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Ventura County Civic Alliance Livable Communities Newsletter – Feb. 15, 2024

by Community Contributor • February 15, 2024 • Comments Off

Volume 18 / Number 69 / Feb 2024

Your Livable Communities Newsletter

This quarter’s Livable Communities Newsletter offers more information from the recently published 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. Special Thanks go to Tony Biasotti for his write-ups, to David Maron for the graphics, and to Kerry Roscoe for the final assembly of the newsletter.

Let us know what you think.

Thanks,

Stacy Roscoe

State of the Region

by Tony Biasotti

The most recent edition of the Ventura County Civic Alliance’s State of the Region report was published in the fall of 2023. It covers 66 different statistical measures of life in Ventura County, spread out over 10 different domains. In keeping with the Civic Alliance’s focus on the three Es, here is a selection of data and data analysis from the 2023 report, as it pertains to the Economy, the Environment and Equity.

ECONOMY: HOUSING

Perhaps no economic topic is more front-of-mind for Ventura County residents than housing, and the cost thereof. Our national economy is strong, and our county’s economy has much going for it as well, with unemployment at historically low levels and strong job growth in the last few years. However, our overall economic growth as well as our growth in well-paying jobs has lagged behind other counties for years now, while the cost of either buying or renting a home in our county has kept going up. We are, essentially, a low-growth, high-cost region.

In June 2023, the price of the median single-family home sold in Ventura County was $928,000, an inflation-adjusted increase of 26% in just three years. Meanwhile, the median family income in the county grew only slightly in that period, when adjusted for inflation.

The result of those two factors is a plummeting level of housing affordability. In 2023, only 17% of households in Ventura County had enough income to afford the median-priced home, assuming a standard mortgage and a payment of 30% or less of the household’s income. Just a decade before, the affordability rate had been at 50%.

It’s nearly as expensive to rent as it is to buy. In July 2023, the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Ventura County was $2,738, an increase of more than $500 from the average rent three years earlier. To afford that apartment, using the traditional guideline that rent should not exceed 30% of income, a family would need to make more than $109,000 per year.

The best way out of a housing shortage is to build more housing, and Ventura County is making slow progress in that regard. In 2022, there were 1,368 units of new housing permitted for construction in the county, a decline of 7.4% from the year before. New permits, or “housing starts,” have been in the 1,200-1,500 range each year from 2018 to 2022. In the mid-2000s, the last time the county added significantly to its housing stock, there were more than twice as many housing starts most years.

ENVIRONMENT: AG SNAPSHOT

The State of the Region report features an entire chapter devoted to measures of environmental quality such as air pollution and bacterial contamination at our beaches. However, there are other aspects of life in Ventura County that are inextricably tied to our natural environment. One of those is agriculture, and it also happens to be one of our signature industries.

Ventura County’s agricultural industry produced $2.1 billion in wholesale revenue in 2022. That was a little more than the year before, but the long-term trend is one of slowly declining economic impact. Crop revenue peaked in 2015 at $2.2 billion, which was nearly 4.5% of the county’s total economic output; in 2022, agriculture accounted for about 3.5% of the county’s economy.

The biggest-money crop in Ventura County is strawberries, and has been for decades. In 2022, strawberries grown in Ventura County brought in $663 million in wholesale revenue, more than the three next-biggest crops — avocados, lemons and nursery stock — combined.

One of the ways in which our farm industry is changing is a shift toward more organic crops. In 2022, about 13.8% of the county’s farmed acreage was planted with organic crops, easily the most on record.

EQUITY: EDUCATION

Equity is a focus of the State of the Region report and there are numerous measures that demonstrate a lack of economic and social opportunities for many people in our county. Unfortunately, some of those relate to our schools.

Closing the achievement gaps between socioeconomic groups has been the major focus of California’s education policy for decades. The results are mixed, at best. In Ventura County, as illustrated in the State of the Region report, the schools and school districts with the best performances on standardized tests tend to be the ones that serve higher-income families. Black and Latino students also lag behind on many indicators. For example, in 2022, the high school graduation rate for white students in Ventura County was 92% and for Asian students, it was 95%. Black and Latino students were far less likely to graduate, with rates of 81% and 82%, respectively.

Community colleges represent an important avenue for many students to gain entry into the world of higher education, particularly Latino and Black students and those from lower-income neighborhoods and lower-performing schools. Our county’s colleges do educate tens of thousands of students every year, but the number has been dropping. Enrollment in the three community colleges was down 16.5% between 2018-19 and 2022-23, and the most recent figures represent their lowest enrollment in more than a decade.

Though the state is facing projected deficits and budget cuts are likely on the horizon, education spending has grown sharply in recent years. Most importantly for issues of educational equity, the extra state spending has been directed at the schools that need it most. In 2021-22, for example, the Santa Paula Unified School District spent $18,320 per student, most of it in state revenue, while the district in Oak Park, a much wealthier area, spent $12,116 per student.