BUSINESS

Report cites Ventura County as one of the nation's least affordable rental markets

Ventura

The average Ventura County renter may be forced to spend over half of their wages on rent in 2018, according to a report released by ATTOM Data Solutions, an Irvine-based real estate data company.

ATTOM Data Solutions’ 2018 Rental Affordability Report, which analyzes rental affordability by comparing average rental data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development with wage numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, included information on 447 counties across the country. Ventura County was listed as the 13th least affordable county in the nation in the report and the least affordable of all Southern California counties.

Ventura County residents who earn a weekly wage of $1,015 would be required to spend 59.7 percent of their income to rent the county’s average three-bedroom property, which costs $2,627, according to data cited in the report.

Although the statistics look troubling, they paint a scenario that may not be applicable to all county residents. For example, the data assumes that an individual would decide to rent a three-bedroom property, and does not factor in the possibilities of a renter having an additional source of income. Regardless, the data serves as a generalization of the state of the county’s rentals and cites Ventura County’s ongoing affordability issues.

A chief issue for Ventura County renters and homeowners is that wage growth is generally outpaced by the region’s high cost of living, according to Daren Blomquist, senior vice president at ATTOM Data Solutions. Blomquist noted that although the area’s affordability issues are not new, they are worsening to the point that they could be cause for economic concern in the near future.

“It is a long-term theme for Ventura County and coastal California, in general, to be unaffordable because they are highly desirable places to live with limited amounts of housing relative to demand,” Blomquist said. “We’ve been on this trajectory of housing costs going up and wages not keeping pace for about five years now, which is making a lot of folks nervous that this isn’t sustainable. It’s hard to know when that tipping point will hit, but we’re five years in and we’re starting to get into dangerous territory.”

Blomquist added that despite the generally higher cost of living in nearby regions such as Los Angeles and Orange counties, those areas have higher average wages that partially offset their affordability issues. Furthermore, residents in more expensive locations such as Los Angeles County may have been priced out of their housing and rental markets and instead choose to live in Ventura County and commute to their jobs, which would drive local housing and rental prices upward, Blomquist said.

Studies such as the one by ATTOM Data Solutions accurately describe Ventura County’s affordability issues, according to Dawn Dyer, president of the Dyer Sheehan Group, a Ventura-based housing market analyst and land-use consultancy.

The Dyer Sheehan Group publishes its own reports on Ventura County’s rental market. Its most recent report cited an average rental price — which encompassed studio, one-bedroom, two-bedroom and three-bedroom apartments throughout the county — of $1,893, which forced many residents to spend upward of half of their income on rent, Dyer said.

Local affordability issues are approaching a point where they will have a variety of significantly negative effects on the overall quality of life in Ventura County, Dyer said.

“Paying upward of 50 percent of your income isn’t sustainable because there’s no money for health care or other emergencies and if you make one misstep, you could become homeless,” Dyer said. “It also doesn’t allow you to spend money in the community by shopping or eating at restaurants. It does have a trickle-down effect.”

Despite Ventura County’s affordability issues, the ATTOM Data Solutions study noted that wages have recently risen faster than rental prices in the area. This may be due to a recent Department of Housing and Urban Development prediction that average rent prices would decrease by 2 percent throughout the nation, according to Blomquist.

On a national scale, Blomquist noted that rental affordability is increasingly becoming an issue across the nation.

“Even some of the middle American markets that are typically very affordable are starting to face this challenge,” Blomquist said. “There are some long-term effects if the housing wealth will be concentrated into the hands of fewer people. Affordability is a key market metric, and the worse it gets, the more we’d anticipate some kind of shift in the market.”

Dyer stressed that such shifts would include forcing middle-class households to move to the county’s more affordable cities or out of the area entirely, which would increase traffic or create other issues.

“More people might gravitate to locations like Santa Paula or Fillmore and commute to Camarillo or Thousand Oaks, which will make commuter traffic worse, since we already have a lot of people commuting in and out of the county to their jobs,” Dyer said. “It would also inevitably increase housing density, or the number of people per household. We’ve seen families double or triple up in housing designed for one family, which creates huge stresses on the system.”

Dyer advocated for pro-growth measures to combat Ventura County’s affordability issues, such as supporting developers who seek to build more apartment complexes in the region or allowing homeowners to construct granny flats — smaller dwellings that could be rented out — on their properties.