‘Recycling’ Old Neighborhoods Urged

With Southern California’s population expected to soar over the next 20 years, local leaders must focus on “recycling” old neighborhoods to develop more housing to help meet the growing demand, former U.S. Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros said Thursday in a speech at Cal State Channel Islands.

In Ventura County, where the population is expected to rise by 1 million by 2020, Cisneros said leaders had a rare opportunity to demonstrate to the nation and the world what could be done through “smart growth” and “infill development,” buzz phrases among urban planners for increasing density in a city’s inner core.

“Raw land for new housing has run out,” Cisneros said. “Six out of 10 cities in the county will run out by 2008. You can get more out of smaller pieces of land by recycling old neighborhoods.”

And, he said, these new developments should include a wide range of housing to attract people from all walks of life, including those on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder.

In addition to farmworkers, who cannot afford an apartment in Ventura County on the roughly $12,000 a year they earn, the county must try to provide housing for middle-income families that have no chance otherwise of achieving the American dream, he said.

“Eighty percent of families in Ventura County cannot afford an average-priced house,” he said, adding that it would take an annual income of $100,000 to buy a $425,000 home under standard income-to-housing cost ratios.

“Many young workers cannot stay here, and those that can’t leave are living in overcrowded, declining neighborhoods,” Cisneros said. “These are the practical implications of unavailable housing stock.”

Leaders also should work to build more apartments because many low-income families cannot afford to buy homes in Southern California, he said.

Government can play a constructive role through its power to change zoning laws, land-use policies and other rules to encourage such development, he said. But most of all, Cisneros added, officials must have the will to maintain a serious commitment to provide affordable housing.

“All the factors are against affordability,” he said, referring to market forces and taxes that make it more profitable for developers to build higher-priced single-family homes. “It requires a huge amount of government mental discipline to achieve something on the affordability equation. I am a believer that cities, communities and regions can be masters of their own destinies.”

In many ways, Cisneros was preaching to the choir in a conference studded with smart-growth advocates, such as county Supervisor Steve Bennett, Ventura City Councilman Bill Fulton and new Ventura City Manager Rick Cole. In their individual statements to the audience, they repeated the mantra about wanting to create pedestrian-friendly, mixed-use neighborhoods that combine residential and commercial opportunities attractive to people from all walks of life.

“We must focus on all housing types and density and look at old commercial strips and dead malls,” said Fulton, a nationally renowned urban planner recently elected to the City Council. “We’re extremely well-situated for that type of growth. There’s a great deal of consensus that that’s what we have to do.”

The housing forum was sponsored by Cal State Channel Islands, the Ventura County Civic Alliance and the Ventura County Star.