Local Housing Shortage Is Near, Study Warns
Ventura County cities could begin running out of room for new housing years before voter-approved anti-sprawl measures are set to expire, a new study says.
The study by the Los Angeles-based Reason Public Policy Institute and Ventura-based Solimar Research Group predicts that Camarillo and Simi Valley could reach build-out in 2004, Moorpark and Thousand Oaks by 2008 and Ventura by 2010 if current land use and development patterns continue.
Most of the county’s slow-growth measures, known as SOAR, require voter approval to build projects outside established growth boundaries through 2020.
The report, which was funded by the James Irvine Foundation and the California Assn. of Realtors, says cities should push for higher-density projects and convert some commercial and industrial land to residential zoning.
Otherwise, the report predicts, cities will face pressure to water down anti-sprawl ordinances or they will see a socioeconomic shift in which middle-class homeowners leave the area or have less money to spend on other goods, while lower-income families crowd into shared homes and garages.
“There are national implications to this,” said project director Sam Staley. “The model of Ventura County is increasingly looked at within California and uses a lot of the growth management tools that are increasingly part of the tool chests everywhere.”
Slow-growth advocates and city planners take issue with the study’s premises and conclusions. SOAR backers reject the economic doomsday scenario, and city planners say rezoning of defunct industrial areas is already in the pipeline and will push build-out dates back by years.
In Simi Valley, for example, one project now in the discussion stage would put more than 1,000 single-family homes on former oil and cattle land, said Deputy Planning Director Peter Lyons. The land is inside the area in which growth is allowed without a vote, but it is not yet zoned for residential use, so it wasn’t counted in the study.
The study “insinuates to me that there’s no more land available for residential construction, and I just think it’s sort of a misnomer,” Lyons said. “Throughout California, properties that were poorly developed or are brown fields [contaminated industrial land] are changing. Every city in urban L.A., you could argue, is built out, but you sure do see new construction.”
The study’s researchers maintain that their findings reveal some fundamental problems with trying to manage growth at the ballot box.
“Most smart-growth and growth-management proposals are debated based on a goal or an idea without a real sense of whether they’re practical or will work,” Staley said. “I think SOAR is flawed, not so much because of the goals or intent of the people supporting it, but because people aren’t taking a realistic view of how the planning process works. It works on a case-by-case basis.”
Even if projects within the growth boundaries are built at the highest densities allowed by their current zoning, and even if the Ahmanson Ranch development is built, the report’s authors say land use plans under SOAR couldn’t yield 60,000 new homes countywide, the number government officials predict will be needed by 2020.
On top of that, the study found that over the past five years, local planning departments have been approving projects at significantly lower densities than would have been allowed. If that pattern persists, the report says, half the county’s cities will be built out by 2010, and by 2020 there will be a shortage of roughly 30,000 homes.
“I think you’ll see something like what you see in Silicon Valley--business and affordable-housing advocates lobbying for higher density against the neighbors who don’t want it,” said Bill Fulton, a regional planning expert and co-author of the study.
Oxnard and Fillmore would be built out by 2019, the report predicts. In 2020, Santa Paula would be the only city in the county where housing of any real volume could be built. Port Hueneme and Ojai, both small cities, would not technically be at capacity but are irrelevant in terms of cumulative housing needs; only about 400 homes are expected to be added in the two cities combined over the next two decades.
Attorney Richard Francis, the architect of the SOAR initiatives, said that even if the study’s predictions about build-out dates prove accurate, it doesn’t validate the authors’ conclusions.
“Need, schmeed, what does that mean?” Francis said. “There’s no city in the San Fernando Valley capable of expanding its borders. And nobody there is talking about economic doomsday for that reason. I think the economic doomsday we should be looking at is what happens if all the farms shut down.
“Personally, I’m not offended by high density,” Francis said. “I think there should be some high density in every community, some moderate density and some low density. But if a community chooses to have no high density, that also doesn’t offend me. They weren’t building affordable houses before SOAR. They were just marching across the plains and into the hills.”
