High Density: High Profits for Mr. Gorian, Tax Woes for the County (Page 1)
Reasonable men may differ. That anonymous quote probably does not refer to people speaking in the defense of their homes or individuals in pursuit of return on their investment.
On Tuesday, July 20, 2004, I sat in the Ventura County Board of Supervisor’s chambers and listened to more than 300 of my friends and neighbors talk of their homes and of their community in often emotional tones. I also listened to Mr. Gorian, the developer, as he presented his case to change the zoning in the Santa Susana Knolls area of Ventura County so that he can build a 250 unit apartment complex in an unincorporated area of the county.
The developer had at least 20 minutes to make his case. Each of the residents opposing the project who spoke had 2 minutes—hardly enough time to be reasonable, but just enough time to be emotional. The Supervisors endured it all and in the end approved in a 3 to 2 decision the prescreening motion to allow the developer to proceed with his application but with certain restrictions. The restrictions could kill the whole project for the developer, but in my experience if the developer gets this kind of quasi-approval it usually means there will bulldozers breaking ground within the next 12 months.
How did we get to this point? Weren’t the emotional appeals of my neighbors not moving enough? Was that PowerPoint presentation of Mr. Gorian’s that convincing?
None of these questions is pertinent because no-one in that chamber that day was speaking the same language. While my neighbors talked about their homes, the Supervisors (technically 3 of them) were thinking about the “housing shortage” and the developer talked about “in-fill project” and “workforce housing” and “low income housing”.
The real subject, the real contention here, is how the zoning laws of this county work and who of the 3 parties in that chamber would get to define them.
If you were to look at a zoning map of any community in Ventura County you would notice bold lines outlining and defining areas in the county. They carry labels like R-E-1AC and RE-10AC and C-1 and R-1 and dozens more. To the vast majority of the citizens of this county, including myself, they are meaningless labels. What is important to realize, however, is that these labels are an urban planner’s shorthand to express the relative population density of an area and what kind of activity that area will be used for. That population density is expressed as the rather cold term of Dwelling Units per Acre, or DU/A.
Let me illustrate what a DU/A is. A typical WalMart store sits on approximately 2.5 acres of land. The typical residential neighborhood built through the early nineties would have a density of 6.5 dwelling units per acre. This means that in the area typically occupied by a Walmart store one could put 17 homes. To me that seems pretty dense, but imagine a density ratio of 200 dwelling units per acre and you would be imagining The Wilshire corridor in LA near UCLA with its multi-story apartment and condo buildings. Conversely a small residence in the middle of large open space like a farm would have less than 1 dwelling unit per acre.
Perhaps you have noted in these examples that density usually confers value on the land. In certain Arizona areas one can buy hundreds of acres for $40/acre. In New York city one can buy a few square feet for hundreds of thousands of dollars. The conclusion one must draw is that land with very little density on it is much cheaper than land with lots of density on it. One can infer from this that if you can buy cheap low density land, then “dense-it-up,” you could make an enormous profit.
