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Ventura County Civic Alliance — Livable Communities Newsletter – Nov. 15, 2023

by Community Contributor • November 15, 2023 • Comments Off

Volume 17 / Number 68 / Nov 2023

Your Livable Communities Newsletter

This quarter’s Livable Communities Newsletter offers key data from the just released State of the Region report. This data is packaged to shed light on the Ventura County Civic Alliance 3Es: the Economy, the Environment, and social Equity.

Let us know what you think.

Thanks,

Stacy Roscoe

State of the Region

by Tony Biasotti

The Ventura County Civic Alliance’s biggest project, the State of the Region report, published Nov. 1 with a launch event at the Ventura County Office of Education in Camarillo. The report publishes every two years and examines life in Ventura County in 10 different chapters, or domains. In this edition of Livable Communities, we present some of the highlights of the report as they relate to the Civic Alliance’s focus on the Three Es: the Economy, the Environment, and social Equity.

ECONOMY

The Economy domain in this year’s report is full of mostly good news, a change from the last few editions of the report. For the past decade-plus, the State of the Region report has chronicled a sluggish economy for Ventura County. The Great Recession hit us hard in 2008 and 2009, and the recovery from that economic trauma was slow and spotty. By some measures, there wasn’t much of a recovery at all: Ventura County’s “gross county product” — the local version of gross domestic product, an inflation-adjusted measure of the value of all the goods and services sold in the county each year — peaked in 2007 and was still well below that level in 2021, the most recent year for which statistics are available. From 2010 through 2016, when the national economy was in a growth phase coming out of the recession, Ventura County’s economy shrank in five out of seven years, and even in the two years when it grew, the growth rate was below 1%.

However, in recent years, that has changed. Economic growth in 2019 was 2.4%, the county’s best performance since 2007. The pandemic triggered a recession in 2020, but it was mild and short-lived: one year of 1.3% negative economic growth, followed by positive growth of more than 3% in 2021.

Much of the recovery was driven by consumer spending. Data in the State of the Region report shows that taxable retail sales in Ventura County grew by a total of 29% from 2019, the last pre-pandemic year, to 2022. Tourism and international trade also took off as we emerged from the pandemic, with revenue and shipments up at the Port of Hueneme and hotel tax revenue at record highs in many cities.

The average monthly unemployment rate in Ventura County was 3.7% in 2022, just barely higher than it was in 2019, when it was the lowest on record. Inflation was a real problem in the economy in 2022 and into 2023, but we seem, so far, to have tamed inflation without the usual side effects of high unemployment rates and slow economic growth

ENVIRONMENT

The State of the Region report measures Ventura County’s environmental quality in several ways, with measures that include air and ocean water quality, solar power installations and vehicle miles driven. There is strong evidence that our environment is cleaner in many ways than it was a generation ago. There is less particulate matter and ozone in the air. Our beaches are closed for bacterial contamination less often. We drill less for oil and gas. Our use of natural gas has declined and our electricity use has risen. Our solar capacity has increased steadily during the last decade with an over 22% increase in 2022 alone.

However, there are some causes for concern. The pandemic nearly doubled the number of people who work from home and don’t have a commute at all, but still, the vast majority of employed Ventura County residents work away from home, and almost all of them get to work by driving alone. In 2021, 10.7% of workers worked from home, and less than 3% of workers either walked, rode a bicycle or used any kind of public transportation to get to work. More than 3 in 4 drove alone to work. All that driving puts a strain on our environment, as well as our psyches.

Two of Ventura County’s signature industries are agriculture and tourism, and both depend, in different ways, on our natural resources and clean environment. Tourism is thriving, with data in the report that shows steep increases in hotel room rates and occupancy.

Agriculture is moving in the opposite direction, with farm revenue’s share of our county’s economy declining for years and a long-term reduction in the land devoted to crops. Our farmers have even harder work ahead of them as stewards of the land, as various invasive pests spread over the county and necessitate chemical and non-chemical measures to fight them.

EQUITY

The biggest areas of concern about life in Ventura County tend to relate to topics of equity. While we provide an admirable quality of life for most of our residents, that doesn’t always extend to those on the fringes of society or at the bottom of the economic ladder.

In recent years, about 200 people per year in Ventura County have died of opioid overdoses. On a per-capita basis, our opioid problem is worse than that of Los Angeles County or of California as a whole. People who die this way come from all walks of life, but all of them needed help that our society was not able to provide.

Perhaps our biggest equity issue is housing and homelessness. In a relatively wealthy county in one of the richest nations on earth, thousands of people don’t have a decent, dependable place to live.

Moreover, the problem keeps getting worse: In 2023, the annual count of homeless people in Ventura County totaled 2,441. That’s the most since the count began in 2007, and it’s more than double the number of homeless people in the 2017 count.

That only scratches the surface of the problem. The State of the Region report includes data gathered by school districts on how many of their students lack stable housing. In 2022, there were more than 8,000 children in the county who at some point in the previous year had been homeless or lived in a motel, or shared overcrowded housing. That number was up more than 40% from the previous school year.

The housing crisis doesn’t just affect people who can’t afford any housing at all. Rents in Ventura County have been climbing steadily for nearly a decade, and in 2021 and 2022 they shot up even faster than before, peaking at an 11% average increase in apartment rents in 2021. The average two-bedroom apartment in Ventura County now rents for more than $2,700, a figure beyond the reach of most of the people who work in the service jobs that make up the backbone of our economy.