Oxnard Is Riding a Job-Fueled Building Boom
Although Ventura County remains in the grip of a housing shortage, its largest city is experiencing its biggest construction boom in a decade.
And Oxnard is certain to remain a prime area of development for years to come in a county increasingly constrained by strict growth laws and rising land costs, experts say.
More than 2,500 new housing units are either being built or have been approved, with another 3,900 in the permitting process. They range from affordable to luxury housing, attracting a diverse mix of renters and buyers from lower wage service employees to corporate executives.
The residential boom has been fueled in large part by years of heavy commercial and industrial development, the result of a red-hot economy that only recently has begun to cool.
Oxnard also has benefited from a growing technology corridor along the Ventura Freeway. New or expanding businesses drove vacancy rates down and rents so far up in white-collar communities such as Thousand Oaks and Santa Barbara that many companies began relocating to Oxnard, about halfway between the two cities.
“You’ve got a relatively pro-business climate in Oxnard that was gladly accepting some of the outfall from those areas,” said Mark Schniepp, director of the California Economic Forecast Project. “You’ve created lots of jobs. The residential communities have followed in the wake of the industrial buildup.”
As long as the economy remains stable, the building boom is expected to continue.
“Recessions always kill building booms,” said Bill Watkins, executive director of the UCSB Economic Forecast Project. “The housing industry is always one of the first things hit. But that’s a very low probability.”
He estimates the county’s economy should grow 4.5% this year and at a slightly stronger pace through 2005.
Oxnard has enough industrial and commercial construction pending to surpass the new square footage being projected by any other city in the county. Much of that would be 2.5 million square feet of commercial space concentrated at the proposed RiverPark mini-city at the junction of Pacific Coast Highway and the Ventura Freeway.
If approved, RiverPark also would include as many as 3,000 new homes, village greens, a town square, movie theater, restaurants, hotel, a food and wine exposition as well as a school and sports fields.
Meanwhile, new homes are being approved, framed and snapped up every day in more modest developments in the city’s northeast area.
Since the county began to emerge from recession in 1995, most new home construction has been concentrated in Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks in the east county. In the west county, Camarillo also has had a robust market in recent years.
But Oxnard last year surpassed plans in each of those cities, issuing permits for 1,032 new housing units.
“We have robust development activity going on, and a few areas left that are fairly significant,” Simi Valley Planner Jim Lightfoot said. “But we are going to run out of area to be developed.”
Most of Growth in Northeast Sector
Most of Oxnard’s growth is occurring in the city’s northeast quadrant, the area around St. John’s Regional Medical Center. The neighborhood, undeveloped until the early 1990s, is teeming today with construction crews and home buyers.
Oxnard officials say the area is designed to be more diverse than more established neighborhoods labeled as working class, golf course or luxury beach properties, or as predominately Latino or white enclaves.
The new neighborhood draws on employees from the nearby medical center and Seminis Inc., the world’s largest producer of fruit and vegetable seeds. It also draws on technology employees who work on the east side of the county or to the west in southern Santa Barbara County. “It’s going to be probably the best integrated neighborhood from a socioeconomic standpoint in the whole city,” said Matthew Winegar, Oxnard’s development services director.
“I think you’re going to see a very broad range of family types. You’re going to find people with graduate degrees and GEDs [high school equivalency certificates] all living in the same neighborhood, machinists and physicians.”
Bill Fulton, an expert on regional planning and development, said a glance at the mix of projects being built suggests there is truth to the city’s spin.
“There’s more of a market for a range of housing than most of the cities in this county are willing to entertain,” he said. “Oxnard is willing to entertain it.”
Over the past two decades, Fulton said, Oxnard tried to build elite communities to recast its image from that of a largely minority, blue-collar city to that of a more insulated enclave, such as Ventura to its west or Camarillo to its east.
“They’re not going to overcome their image that way,” Fulton said. “No town ever builds itself out of a reputation as a poor town. They’re only going to overcome their image by embracing their history and capturing the market inside their boundaries. I think they’ve begun to figure this out.”
Jim Jevens, Camarillo’s economic consultant, said to compare growth in Oxnard and Camarillo is like “apples and oranges.” “We’re more restricted,” he said.
Camarillo has grown slightly faster than Oxnard in recent years, but that is a function of size, Jevens said. With about 160,000 residents, Oxnard’s population is about 2 1/2 times that of Camarillo’s.
