New Homes to Make Ojai Options More Affordable
Home to some of the county’s highest-priced real estate, Ojai will soon have some more affordable options, as a nonprofit group will build 24 homes for families where seven decrepit homes now stand.
Cabrillo Economic Development Corp. will build the Sycamore Homes project on about three acres on South Fulton Street. Each home will have three or four bedrooms and sit on a 3,700-square-foot lot. Subsidies from the city and county will lower the cost of the homes by 25% to about $150,000 each.
The project--the first of its kind in Ojai--will move the city closer to fulfilling a state requirement handed down earlier this year that 36% of houses built in the city by 2005 be affordable to families making $50,500 or less.
With the county’s other cities facing similar mandates, Sycamore Homes’ tightly packed houses on what is now a scruffy downtown lot may become a model of how to build reasonably priced homes in an age of tight anti-sprawl laws.
More than 166,000 new residents are expected in the county over the next 20 years, and 54,568 new dwellings. Those numbers, coupled with growth-control laws, are forcing cities to develop more creatively than in the past.
Planning experts say housing in all price ranges will be built closer to town and more tightly packed in coming years, as more and more homeowners decide they are willing to give up large lots to be closer to work and their communities. That trend will make oddball vacant lots in downtowns that developers once ignored more attractive.
“Traffic has become so terrible that proximity has become more important,” said author and planner Bill Fulton, who was chairman of a citizens committee that recently considered Ventura’s future.
Cities’ options include building more dwellings per acre and rebuilding rundown neighborhoods such as Sycamore Homes is replacing, rezoning land set aside for other uses or allowing homes and businesses to be built together.
The projects have had their successes, like apartments above a furniture store in Fillmore, and 26 condominiums on one acre in downtown Ventura, but the projects have produced controversies. County residents who voted for SOAR anti-sprawl measures to save agricultural greenbelts between cities may find the flip side means high-density developments in their backyards, as residents on neighboring Bald Street now face in Ojai.
“There’s not anything I can do to stop it,” said Larry Prince, who owns a home that will back up to the new project that he opposed at Ojai City Council meetings. “I’m just a citizen who got caught up in it.”
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Prince said he worries the development will bring too many residents to his quiet neighborhood and too many cars to his street, which will be one of two outlets for Sycamore Homes onto East Ojai Avenue.
However, some project supporters said, its proximity to downtown may actually mean fewer cars. When Cabrillo hands out loans for the homes, it will give priority to families already living and working in Ojai, so homeowners could potentially walk or take the Ojai Trolley to work.
Mike and Kay Wright, who until last week lived in one of the seven homes that will be razed to make room for the project, both work within two blocks of South Fulton Street and are eager to buy one of the homes.
Mike works at a nearby gas station, Kay at an automotive supply store. Their two daughters, ages 18 and 21, live with them as well.
Both parents plan to walk to work if they get one of the homes, and Kay Wright said the project is the only way that, on the family’s income of $35,000 a year, they can afford a home near their jobs.
She bristles, though, at neighbors’ objections to the project, and the stigma of higher crime and lower property values that she feels comes with the term “affordable housing.”
“People think it’s going to be a bunch of riffraff,” she said. “In reality it’s a pretty decent bunch of families that make that income and they deserve their own home as much as anybody else.”
Everett Millais, executive director of the Ventura County Council of Governments, said affordable housing projects and their surrounding neighborhoods can coexist happily if they are designed well. And cities will have to come to terms with the higher-density projects if residents want to preserve agricultural greenbelts, he said.
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Setting growth boundaries doesn’t end growth pressures, Millais said. Accommodating growth means doing it in a different way, and rather than spreading outside town, it means higher densities in town.
And the pressure is there. More than 200 people have already put their name on a waiting list for applications for Sycamore Homes, even though Cabrillo does not plan to start accepting applications for several weeks, said Karen Flock, who is overseeing the project for Cabrillo.
The city of Ojai is providing $550,000 to subsidize the project and the county will give $260,000 from federal housing funds. Construction is due to start later this fall.
