Assessing Ventura's land-use initiative
Monterey County voters face similar decision

Posted on May 27, 2007

By CLAUDIA MELÉNDEZ SALINAS and JIM JOHNSON
Herald Salinas Bureau

Flanked by the Pacific Ocean and Los Padres National Forest, it faces the growth pressures that spill over from adjacent counties, where skyrocketing housing prices drive their residents further and further away from employment centers.

It's called Ventura County, and since 1998, its open spaces have been protected by a voter-approved initiative that requires all major development of county farmland be put to a countywide plebiscite.

On June 5, Monterey County voters will decide if they want to adopt a measure tailored after Ventura's Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources, or SOAR, an initiative that proponents say has preserved their quality of life and opponents decry as a negative force against farming.

Measure A, the general plan initiative on the June 5 ballot, also known as GPI, would require a countywide vote for any development in the unincorporated county outside five "community areas": Boronda, Castroville, Chualar, Fort Ord and Pajaro.

Like Ventura, which faces growth pressure from Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, Monterey County faces growth pressures from its neighbors. It's home to a stunning coastline and some of the richest soil in the world.

But the similarities may end there: Monterey County is home to about 400,000 people, almost half that of Ventura — even though Monterey County is almost twice its size. On Monterey County's more than 3,000 square miles of land, there are fewer than 140,000 housing units. By comparison, Ventura County is 1,873 square miles and has 266,000 housing units.

In Ventura, development pressure led slow-growth advocates to pass their SOAR initiative by an overwhelming majority. The countywide measure was preceded by the city of Ventura's own initiative in 1995. Other initiatives that set urban restriction boundaries (CURBs) in eight of Ventura County's 10 cities followed. The county initiative expires in 2020.


Agriculture not protected


Backers of SOAR, which has evolved from a growth-control initiative into a nonprofit organization, say the measure has been an unqualified success.

"All in all, I think most people in Ventura County are quite pleased with the impact of the initiative," said Karen Schmidt, SOAR's executive director. "The general sense is that it played a significant role in putting a temporary halt, or moratorium, on sprawl development in the unincorporated county. It certainly hasn't stopped the loss of agricultural land, but it has slowed it down. And it has brought developers toward looking at infill development (in the cities)."

Not everyone is as enthusiastic about SOAR. Almost 10 years after its approval — under the rallying cry to protect agriculture — leaders of the industry say it's done anything but.

"It's the worst thing that's ever happened to agriculture in Ventura County," said deputy agricultural commissioner Susan Johnson. "It's not protecting agriculture, it protects open space.
Agriculture is what happens to sit there."

SOAR did not lock in agricultural land values, as its proponents predicted. Instead, the price of land continues to increase, with estimates by the Economic Forecast Project of the University of California-Santa Barbara that the value of the best quality land for berries ranges in excess of $50,000 per acre (farmland in Monterey tends to run about $10,000 per acre). As a result, a trend to switch to more profitable crops, such as strawberries, has accelerated to pay higher lease rates.

Leasing an acre of land can go up as much as $3,000 in Ventura, Johnson said. In Monterey County, prices range from as little as $100 to as high as $2,800 if the land is used for strawberry production.

SOAR a 'one-sided deal'

While land values continue to rise in Ventura, the Economic Forecast Project concluded that the total value of its crops has remained constant in real dollars for the past five years, while the overall economy has had substantial growth. Thus, agriculture has become a smaller portion of the economy: In 1991, agriculture's share of the economy represented more than 5 percent. By 2003, it had fallen to about 2.5 percent.

Ventura had 11,333 acres dedicated to strawberries in
2005 — the largest of its 10 most important crops, valued at $328 million.

But because the higher-yield crops are more labor-intensive, they've attracted more workers who cannot afford the skyrocketing home prices that have characterized the area since the beginning of the decade.

"What we're doing is increasing the ag work force, but it's not the best paid job in town," said Bill Watkins, executive director of Economic Forecast Project. "There are thousands more workers receiving low wages, and housing prices are going up. My community said: 'We want ag,' but we've done nothing to help people in the business to continue to live there. We're not building farmworker housing. It's just kind of a one-sided deal, in a way."

Since the SOAR and CURBs initiatives were passed, county voters have rejected five development proposals and approved one. Earlier this year, voters OK'd Santa Paula's Measure A7, a 495-home hotel-and-golf project in Adams Canyon northwest of town. Two earlier proposals for the Adams Canyon area had failed, as had initiatives to build in Santa Paula's Fagan Canyon, on Ventura's hillsides and in a canyon near Moorpark.

Preserving remaining land

According to a State of the Region report prepared by the Ventura County Civic Alliance and released earlier this month, the pace of urbanization has actually increased slightly since 2000 but is falling well behind population growth.

Between 2000 and 2004, the amount of urban land increased at a rate of 4.7 percent, or a little more than 1 percent per year, while the 1990-2000 rate was
9.5 percent, or a little less than 1 percent a year.
The total increase in urban land of 14.8 percent lagged behind the population increase of 21 percent.

Schmidt said much of the increase can be attributed to the conversion of agricultural land that was excluded from some of the SOAR boundaries.

And most seem to agree that considerably more farmland and open space would have been converted to development if the county's initiative hadn't been approved.

Former League of Women Voters Ventura County president Sue Kelly, whose organization endorsed the SOAR initiative in 1998, said the bottom line for SOAR backers is preserving the remaining land from increasing growth pressures.

