Support for Oxnard Fisherman’s Wharf development

Max Ghenis
Nov 6 · 18 min read

On Thursday, the Oxnard City Council will decide whether to approve a proposed development at Fisherman’s Wharf, which would include new restaurants, retail, park space, a boardwalk, and 390 apartment homes, at a currently-decrepit waterfront lot. Ventura County YIMBY has provided the below report to City Council and will speak in support of the project. If you agree that we need multifamily homes and walkable communities throughout Ventura County, please give public comment with us, email City Council, and/or join VC YIMBY as we fight for housing across the county!

Overview

Oxnard’s homelessness rose 64 percent last year. 18 percent of Californians are in poverty, the highest share of any state, and 25 percent of Oxnards are in poverty. Rents are rising. More people are housing-insecure, and more are forced into supercommutes. This in turn causes rising auto emissions, which are worsening our deadly air pollution and exacerbating fire risk.

Experts studying each of these issues agree that each can be traced back to a common problem: Not enough homes. California is short at least 3 million homes. We rank #50 in housing units per adult — Oxnard’s ratio is even lower — and it’s only getting worse.

Without enough homes, residents compete over the insufficient inventory, outbidding each other to bring up rents. The game of musical chairs increasingly doesn’t have enough chairs, and so those left out use the streets instead. People can’t afford to live near their jobs, so they instead move to fire-prone areas where we allow building, then create emissions and air pollution driving hours each day.

California’s housing shortage is a crisis, as is Oxnard’s. We need homes downtown, we need them by the Collection, and we need them at the harbor.

Fisherman’s Wharf provides Oxnard a unique opportunity to infuse walkable, mixed-use design into one of our most beautiful neighborhoods. Revitalizing it would bring sustainability, diversity, and vibrancy to the harbor, and we urge City Council to approve it.

This document describes the severity and impacts of the housing crisis — with peer-reviewed evidence wherever available — and also addresses concerns and provides polling around likely support among the full Oxnard population. We conclude with a recommendation to approve and consider improvements to the project to amplify its benefits.

The housing shortage

California

In 2016, the McKinsey Global Institute issued a report on California’s housing shortage, finding that, “to satisfy pent-up demand and meet the needs of a growing population, California needs to build 3.5 million homes by 2025.”

That report, which used data from 2014, also found that California ranked 49th out of 50 states in housing units per capita. Using 2018 data, this still holds (Utah is #50), and California ranks 50th in housing units per adult. Ventura County and Oxnard are below the California average.

US Census Bureau; calculations by Ventura County YIMBY

Other studies also estimate California’s housing shortage as ranging from 2.7 million to 4 million. This represents about half of the nationwide housing shortage, estimated by the National Low Income Housing Coalition in 2018 at 7 million homes.

After rising from 2014 to 2017, residential building permitting fell 20 percent in the first half of 2019.

LA Times

Oxnard

Oxnard added an average of 570 housing units per year from 2010 to 2018. We have consistently missed state housing production targets. Even new developments like Wagon Wheel don’t come close to meeting our share of Governor Newsom’s goal of adding 3.5 million homes by 2025.

The Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) assigned Oxnard a target of 8,482 homes through 2029 in their latest allocation methodology, nearly doubling our current run rate. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to meet that goal focusing only on areas like downtown. Rejecting this project doesn’t create apartments elsewhere in Oxnard; we need to say yes to this proposal as well as others.

US Census Bureau and Southern California Association of Governments; calculations by Ventura County YIMBY

Effects of the housing shortage

The effects of the housing shortage range from high rents and homelessness to climate change, pollution and fires, to segregation and economic mobility.

Housing costs

A 2016 report from the Obama White House describes the problem of high housing costs:

In just the last 10 years, the number of very low-income renters paying more than half their income for rent has increased by almost 2.5 million households, to 7.7 million nationwide, in part because barriers to housing development are limiting housing supply. Since 1960, the share of renters paying more than 30 percent of their income for rent has more than doubled from 24 percent to 49 percent. And over that time, real household income increased by 18 percent, but inflation adjusted rents rose by 64 percent.

The White House continued, citing three academic sources,

Barriers to housing development are exacerbating the housing affordability crisis, particularly in vibrant regions with high job growth and few rental vacancies.

Oxnard’s rental vacancy rate is 2.3 percent, less than half the national rate of 6.1 percent.

US Census Bureau; calculations by Ventura County YIMBY

RentCafe estimates that Oxnard rents have risen 5 percent per year since 2016, nearly double the national pace.

