Downtrodden Downtown Builds a New, Upscale Identity in Ventura
Ventura has been a poor man’s seaside resort, the white-sand home of Midwestern migrants and faded thrift stores, dismissed as “Bakersfield by the Sea.”
But with the opening of new restaurants and a movie complex, the arrival of live theater and trendy boutiques, Ventura’s downtown has become more quaint than tattered, more cool retreat than homeless haven.
Out-of-town visitors and Main Street merchants join city officials in saying Ventura’s old downtown, radiating out from an 18th century Spanish mission and a century-old City Hall, has begun to live up to its promise.
“We’re not Santa Barbara, we’re not Pasadena and we’re not Santa Monica,” said author and planning expert Bill Fulton, whose office occupies a Victorian house on Main Street. “But we’re not Bakersfield either. We’re a prosperous beach town. We have a great downtown. It’s bustling.”
So far, the bustle is only a few blocks long and a couple of blocks wide. But in the latest sign that an economic revival may finally fill the weeded, vacant lots along Santa Clara Street and replace the red-light motels of Thompson Boulevard, homebuilders are eyeing downtown Ventura as never before.
The Olson Co., the state’s largest developer of urban “in-fill” -- housing in aging city centers -- has already sold nearly all of the 26 Spanish-style condominiums it is constructing on one long-vacant acre at downtown’s edge next to the Ventura Freeway. Prices range from $327,500 to $379,500, nearly double what they could have commanded three years ago.
“I think everybody’s interested in building in the downtown,” said Todd Olson, managing director of acquisitions for the Seal Beach-based company. He said Olson wants to build another larger project nearby.
And on a hillside across from Ventura’s neoclassical City Hall, architect and developer Ray Mulokas is finishing 33 upscale condos, including four penthouses with dramatic ocean views priced up to $1 million each. Three of the units are artist’s lofts. Offices will line the street level of the four-story building.
“Ventura is just beginning to realize its potential,” said Mulokas, who plans to live in one of the penthouses. “It’s a fantastic little town. And everybody is beginning to discover it.”
Mulokas, who has built about 1,000 dwellings in Southern California in the past 30 years, said he has 200 people on a waiting list for his condos. He hopes to build another complex not far away on what is now city land. He also has ambitious plans, including elaborate drawings, for other parcels he will not yet discuss.
“Developers are crawling all over every piece of property down here, looking for opportunities,” said architect Nicholas Deitch, who is working with four of them.
Deitch has worked on the same block of Main Street for 20 years, waiting for the downtown area to awake from its slumber.
“When I first started, you could park anywhere you wanted, anytime you wanted,” he said. With a Main Street parking space almost as rare as snow on the beach, a new parking garage was built four years ago for the overflow.
The city spent $18 million over five years in the 1990s to refurbish the downtown core, sprucing up Main and California streets with decorative sidewalks and palm trees and underwriting the four-story parking garage and a new 10-screen movie theater. That has increased the city’s share of downtown property taxes by at least $1 million a year.
“I think there is a comfort level in the downtown that wasn’t here before,” said Denise Sindelar, co-owner of Natalie’s Fine Threads, a Main Street shop where sales have grown steadily since opening in 1996. “We’ve been here six years, and it’s changed so much for the better -- it’s safer. There had been this stigma that only the homeless lived here.”
Sindelar, an arts supporter, may now choose on weekend nights between comedy improv at the Livery community theater and plays at the cozy 200-seat Rubicon Theater, which hosts a stage company that features actors such as Larry Hagman, Stephanie Zimbalist and Linda Gray.
“The Rubicon Theater has brought people up from Los Angeles [who] never came before,” Sindelar said.
Nona Bogatch founded her Victoria Rose bed and breakfast in a 19th century church near the downtown three years ago. Since then, she has seen the opening of half a dozen fine restaurants to which she refers her guests.
“With the revitalization of the downtown, we have more people, from more places,” she said. “These are wonderful restaurants, and the movie theater is great. Keeping out the fast-food restaurants had really helped us.”
Ventura, with its population of 100,900, is already considered a model of how older cities can begin to reinvent themselves. Now officials hope it can show how a land-poor city in a county where outward expansion is strictly controlled can look inward to accommodate population growth. The key is new housing.
Based on city plans, Deitch figures 2,000 to 6,000 new dwellings will eventually be built downtown, which occupies an area 10 blocks long and four blocks wide, bounded by foothills and the ocean, and by the Ventura River and Ash Street. About 800 residences currently exist; nearly all were built at least 20 years ago, Deitch said.
During the last decade, just one housing project was built downtown, a 13-unit senior citizen complex. But a hint of the current housing turnaround began four years ago, with the rehabilitation of the Henshaw Hotel, a former transient hotel where a studio apartment now rents for about $1,000 a month.
“We look at housing as a major issue,” said Sidney White, the city’s manager of economic development. “I think we are moving at all due speed. It’s sort of this methodical movement toward success, rather than a rush to failure.... But we are looking to speed up the process.”
Developers have complained for years about the city’s cumbersome process for approving downtown projects. It took Olson four years to break ground on its project. And Mulokas said he started trying to build on his site in 1997.
“It took a lot of staying power to get this up,” Mulokas said recently, peering through graceful arches near the courtyard of his Italian villa-styled condos. “The plans alone took more than a year to get through plan check.
“It’s good that people are careful and watching closely, but it should not be this difficult to get a project done,” he said.
White said the city’s goal is to make the process simpler and quicker.
By next October, he said, the city expects to pick builders for several projects that would produce dozens, perhaps hundreds, of dwellings around the downtown area. And unlike the Olson and Mulokas projects, they would emphasize affordability.
“I think affordable housing is so high on the radar screen it’s going to be part of all the conversations,” White said.
The city owns 44 acres at 36 locations downtown, much of it suitable for new construction, which would certainly include housing. City officials this year created the Housing Roundtable, an advisory committee that includes several developers. Lynn Jacobs, a developer and round table member, said the city seems determined to take advantage of a booming housing market.
“The housing prices, and lack of housing supply, have really hit Ventura County,” she said. “So, projects that were not feasible five years ago are now. And more expensive [business-residential] mixed-use projects are possible because of the price of housing.”
The median price of a house in Ventura County has risen nearly $150,000 since 1995, to $334,000. And it has spiked even higher in the city of Ventura. There, Santa Barbara professionals are snatching up houses as soon as they hit the market, because they are far cheaper than in their city of employment.
Planner Fulton said Ventura hasn’t hit its stride yet. But word that Olson and Mulokas have persevered through the city bureaucracy will spread, he said.
“We didn’t make it easy, but in-fill developers found us anyway,” he said. “This tells us there’s definitely a market for small-town urban living in coastal California.”