In terms of industrial development, Camarillo does not allow as much heavy industry as Oxnard. Camarillo is also constrained by a policy that permits no more than 400 housing units per year, and most of that is geared toward luxury development.
In Oxnard, the northeast area now under construction includes a blending of housing, from subsidized homes for lower-income families to mid-range condominiums and townhouses, to houses in the $300,000 range.
El Paseo, a 190-home development, was recently recognized by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development as one of nine projects nationwide that are top examples of innovative design in affordable housing.
The development includes two-, three- and four-bedroom detached homes in Craftsman and Mediterranean styles, designed compactly and set on 2,700-square-foot lots.
These houses, the first of which were completed in 1999, sold for $90,000 to $150,000 to families earning no more than $48,000 per year. “There’s an intense pent-up demand in west Ventura County for affordable, detached, entry-level housing, and Oxnard’s the last bastion of that,” said Loren Bloch, president of Community Dynamics Inc., which developed the project.
In contrast, two luxury apartment and townhome communities near the hospital make up most of the new multifamily rental housing being built countywide. The complexes target renters with household incomes of $60,000.
These may be people who need temporary accommodations as they shop for a house or people who don’t have the savings for a down payment. Monthly rents at these complexes range from about $1,200 to $2,100.
Improved Real Estate Values in Colonia
Pat Patterson, an Oxnard real estate broker and a past president of the local Realtors association, said this mix of residential development in the northeast area has improved real estate values in what have historically been less desirable neighborhoods, such as Colonia just to the south.
“When Standard Pacific started construction on Cesar Chavez Drive [one of the first developments in the northeast], I thought, ‘Geez, are these folks nuts?’ ” Patterson said. “I thought it was a great risk. But frankly I think it’s helped improve the neighborhood. It’s had a positive impact. And I think the new high school will have a terrific effect. It’s an instant integration.”
Two schools were built to accommodate development in the northeast portion of the city--Frank Junior High in 1994 and Brekke Elementary in 1997. A third, Pacifica High, is under construction and scheduled to open this fall.
State-imposed class-size reduction and a shortage of classroom space in other parts of the city threaten to gobble up space faster than originally anticipated, Oxnard Elementary Supt. Richard Duarte said. Still, those schools should be sufficient for years to come.
The mix of multifamily and single-family housing, of affordable with luxury, has caused some people to rethink their stereotypes of Oxnard, which has received as much attention for its bouts of gang violence as its successes.
“It’s really strange to see a place this nice in Oxnard,” said Rick Jackson, from the outdoor hot tub at the new Tierra Vista luxury apartment complex. He and his wife moved in when the first apartments became available in October. They pay $1,270 a month for a one-bedroom unit.
The complex also has a fitness center, swimming pool and business center. The apartments feature high-speed data lines, washer-dryers, garages, decorator paint colors and home security systems.
Before the move, Jackson, 29, a club bouncer who hopes to become a police officer, lived in neighboring Ventura. He always considered Oxnard a shabby alternative.
“In all honesty, I don’t consider this Oxnard,” he said, peering through the rising steam out onto the freshly landscaped grounds. “It’s almost like a continuation of Ventura.”
One of Jackson’s neighbors is Enrique Osorio, treasurer and vice president of Seminis. The 49-year-old executive moved into the complex last month, after his transfer from Mexico to Seminis’ Oxnard headquarters.
“I find it very convenient to me because it’s very near the office,” Osorio said of his apartment. Several other company employees live there as well, he said. “I find good people here I can chat with, and it’s a very secure place to live.”
Just across Rose Avenue, off Gonzales Road, Louie Maione, a 29-year-old restaurant owner, and Elizabeth Macias, 24, a restaurant employee, are looking to buy a house. They are attracted by the prospect of living in a diverse, upwardly mobile community. They also figure they cannot afford a large home in move-in condition in Ventura or Camarillo.
They checked out one subdivision that features semi-attached single-family homes in beige-tone siding and stucco.
They toured a 1,885-square-foot unit with a fireplace and four bedrooms, including a master suite, which lists for about $250,000. “I think it will be a real nice neighborhood with people from all parts of the county moving in,” Maione said. “It’s a nice neighborhood compared to where I used to live in south Oxnard,” Macias said.
Fulton said these reactions validate city officials’ strategy.
“They’re embracing the fact that they’re a different place than the places around it,” he said. “That is the future of Southern California, a much less homogeneous and suburban population and economy.
“In this county we’re still thinking of our future as if it’s 1970s suburbanization. And it’s not.”