RentCafe; chart by Ventura County YIMBY

New housing development

Several studies also show that adding housing supply reduces rents.

A 2016 report from California’s Legislative Analyst Office (LAO) listed new private home development as a way to help low-income Californians afford housing. LAO found that “housing becomes less expensive as it ages,” that “places with more building saw slower growth in rents for poor households,” and that “building market-rate housing appears to reduce displacement.”

California Legislative Analyst
California Legislative Analyst
California Legislative Analyst

A 2019 study from the Upjohn Institute finds that:

new construction reduces demand and loosens the housing market in low- and middle-income areas, even in the short run.

Even if the Fisherman’s Wharf apartments aren’t immediately affordable to low-income renters, their construction will benefit low-income renters as they won’t have to compete with middle-income renters, who can instead choose the Wharf apartments.

A 2019 NYU study found that new housing development reduced rents in the immediate vicinity, even as it also attracted new restaurants. Specifically:

for every 10% increase in the housing stock, rents decrease 1% and sales prices also decrease within 500 feet…Opposing such development may exacerbate the housing affordability crisis and increase housing cost burdens for local renters.

A 2018 Northwestern study also found that:

on average and in the short-run — new construction lowers rents in gentrifying neighborhoods.

A 2017 analysis by the Sightline Institute compared several successful examples of achieving broad affordability by producing an abundant housing stock. It concludes:

Building plenty of housing is not just one way to affordability, it is the only way — the foundation on which other affordability solutions, measures against displacement, and programs for inclusion rest.

Economic costs

McKinsey estimated that:

California loses $140 billion per year in output or 6 percent of state GDP due to the housing shortage.

This would be $3,500 for every California resident, or $3 billion per year for the Oxnard-Thousand Oaks-Ventura metro, whose GDP is $50.8 billion as of 2017.

Economists from the University of Chicago and UC Berkeley estimated in 2015 that the US-wide effects of restrictions on housing supply total $1.6 trillion per year, or about $5,000 per person.

Poverty

The Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure has consistently listed California as the highest-poverty state. The latest data, from 2016–2018, shows that 18.2 percent of Californians are in poverty, 40 percent above the national average of 13.2 percent.

This impoverishment largely results from California’s high housing costs. California also has the largest gap between the poverty measures that do and do not consider housing costs.¹

Oxnard

The California Poverty Measure (CPM), a poverty measure created by Stanford and PPIC in a similar way to the Supplemental Poverty Measure, estimates that 17.8 percent of Californians are in poverty as of 2017. While Ventura County’s CPM poverty rate is 16.9 percent, the rate for Oxnard and Port Hueneme is 25.6 percent. This places Oxnard-Port Hueneme in the top quintile of California’s most impoverished local areas, and at about double the national poverty rate.

US Census Bureau, PPIC, and Stanford Center on Poverty & Inequality; calculations by Ventura County YIMBY

Oxnard’s high housing costs contribute to its high poverty rate. The CPM considers families in poverty if their total resources (income after taxes and transfers) is less than a poverty threshold, which is based on common expenditures, family size, and housing costs. The poverty threshold for a family of four that rents (which varies only with housing costs) for Oxnard-Port Hueneme is $34,263, while the overall California threshold is around $32,000. That is, meeting basic expenses in Oxnard requires more money than it does throughout the state, and this pushes more people into poverty.

PPIC and Stanford Center on Poverty & Inequality

Homelessness

Homelessness is rising across many counties in California, including Ventura County.

A 2018 Zillow-commissioned report found that “homelessness rises faster where rent exceeds a third of income.”

Zillow

A 2018 UCLA report came to the same conclusion that high housing costs are a major factor in predicting homelessness.

Oxnard

61 percent of renters in Oxnard pay over 30 percent of income on rent, the typical definition of housing insecurity. These shares have been roughly constant since 2010. The Zillow analysis suggests that these levels of rent burden have made — and continue to make — Oxnard at risk of increasing homelessness.

As we’d expect, homelessness has risen in our area: From 2018 to 2019, Ventura County added 28 percent more homeless people, adding to a 13 percent increase from 2017 to 2018. Following a decrease from 2015 to 2018, Oxnard’s homeless count rose 64 percent in the past year.

Ventura County 2019 Homeless Count; calculations by Ventura County YIMBY

The most visible types of homelessness can misrepresent the full situation. While 83 percent of Oxnard’s homeless population lack shelter, 15 percent are chronically homeless, 22 percent have a mental health problem, and 16 percent have a substance abuse problem. As these are likely correlated factors, only a minority of Oxnard’s homeless population have one of these issues.

