Ventura County Civic Alliance — Livable Communities Newsletter for Nov. 15, 2021

HOUSING

Ventura County’s housing and real estate have been relatively expensive for decades, but even by those standards costs skyrocketed in 2020 and 2021. From June 2019 to June 2021, the median sale price of a single-family detached home in Ventura County went from $647,000 to $840,000, an 8.2% increase the first year followed by a 20% jump the next. In 2020, the median price topped $700,000 for the first time since 2006, at the height of housing boom of the early and mid-2000s. In the early 2000s, though, the economy in general was booming and the county was adding thousands of jobs every year.

The price of housing was going up, but so was the ability of most people to pay for it.

However, in 2020 and 2021, Ventura County lost thousands of jobs and saw its unemployment rate spike to record levels — and yet, housing costs continued to rise. Our housing affordability rate — the percentage of Ventura County residents who can afford the median-priced home with a standard mortgage — was 27% in the first quarter of 2021, the lowest rate in more than a decade.

Rental housing is behaving in much the same way. The average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Ventura County — based on surveys of apartment building owners, so rented single-family homes and granny flats aren’t counted — was $2,427/month in July 2021, an increase of $238 in a single year. The 10.9% year-over-year increase topped every year but one of the past 14 years. Apartments in Ventura County posted a vacancy rate of just 1.37% in 2021, compared to a national rate of 6.2% for all rental housing.

This increase in housing costs comes at a time when more people in Ventura County can’t afford a place to live at all. The annual county census of homeless people was canceled in 2021, due to the pandemic, but in January 2020 the count found 1,743 people in the county without adequate shelter. That represents an increase of more than 50% over the total in 2017.

When the price of a commodity goes up, the natural place to look for explanations is in the supply of and demand for the good or service in question. In Ventura County, as in most of coastal California, demand for housing is soaring. The pandemic seems to be driving it even higher, as many workers’ jobs have become untethered from physical offices, giving them the freedom to move, say, closer to the beach. On the supply side, Ventura County reported 1,501 “housing starts” in 2020 (a housing start is recorded when a local government issues a final permit to build a residential unit). That figure was the most since 2017, but the three-year total of 4,151 starts from 2018 through 2020 fell below the single-year total from 2005. For the first time in decades, Ventura County built enough housing in the late 2010s to keep up with its population. That could have resulted from the fact our population growth has been stagnant in recent years, in part because residents are exiting the county seeking more affordable housing.

JOBS AND THE ECONOMY

The beginning of the pandemic in March 2020 delivered a cataclysmic shock to the economy. The unemployment rate in Ventura County spiked from 3.7% in February 2020 to 14.5% in April 2020, the highest on record. This side effect of the pandemic was fairly short-lived; by November 2020, the number of unemployed people in Ventura County was less than half of what it had been in April. When the deadly winter wave of COVID-19 subsided in early 2021, the unemployment rate dropped again. By September 2021 it fell to 5.3% — only about a percentage point higher than before the March 2020 shutdown of huge parts of the economy.

THE ENVIRONMENT

Ventura County’s natural environment ranks among its greatest resources. This is something our communities largely agree upon. Even with a growing realization that the status quo fails to provide enough housing, there remains a consensus in most of our cities that we do not want to deliver homes by creating more suburban sprawl. Ventura County had a little less than 95,000 acres of active farmland in 2020, and tens of thousands more acres of unirrigated rangeland. While farm acreage declined slightly in recent years — 11.4% fewer farmed acres in 2020 than in 2013 — the county’s efforts at preserving farmland and open space largely succeeded, as the decline in farmland is much smaller than a comparable decline from before the growth-control laws in the 1990s.

As the State of the Region report details, our air and ocean water are cleaner than they were a generation or two ago, and our per-capita electricity and natural gas consumption is lower. These important trends represent real improvements to our region’s quality of life. For example, the county of Ventura posted warnings at our beaches advising people to stay out of the water, due to elevated levels of bacteria, 320 times, not including those prompted by rainy weather. That was less than half the number of beach advisories posted in 2004. In 2020, the air in Ventura County exceeded state standards for particulate matter 21 times, less than one quarter as often as in 1991.

However, in these and other measures, Ventura County has stopped making the same progress toward a cleaner environment that we achieved 20 or 30 years ago. Beach advisories were on the rise in 2020; so were days above the state standards for both ozone and particulate matter.

Our county is more affected than almost anywhere else in the nation by the biggest environmental challenge facing the planet. As the Washington Post reported* in 2019, Ventura County is one of the most rapidly warming places in the contiguous 48 states, with our average annual temperature 4.68 degrees Fahrenheit higher than it was in the late 1800s. We are taking steps the remedy this, such as developing our solar infrastructure. In 2020 we added 19.8 megawatts more solar capacity than existed in the county in 2011, but the effects of climate change, including more serious wildfires and droughts, are with us. By September 2021, Ventura County was in a state of “exceptional drought,” as defined by the U.S. Drought Monitor. That’s the most serious category in the Drought Monitor scale, and it means Ventura County is even drier than neighboring Los Angeles and Santa Barbara counties, both of which are in the second worst category: “extreme drought.”

* https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/climate-environment/climate-change-california/