Keeping Development and Farming Separate : Housing tracts, agriculture don’t make good neighbors

The Ventura City Council did the right thing when it approved building 198 homes on a 42-acre lemon orchard at the corner of Kimball and Telegraph roads.

But a mere seven miles away, Oxnard’s plan to replace cropland with houses is exactly the wrong thing to do.

What’s the difference?

As they say in real estate: location, location, location.

The Oxnard proposal involves 815 acres of farmland between Rice and Rose avenues, stretching from 5th Street south to Pacific Coast Highway. Aside from its sheer size, the fact that it is surrounded mostly by other cropland on the fertile Oxnard Plain makes it precisely the sort of isolated place where farmers can take care of business without infringing on the rights of neighbors.

And this is where the city envisions adding more than 3,000 new homes.

Here in the season when the annual fumigation of strawberry fields has touched off the annual furor over fumes drifting into nearby neighborhoods, keeping urban areas urban and rural areas rural makes more sense than ever.

That’s one reason why the Ventura County Farm Bureau last week officially joined environmentalists and other more traditional foes in opposing this project. Adding to that irony: Among the developments proposed to replace all this farmland is something called Pacific Ag Expo, a theme park celebrating . . . farming.

In contrast, the Ventura project is a relatively small parcel surrounded by existing residential neighborhoods. It’s exactly the sort of “in-fill” development that helps erase conflicts between the needs of farmers to make a mess and the rights of residents to breathe easy.

Many of the people who live around this particular orchard will hate to see it go. Opposition to this project begat a year of negotiations in which the developer--Beazer Homes of Orange County--scaled down its plans from 228 homes to 198, improved the design, upgraded the landscaping and agreed to widen Telegraph Road and to chip in an extra 30% to help local schools accommodate the children the new homes will bring.

And still some neighbors don’t like it.

It would be easy to say we already have plenty of development in Ventura County. Most people who move here are attracted by the relatively small population and large green spaces. And more than a few would love to be the last person ever allowed to move in.

But that’s not the way the world works.

Fast or slow, Ventura County’s population will continue to grow. Quality development in sensible urban locations should be allowed, even encouraged. Any sort of development that breaks up a large swath of the world’s most productive farmland should be considered only with extreme caution.