Homeless people are, by in large, formerly-housed neighbors. Half of the homeless people in Ventura County have lived here for five years or more.

Some of our homeless neighbors absolutely need treatment and medical care, but many have simply been unable to pay rent. Reducing the cost of housing by allowing new construction can help keep people housed.

Commutes

The average one-way commute for the Oxnard-Thousand Oaks-Ventura metro is 27 minutes, higher than 87 percent of US metros.

One in 30 Oxnard workers commutes over 90 minutes each way. That rate of “supercommuters” is 14 percent higher than the national average.

Three of the top ten metros by supercommuter share are in California, and these shares are rising. While Oxnard’s share is roughly stable, it is high, and our city’s housing and employment decisions are felt beyond our borders.

San Jose Mercury News

UC Berkeley’s CoolClimate calculator shows that reducing vehicle miles traveled (VMT) is the second-most-important local policy Oxnard has at its disposal for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

UC Berkeley CoolClimate

Mixed-use, walkable developments like Fisherman’s Wharf reduce VMT by giving residents more business options in their neighborhood. The jobs created in the Wharf’s services and high-tech office buildings could even create opportunities for some to live in the same complex as their work.

Climate change

Passenger vehicles are the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions in California, representing 28 percent of our total.

Next10

Per-capita auto emissions in Oxnard-Thousand Oaks metro area have risen 13 percent since 1990, and much of that increase occurred since 2013.

New York Times
New York Times

Pollution

From 2016 to 2018, air pollution in California rose 15.4 percent, more than any other region in the country. Removing the effect of fires, it rose 12.5 percent, still more than any other region. This increase killed over 4,000 people (the equivalent of 21 Oxnard residents) and caused over $35 billion in damages.

Clay and Muller (2019); calculations by Ventura County YIMBY

Auto emissions have increased 45 percent since 1990, and given the correlation between auto emissions and pollution, Oxnard’s pollution has likely increased at least as much as California’s.

A growing academic literature has identified air pollution as a cause of many public health and social problems, from low birth weight to depression to baldness to childhood stunting to dementia to crime. Reducing pollution would cut health expenses, improve the economy, and save lives, especially of children.

Driving is also polluting our oceans, as tires are the biggest source of microplastics in California’s coastal waters.

Further, noise pollution created by vehicle traffic causes health problems like cardiovascular disease.

Fires

Without housing options nearer job centers, workers increasingly have to live farther from their work. Beyond long commutes, this also forces people to live in fire-prone areas with poor electrical infrastructure. Coupled with houses themselves becoming fuel for wildfires and the increased risk of wildfires caused by higher commuting emissions, and sprawl emerges as a major source of fire risk.

Oxnard is among the safest cities for fires in California: While Cal Fire places 100 percent of housing units in Malibu and Bell Canyon in Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones, it places zero Oxnard housing units in such a zone.

Allowing more people to live here will mean fewer people forced into danger.

Diversity

Oxnard is a segregated city. Compared to the rest of the city, residents of the 93035 ZIP code where Fisherman’s Wharf is located are five times as likely to be non-Hispanic/Latino white, twice as likely to be age 65 or older, 50 percent more likely to have household incomes of $100,000 or more, and 20 percent more likely to be homeowners.

US Census Bureau; calculations by Ventura County YIMBY

Schools

Oxnard’s schools are also heavily segregated. These outcomes result from adherence to historical housing inequities, especially the prohibition of apartment construction in wealthy white neighborhoods used to keep minorities out (see Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law).

Using state education data, we calculated that Hollywood Beach Elementary, the closest elementary school to Fisherman’s Wharf, is 45 percent white. Only one other elementary school in Oxnard is more than 10 percent white: Christa McAuliffe (11 percent), the other elementary school near the Wharf.

The VC Star reported in 2017 that schools remain segregated throughout Ventura County.

Oxnard resident and UCLA professor David G. Garcia, in his book Strategies of Segregation, identified four strategies white people historically used to segregate Hispanic children in Oxnard. One was “Building a permanent link between residential and school segregation.”

Garcia finds that a neighborhood with white residents is now a historic district. Laws preserving such historic districts, and single-family-only zoning laws, are more widely used in white areas. The Local Coastal Plan restricting residential development at Fisherman’s Wharf is another such policy.

Concerns

Traffic and parking

Many opponents of the Wharf revitalization claim to be concerned about traffic. However, many of these same opponents also want the Wharf developed into a zero-residential tourist attraction. This would likely add more traffic than a mixed-use building, since tourists would drive in and out of the destination.

