Smart Growth in Action, Part II: Case Studies in Housing Capacity and Development from Ventura County, California

This report is the second portion of a two-part study that attempts to help fill this void by examining the implementation of growth management techniques in Ventura County, California, a county of some 800,000 residents about 40 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles and adjacent to Los Angeles County.
The first phase of this study was a quantitative analysis of residential development approvals in the county between 1996 and 2001. This second phase is a “case study” analysis examining six different residential development approvals in more detail.
We found that, despite the passage of Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources (SOAR) growth management initiatives, most cities in Ventura County had not amended their plans or their project approval processes to allow greater density within the boundaries of their municipalities. Quite the contrary, projects being approved in the cities were likely to have lower densities than the applicable general plans theoretically allowed. By failing to amend their plans or practices, cities were tacitly refusing to take any growth shunted from the SOAR-protected areas, in essence setting the stage for a crisis in housing supply to occur before SOAR’s sunset date in 2020 and an exacerbated housing price escalation in the meantime.

Geoffrey Segal, William Fulton, Susan Weaver and Lily Okamura

Reason Foundation

May 1, 2003

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