Prices Drive Off Home Advocate

By Catherine Saillant

March 18, 2004 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

Lyle Wray knew it would be tough finding a Ventura County home within his budget when he accepted a job as an affordable housing advocate last year.

What he didn’t count on was being priced out of the market himself.

After looking at housing within reach of his $80,000-a-year salary, Wray, 54, has given up and is heading to a similar job in Connecticut.

The former Minnesota resident knows he will be trading midwinter hikes for mornings shoveling snow. But houses in Ventura County are so costly, he has no choice if he wants to become a homeowner, Wray said.

“This is the most beautiful place I’ve ever lived in and the weather is fantastic,” he said. “It’s paradise. I just can’t afford to live here.”

The irony is not lost on Wray. He said it underscored what he learned during his year in Ventura County: Affordable housing is hard to find and even the middle class is slowly being priced out.

“If I can’t afford to live here, what happens to police, teachers, firefighters?” he said. “I call it the Santa Barbara-Monaco syndrome. If this keeps up, only the rich and the people who cut their grass will be living here.”

If it’s tough now, it’s only going to get worse, economic experts say. Housing prices across Southern California last month surged to new highs, according to figures released by DataQuick Information Systems.

A median-priced home was $351,000 in February, up 2.3% from January and 20.2% from a year ago. Orange County had the highest median price at $475,000, with Ventura County in second place at $440,000.

Home prices rose faster in Ventura County over the past 12 months than in Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego, Riverside and San Diego counties, gaining 26.4% in value. The spike is largely due to a lack of homes for sale in Ventura County, John Karevoll of DataQuick said.

“Ventura County has the biggest housing crunch in Southern California,” Karevoll said. “There just aren’t enough homes for people who want to buy.”

The month-to-month increases caught Wray by surprise.

“It was on the margin when I got here last summer and I was hoping to make it work,” he said. “But then I began to look at housing. By the time I began getting serious about plunking down money, it was out of my reach.”

Wray sold his Minnesota home for $217,000 to take a job with the Ventura County Civic Alliance, a 3-year-old nonprofit group that tackles regional problems. Wray’s first project was a report on growth and economic sustainability in Ventura County, of which housing affordability is a major component.

The group found that affordability has dropped considerably since 1992, when it hit a high of 47% of residents who could afford a median-priced home. By 2001, that number had dropped to 35% of households.

Alliance members will hold a forum on affordable housing and other growth-related issues April 8, with Henry Cisneros, former U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development secretary, as keynote speaker.

Discussion will include possible solutions to the affordability problem, from increasing density to reserving low-cost homes for such essential jobs as firefighters and teachers, Wray said.

His own moment of truth came when he looked at a “mediocre” Thousand Oaks townhouse on the market for $340,000, Wray said.

“I just said, ‘OK, that’s it.’ It was not in a terribly good neighborhood and there was an association fee on top of the mortgage,” he said.

Homes in the fashionable West Hartford area where he is looking to resettle are easily within his range and offer a lot more, he said. “I was just looking at a two-story colonial with a double garage that was under $300,000,” said Wray, who is single. “Yes, it’s snowing there right now. But I grew up in Canada and Minnesota, so I’m used to it.”

Despite Wray’s experience, affordability for most would-be home buyers has not reached the depths seen in the late 1980s, Karevoll said. In 1989, higher interest rates for home loans made it tougher to buy homes than today. The typical monthly payment for Southland buyers last month was $1,542, Karevoll said. In the late ‘80s, it was 20% higher, he said.

“For most households, the cost of the monthly mortgage is the determining factor in affordability,” he said. “And most of the increases in home prices have been offset by the decline in mortgage interest rates.”

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Home sales

February figures for home sales in Ventura County since 1988, with median prices and number of sales.

*--* Price Sales 1988 $161,000 965

1989 215,000 966

1990 220,000 605

1991 212,000 411

1992 204,000 433

1993 192,000 766

1994 197,000 609

1995 183,000 558

1996 186,000 692