Further, many of these opponents are simultaneously concerned about traffic and parking for residents. UCLA urban planning professor Donald Shoup notes (emphasis ours):

A flood of recent research has shown that parking requirements poison our cities, increasing traffic congestion, polluting the air, encouraging sprawl, raising housing costs, degrading urban design, preventing walkability, damaging the economy, and penalizing everyone who cannot afford a car…

Planners typically assume that every new resident will come with a car, so they require developers to provide enough off-street parking to house all the cars. Ample free parking then ensures that most residents do want a car. Parking requirements thus result from a self-fulfilling prophecy…several cities — including Buffalo, Hartford, Minneapolis, and San Francisco — have removed all their parking requirements, and many others have removed requirements in their downtowns.

Free parking produces traffic. Oxnard should follow the advice of both Shoup and President Obama by joining other cities in repealing parking requirements. Until then, we should allow this development to proceed with its already-excessive 974 parking spaces. Devoting any more land to parking will make the apartments and services there more expensive, impose other unnecessary costs, and ignore the technological changes in mobility like Uber and autonomous vehicles (already on the road in Phoenix), which will reduce or remove the need for parking over time.

Motor vehicle deaths

Low-density development is accompanied by longer drives, which encourages cities to set high speed limits. Main arteries in Oxnard, such as Victoria Avenue, have speed limits of up to 55 miles per hour, even in areas with pedestrian and bicycle traffic.

Higher speed limits make roads more dangerous:

researchers from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found that for every 5 mph increase in a highway’s speed limit, roadway fatalities rose 8.5 percent.

Over the past 25 years, the report finds, higher speed limits caused 36,760 deaths.

Motor vehicles are a top cause of death across age groups, especially children. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that, in 2017, unintentional injuries were the top cause of death for all age groups from age 1 to 44, and motor vehicles were the top cause of unintentional-injury death among the age groups 5 to 9, 10 to 14, and 15 to 24.

US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Recent motor vehicle fatalities include:

Infill mixed-use development like Fisherman’s Wharf will make more excursions walkable, cutting down on the epidemic of vehicle fatalities.

Displacement

In addition to the studies listed above showing that new housing development reduces housing costs in the vicinity, other studies question whether new construction causes displacement, and conclude that it does not.

One example is a 2018 paper from San Francisco’s Planning Department that identified a negative correlation between housing production and legal evictions in San Francisco’s heavily-Latino Mission district.

A related concern is that new high-end housing developments create “induced demand,” in which they attract high income residents and make the neighborhood less affordable. While the 2019 NYU study found some evidence of this in the form of more restaurants, they found that the effect of additional housing supply was greater, so rents fell overall. Another 2019 study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that condominium development, rather than generating high-income demand, followed high-income demand.

Public comments compared to polls

Polls and studies of public comments indicate that public comments provide a negatively skewed representation of sentiment toward housing. Californians support housing in their communities, and demographics suggest that Oxnard’s residents are especially likely to support housing.

Demographics of public commenters

Public commenters are unrepresentative of the public.

A study of Boston land use meetings compared public commenters to the registered voter base. Commenters were, on average, eight years older than registered voters, and half as likely to rent their homes. Commenters were also four times as likely to oppose housing projects than to support it.

The researchers also found that “Latinx people…compose 8 percent of voters but only 1 percent of commenters.”

Among commenters, “White residents and homeowners were substantially more likely to oppose the construction of new housing.” Democrats were 50 percent more likely to support projects than Republicans.

Polls of Californians on housing

Polls reveal that Californians support building more housing nearly two to one.

A May 2019 LRP poll on behalf of California YIMBY found that 61 percent of Californians support, and 38 percent strongly support, having more housing built in their community. Renters, Democrats, Black, and Latinx Californians are particularly supportive, and feel more intensely about their support.

LRP and California YIMBY

A May 2019 PPIC poll also found broad support for housing. 62 percent of Californians favored legalizing apartments near transit and jobs, including 72 percent of renters and 74 percent of Democrats. Similar shares supported tying transportation funds to new housing, and the Los Angeles region was similarly supportive to California overall.

When asked in a September 2019 PPIC poll what “the most important issue facing people in California today” is, 11 percent of Californians identified housing costs and availability, and 15 percent identified homelessness.

Oxnard’s demographic predictors of housing sentiment

Oxnard demographics are weighted toward groups shown to especially favor housing in their community.

Data from the 2018 American Community Survey and the California Secretary of State show that Oxnard residents, compared to California residents, are disproportionately Hispanic, renters, and registered Democrats. These three factors correlate to higher support for housing, suggesting that large majorities of Oxnard residents likely favor new housing.

