Why do we want to go out and build more suburbs when we have everything close by right here.”

For the Olson Co., the Ventura project is just one finger in its Ventura County pie. It has three other projects going in Port Hueneme, where it hopes to sell Craftsman and California Bungalow style homes on 3,000-square-foot lots for just over $200,000 each. The company plans 73 homes on three separate lots--all within a short walk of the ocean.

“We build in L.A. all the time, but Ventura County is kind of catching on too,” Smith said.

Indeed, a builder recently completed a small-lot project at the foot of the old downtown in Camarillo. And a project combining stores and offices with apartment lofts is also in the works in the same area.

Oxnard has its own ambitious plans for a faded downtown. It’s trying to build a movie theater. And the city recently became the first in the county to draw up plans to build houses on dozens of small vacant lots scattered throughout the city on so-called “in-fill” parcels.

To encourage such building, the city has agreed to waive development fees until the new in-fill dwellings are occupied. Not that the projects will be popular.