Agoura looks to Dorothy Drive for housing




LIMITED—A tight housing market demands local government consider new venues for construction. RICHARD GILLARD/Acorn Newspapers

LIMITED—A tight housing market demands local government consider new venues for construction. RICHARD GILLARD/Acorn Newspapers

Agoura Hills, like all communities in the Conejo/Las Virgenes region, is in the midst of an affordable housing dilemma. Some might call it a crisis. With home prices and rents at record highs, cost-effective housing in the city and throughout the Conejo-Las Virgenes region is all but non-existent.

The state has required Agoura Hills to build 318 new homes over the next six years, more than half of which need to be affordably priced. But in a community that values its limited open space and pastoral mountain views, the question of where to build the new homes is difficult to answer.

The City Council met with a developer last month to discuss the possibility of building out an 8-acre parcel on the east end of Dorothy Drive that would help satisfy the state mandate.

“We are being required to build not just affordable housing but a lot of housing all throughout the city, and we have to find space for it.

“There are going to be situations where we have to look in places we’ve never looked before,” Councilmember Deborah Klein Lopez said.

One of those areas is Dorothy Drive.

“It’s difficult to look at a plot and try to determine if it’ll be a good place for housing. We can’t say no to every spot; otherwise, we have to build places we don’t want to, which is getting deeper and deeper into the high fire severity zone,” Klein Lopez said.

The question before the council is whether to rezone the Dorothy Drive parcel from commercial to residential use, which would put the proposed development through a thorough environmental review, or to adopt an overlay zone, a form of conditional rezoning that allows the city to demand more affordable units on the same parcel but with less control over the outcome of the development.

Developer Joe Oftelle joined the council in June for a prescreening review concerning the Dorothy location. The meeting was an opportunity for Oftelle to share his plan for development of the lot and for the council to voice concerns so the builder can refine the project before making his formal presentation.

Oftelle’s development would add 74 new townhomes to Agoura Hills. Five of those units would be priced for very-low-income families and three for low-income. Families must show proof of qualification.

Developers are amenable to building these types of units with the promise they’ll be able to recoup their investment on the below-market units and turn a profit on the project as a whole.

The cost for Oftelle’s 1,400-square-foot homes would be around $675,000 each. The homes would sell for a market value of $750,000. The verylow income units would sell for around $85,000, which is why from a business standpoint only a small percentage of them can be marketed at that rate.

Costlier 1,800-square-foot units would also be built.

“When you look at the moderate, the low- and the very-low-income units, (the losses) are pretty dramatic. These are a loss, and we expect that. We respect that and understand it,” Oftelle said at the council meeting.

“The reason I bring this up is that we had talked about it and it was discussed: ‘Can you add more affordable units?’ Frankly, we will meet the requirements. Any more than that and the project begins to not make sense (financially),” he said.

Oftelle said he would be in favor of rezoning the parcel for residential use, but would not be in favor of overlay zoning that would require him to build additional affordable units.

Adding to the complication: The Dorothy Drive parcel sits right next to the freeway.

“I question what are the sacrifices we’re demanding our residents make,” Councilmember Linda Northrup told The Acorn. “We’ll have an 18-foot wall . . . you’ll drive into the city and you’ll only have a view of this wall, and you’re going to invite people into Agoura Hills to live a stone’s throw from the freeway and say it’s not going to be substandard housing? I question it.

“I think at some level we have to look at sites and ask if it makes sense to build the very dense housing being demanded here in Agoura Hills, or do we need to decide there are resources we want to preserve? As a state I’d like us to take a look at the options,” Northrup said.

Follow Ian Bradley on Twitter @ian_ reports.