US Census Bureau and California Secretary of State; calculations by Ventura County YIMBY. Oxnard party registration data is for Ventura County supervisorial district 5.

Recommendation

We wholeheartedly support the Fisherman’s Wharf revitalization. Oxnard needs more homes throughout the city. Plans to build out downtown are necessary but not sufficient — the consequences of the housing shortage are many and they are severe, and we cannot afford to leave opportunities like these on the table. That this project would bring mixed-use development to this vehicle-centric neighborhood further amplifies its benefits for combating climate change and pollution.

We have listed academic research showing that infill development like this can improve the economy, reduce poverty and homelessness, cut emissions, purify our air, reduce fire risk, and integrate our city. This is just a fraction of the research on these areas; the expert consensus is clear that adding mixed-use multifamily housing is a boon for society. Beyond these claims, for example, studies show that growing up in walkable neighborhoods engenders in low-income children a stronger connection to their community and enables them to earn more later in life. It’s not just good for children: Americans as a whole are more trusting, less isolated, and more satisfied with their communities when they live in amenity-rich neighborhoods. In addition to the direct fiscal benefits of approving this project, research from multiple sources also shows that more compact development makes public service provision less costly.

We do not believe the concerns around traffic and parking are valid, and if anything we would prefer to see fewer parking spaces and more homes, as earlier proposals included. We request that pedestrian and bicycle safety be prioritized in considering this project, as well as opportunities to expand public transit. The development as envisioned would be a boon to the community and to the region, but there are always ways to improve.

Thank you for your consideration.

Ventura County YIMBY


Appendix

About Ventura County YIMBY

Ventura County YIMBY (“Yes In My Back Yard”) is a grassroots organization working to end the housing crisis in California and Ventura County. We work with California YIMBY and other housing groups to promote state and local legislation, support pro-housing politicians, and engage in project-by-project advocacy (like this). Our goal is to make California more affordable, inclusive, and sustainable by getting more homes built.

Streamlining and by-right development

By-right development processes approve projects that comply with zoning standards, without a discretionary review process. Discretionary reviews are a common way for public commenters to exert influence, often against the will of the broader community.

President Obama’s number-one recommendation for promoting healthy housing markets was to “Establish by-right development.” His number-three recommendation was to “Streamline or shorten permitting processes and timelines,” citing successes in Austin, San Diego, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts.

In supporting 2016 legislation from Governor Brown, UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation described successes of other states adopting by-right development to produce more affordable housing.

A by-right development process could have expedited projects like Fisherman’s Wharf.

Inclusionary zoning

Oxnard’s inclusionary zoning (IZ) ordinance demands that projects with at least 10 units reserve:

  1. At least 10 percent of units for low income households, who would pay as rent no more than “80 percent of the Area Median Income for the Ventura County Metropolitan Statistical Area, adjusted for family size appropriate for the unit in question;” and
  2. At least 5 percent of units for very low income households, who would pay as rent no more than 50 percent of Area Median Income

Demand for IZ homes often outstrips supply by considerable margins, so they end up being allocated by lottery. This can create years- or decades-long waitlists.

The Wharf project is not subject to the IZ ordinance, since it is not on city land. This has been raised as a concern by some opponents.

IZ can provide opportunity to its beneficiaries, but it is effectively a tax on new multifamily development, and research suggests it has costs:

  • A Mercatus Center study of the Baltimore-Washington area found that “inclusionary zoning makes housing less affordable for those not lucky enough to get a subsidized unit.”
  • Housing proposals, including low-income proposals, fell after San Francisco instituted a 25 percent IZ rule.
  • A calculator built by Up For Growth estimated that a 10% IZ in Seattle raises market rents by 5 percent and reduces the probability of the project being built by 32 percentage points.

School diversity index

Ed-Data reports that Oxnard has become less ethnically diverse since 2013. This has accompanied its rising rents and failure to meet housing production goals.

Ed-Data

Footnotes

[1] This is the gap between the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) and the Official Poverty Measure (OPM). The primary differences between SPM and OPM are that SPM accounts for taxes, transfers, and local cost of living. The most important of these for comparing geographies is cost of living, i.e. housing, especially in California where taxes and transfers are relatively progressive.

Ventura County YIMBY

We’re saying “yes” to housing in Ventura County. vcyimby.org

Max Ghenis

Written by

Data scientist, economic policy nerd, basic income advocate, YIMBY

Ventura County YIMBY

We’re saying “yes” to housing in Ventura County. vcyimby.org

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