"People don't realize this soil in the Santa Clara River Valley is the richest in the world," Kelly said, "and to pave it over is just a shame."

Rising home prices

Doomsday scenarios about the effect the SOAR initiative would have on development have largely been debunked, at least during its first decade.
Development has not slowed appreciably, and a spike in housing prices and corresponding dip in the percentage of families who can afford to buy a home seem merely to reflect a statewide trend.

According to the Civic Alliance report, the county's housing stock has increased at the same rate — about 6 percent overall — since 2000, as it did during the 1990s, before the SOAR initiative.

The major increase in the housing market has been in price, with the median home price rising from about $295,000 in 2000 to about $695,000 in 2006. By comparison, the median home price rose by just 25 percent in the 1990s.

The county's affordability index plummeted despite that salaries increased from about $62,000 in 1998 to about $82,000 in 2007. The affordability index reflects the percentage of households that can afford to purchase a median-priced home.

But many factors unrelated to SOAR are almost certainly at work in the spiking of home values, which was a nationwide phenomenon and especially acute in coastal California.

Rodney Fernandez, president of the nonprofit affordable housing builder Cabrillo Economic Development Corporation, said SOAR has not affected production of below-market homes.

"The decisions to do affordable housing are done by and large in the cities," he said. "They're the ones who have the responsibility and the ones that are making the calls when projects come up."

'Housing crisis' ahead


In the past five years, and as the overall housing crisis deepened, support for mixed housing has increased, he said. Before, proposals for senior housing were welcome while apartment complexes — particularly those for farmworkers — were routinely opposed.

In the long haul, housing availability may turn out to be a major issue.

Len Gilroy, a senior analyst for the Los Angeles-based free market-oriented Reason Foundation, said his organization conducted a study of Ventura County's housing market that predicted a "housing crisis"
before the county's SOAR initiative expires in 2020.

The study suggested that the county would need to add about 60,000 new housing units between 2000 and 2020, but that the county's policies would only allow a maximum of about 46,500 new units during that time.

In addition, the study found that cities in Ventura County have been approving housing projects at between 20 percent and 45 percent lower than planned capacities, further contributing to the gap between projected need and production.

Despite the passage of the county's SOAR initiative, the study found that cities had not altered their development approval processes to accommodate the expected demand for housing.

Political pressure from neighbors opposed to higher-density projects combined with developers' unwillingness and inability to back larger projects because of market demand have contributed to the trend, the study found.

As a result, Ventura County will likely be able to add about 33,000 new units before 2020, well below projected need, according to the study.

"What is actually coming out in the real world is significantly less (than projections)," Gilroy said, while acknowledging the housing market is influenced by myriad forces besides growth-control rules. "You can't say before SOAR everything was peachy and after SOAR everything tanked. It's not that simple. But there is an effect."

Schmidt said the debate about how much housing will be needed is ongoing, and probably will continue right up until the initiative expires in 2020.

"There are different opinions on what kind of growth is needed," she said. "I don't believe zero growth is possible. It really depends on how you grow and how the cities choose to grow.

"The speculation is in 10 years the pressure for growth will cause a shift in attitudes, but there's a lot of support for (the initiative) now."


Forcing out strawberries

But while the effects of the initiative on housing may not be fully understood until its sunset date nears, its effects in agriculture are poised to become pressing sooner.

Nancy Lindholm, president and CEO of the Oxnard Chamber of Commerce, said she worries about new rules from the Department of Pesticide Regulation that could put out of production about one-third of Ventura's strawberry fields.

"They're being forced out of the industry and will have no recourse on what to do with their land,"
Lindholm said.

Farming leaders haven't decided what to do to deal with these developments, said Rob Roy, president of the Ventura County Agricultural Association.

"We need to get together as an industry to start discussing potential impacts," Roy said. "There will be significant impacts to workers, and if those farmers who can't grow strawberry don't have the ability to grow any other crops, those issues are going to be very significant."

Meanwhile, Kelly said she wants to see the SOAR initiative renewed in 2020 and will campaign for it.

But the League of Women Voters as a whole appears to be rethinking its position, said current president Pam Pecarich, a Salinas High School graduate who now lives in Ventura County.

"I think it's fair to say we've evolved in our understanding of the issues," Pecarich said. "I think what our league is realizing is we need to do something about housing, and SOAR doesn't address that."

Jim Johnson can be reached at 753-6753 or jjohnson@montereyherald.com.

Claudia Meléndez Salinas can be reached at 753-6755 or cmelendez@montereyherald.com.

Comparing counties:

Ventura County		Monterey County
Population: 817,000, making it the state's 11th most populous county		Population: 424,020, making it the state's 18th most populous county
Housing units: 266,554		Housing units: 137,533
Land area: 1,845 square miles		Land area: 3,322 square miles
Ten incorporated cities: Camarillo, Fillmore, Moorpark, Ojai, Oxnard, Port Hueneme, Santa Paula, Simi Valley, Thousand Oaks and San Buenaventura (Ventura), the county seat		Twelve incorporated cities: Carmel, Del Rey Oaks, Gonzales, Greenfield, King City, Marina, Monterey, Pacific Grove, Salinas, Sand City, Seaside, Soledad
2005 crop value: $1.2 billion		2005 crop value: $3.3 billion
Median household income: $59,379		Median household income: $46,971
Per capita income: $24,600		Per capita income: $20,165
2006 median home price: $695,000		2006 median home price: $675,000