patrick.net

Curious what patnet thinks of this law that we have in Ventura County, as well every city in the county. It goes up for a vote every 20 years or so and always passes overwhelmingly in each city and at the county (unincorporated land) level. Basically states that any development on Ag land is required to go to a vote, which always get voted down, so no developer even bothers with that. The county is mostly agriculture, any new developments happen in remaining empty lots or by tearing down existing commercial buildings. It's kept prices very high and a lot of the area has people who have owned their homes since the 60's, 70's and 80's. Half of my neighbors bought their homes for $40-50k. The architect for the tract is my neighbor lol.

Admittedly, I'm a bit of a NIMBY in this case and believe in in-filling existing lots first instead of using Ag land, without this law, no doubt it would turn into a shithole like the San Fernando Valley and I wouldn't want to live here. Not that I'm a staunch supporter of some industrial ag, we grow fucking Sod (grass) here, in the middle of a goddamn drought. On the flip side, without new housing, the 800,000+ residents here lack a strong economy with high paying jobs, so people commute to LA county and traffic is becoming a major issue on the 101 which is the main artery and there is zero public transportation.

There is also a patch work of local roads that do no connect as originally intended, lots of dead ends into ag land where connectors would have gone, so traffic in some of the cities snake around existing streets leading to traffic, more air/noise pollution, longer travel times for emergency services – kind of feels like a half built city sometimes.

We also had the Thomas Fire destroy 500+ homes in the hills here and many people affected are just listing their ocean view lots for 500-800k because they were so under-insured for rebuilding on a hillside with all the engineering and permitting involved. This will also change the character of the city with a boat load of new $1-2M+ luxury homes being constructed up there.

http://www.soarvc.org