Lowdown on Oxnard High-Rises: It’s a Tough Sell for Now

If San Diego high-rise developer Doug Austin has his way, three condominium towers up to 500 feet tall will form a new urban skyline above the agricultural Oxnard Plain in the next few years.

Austin’s plan calls for more than 1,000 condominiums in three slender towers -- two of 31 stories and one of 48 -- nearly twice as high as Ventura County’s tallest building, which is itself an aberration in low-rise suburbia.

“Frank Lloyd Wright had a concept of a mile-high city as a way to save the plains and open space,” said Austin, who is also an architect. “And if you’re looking out into Oxnard’s future, and you are truly interested in saving the farmland, this is an alternative. The growth has to spread somewhere.”

But if Austin’s vision makes sense to some decision-makers, it’s jarring to others in 190,000-resident Oxnard, a onetime farm community trying to polish its blue-collar image with a crush of development.

“I thought of ‘The Jetsons’ when I saw those plans,” Mayor Tom Holden said. The City Council “understands that we cannot entertain a project of this type and maintain the fabric of the community. It goes from single-family homes to a 48-story building, stopping nowhere in between.”

Aside from its outsized scale, critics say building the condo towers near the junction of the Ventura Freeway and Pacific Coast Highway -- one of the most congested intersections in the county -- would only make the snarls worse.

Traffic now backs up for miles during rush hour. So how can area roadways deal with 1,043 new condos in the three towers, hundreds of condos and apartments planned at a nearby Wagon Wheel Road site, and 2,805 homes in the RiverPark planned community just across the freeway?

Widening the nearby Santa Clara River Bridge bottleneck, which is now underway, should help. But RiverPark alone would funnel nearly 79,000 vehicles a day onto streets and the Ventura Freeway.

“I’d like to see the infrastructure catch up with development. I think we need to stop and smell the roses,” said Councilman John Zaragoza. “Forty-eight stories is a lot of building. They call it smart growth, but I don’t believe it.”

If the City Council voted today, Austin acknowledged, his project would fail 3 to 2. But the developer thinks he will prevail after the give-and-take of the next couple of years.

“This is a site the city staff pointed us to,” Austin said. “And I think we have enough flexibility to come up with a project that will work there. We’re going to be good listeners.”

Austin is chief executive of the development arm of Austin Veum Robbins Partners, a large San Diego architectural design firm that has helped rehabilitate historic buildings there and is beginning construction of two condo towers similar to those proposed in Oxnard.

Skeptics often predict failure when high-rise condos are proposed, Austin said. But from Seattle to Portland to San Francisco to San Diego, the projects have proved successful, he said.

Austin compares his Oxnard proposal with a pair of 18-story condo towers being built near a freeway and along a rail line in Irvine. In all, 4,000 apartments and condos are planned along a two-mile stretch of Jamboree Road as once-suburban Orange County embraces high-density urban development.

“Even in San Diego, for a long time they didn’t want high-rise towers,” Austin said. “Then the dynamic changed.... I think that’ll happen in Oxnard.”

Austin said his analysts are “trying to get our arms around the traffic impact” -- then propose solutions.

For now, there are plenty of skeptics, including Robert Lopez, general manager of the Topa Tower Club, a private bar and restaurant atop Oxnard’s tallest building.

“It would be good for our business,” Lopez said. “But we’re all worried about the traffic. That’s scary.”