Neighbors’ Opposition to Development in El Rio Well-Grounded

Your article “Low-Income Housing Stirs Up El Rio,” July 18, provided a fairly well-balanced account of the pitched battle the citizens of El Rio are fighting against an out-of-town developer and our own Oxnard Planning Department.

Fighting affordable housing is like fighting the sanctity of motherhood. Nevertheless, the residents of El Rio and El Rio West are fighting an uphill battle to preserve our neighborhood against the specter of an affordable apartment project.

Our opposition is not based on racism, elitism or NIMBYism, as the developer has intimated. We are an ethnically mixed neighborhood of blue-collar workers.

Our objections are based on the extensive research we have done and center on [our position] that this is one of the worst locations in the city for a project of this nature.

The residents feel the project is an incompatible land use because of its location. Placing a residential development next to a state highway that carries a great deal of truck traffic (Vineyard Avenue) would subject the future residents to excessive levels of noise and air pollution, not to mention the obvious safety hazard to children.

Our research into the proposal has uncovered a number of problems that have not been adequately addressed by the city or the developer.

For example, both the Ventura County Flood Control Department and the local school district have serious misgivings about the project.

In addition, the proposal would place more than 200 children into a development with insufficient recreational facilities adjacent to a neighborhood that has none. The developer and the city’s solution to this problem is to contribute money toward a future park site at the Oxnard Town Center, a project that has been mired in lawsuits for the past decade.

These concerns led three of the planning commissioners to vote against the project.

It is particularly disheartening to have to defend our neighborhood against a developer who has no ties whatsoever to our community and did not even check with the residents before proposing this poorly designed project, which relies on our neighborhood to absorb its numerous density-related impacts.

The developer has been condescending to residents and has the audacity to call the citizens of our neighborhood “opponents.”

He has been aided and abetted by the Planning Department, who lacked nothing but pompoms at the recent Planning Commission hearing.

The residents of El Rio West have always supported the current commercial zoning on the site, which provides an effective buffer between the state highway and the existing residential neighborhood.

The current proposal doesn’t fit the site because it is too big, too dense and doesn’t adequately address the impacts it will have on parking, traffic, schools, recreational facilities and the historic flooding in the area.