Red-tiled and earth-toned, Camarillo is a sea of shopping centers, parking lots and walled-off subdivisions by a busy freeway--a prototypical Southern California suburb.
So it's a surprise that California's busiest builder of high-density housing in blighted urban areas is applying his principles there.
In that young, affluent community of 58,000 on the edge of the Ventura County farm belt, Stephen Olson's fast-growing firm is planning construction of 24 three-story townhouses on half an acre downtown. In a mixed-use fashion increasingly popular in the state's aging city cores, owners will work out of first-floor offices and live in the rooms above. A Metrolink train station connecting them to Los Angeles is a short walk away.
Such "in-fill" development is in these days, even in semirural Ventura County, where anti-sprawl laws are forcing cities to look inward for growth opportunities.
The same thing is happening in big cities and smaller suburbs from San Francisco to San Diego. Converging trends are forcing public officials and home builders to embrace "smart growth" principles that place homes near jobs by making better use of abandoned, odd-shaped or marginal lands already within city boundaries.
Responding to clogged freeways, limits on usable land and a need for affordable housing, city redevelopment agencies have begun pairing with some of the state's largest suburban home builders to construct more dwellings on less land than ever before.
"What we're trying to do is match jobs, transportation and housing, so we have smart living," said Olson, whose 14-year-old Seal Beach company helped pioneer such public-private collaborations.
"We made a correct assumption that downtown living was going to grow, and that state mandates for affordable housing would eventually get legs and teeth," said Olson, whose company has 71 projects and 4,500 units in the development pipeline.
State law requires city redevelopment agencies to spend 20% of tax revenues on affordable housing. So the agencies try to sell less desirable land to developers at cut rates.
Now, however, in a trend that models the successes of East Coast cities, and of San Francisco, Portland and Seattle in the West, lofts and townhomes built on those parcels are increasingly popular. But sometimes not so affordable.
Often they are snapped up by young white-collar professionals weary of freeway commutes, and 50-something baby boomers with grown kids who are trading tract-home routines for the bustle and sophistication of reviving downtowns in cities such as Pasadena and Long Beach.
Tight clusters of fashionable apartments and condos are also springing up along new subway, light-rail and commuter train lines that resurrect a portion of the Los Angeles Basin's efficient Red Line trolley system abandoned half a century ago.
Even in the most tattered sections of Los Angeles, a few new projects are taking root as lower- and middle-class families search for a home they can afford.
"If it has warts and hair, we're there," Olson said. "We build in areas that are challenged."
Although the Olson Co. was among the first to fill the in-fill niche, such smaller specialty firms now often compete with big companies.
They all recognize the opportunities in a new cityscape that shuns the car and values urban living as much as suburban retreats.
"The notion of always expanding ... beyond the urban fringe is something that is not as viable as it once was," said Stuart Gabriel, Director of the Lusk Center for Real Estate at USC. "Housing is coming back to the jobs. And this is occurring in part because of very significant commute costs in time and money."
Traditional home builders are eager to catch the crest of the new trend, said John Stanek of Western Pacific Housing, who is also a top officer with the Building Industry Assn. in the Los Angeles region.
"We're all trying to find properties where we can work with local redevelopment agencies," Stanek said. "It's something everybody is fighting to do."
Stanek's company is cutting deals with Westminster and Buena Park in Orange County and hustling a piece of Redondo Beach's large new Heart of the City project on 17 acres near the marina.
"As a developer who commutes regularly in Los Angeles and Ventura counties, I know it's vital that we provide more housing closer to the job centers," Stanek said. "And I believe we'll see people moving back to the city, just as it happened on the East Coast. Some people will have two homes--a condo or apartment in the city and home in the suburbs.
"Olson was the first to focus on this," Stanek said, "but the rest of us are playing catch-up."
Long Beach is the beneficiary.
When that port city requested bids from developers to build 300 townhomes on The Promenade in its rejuvenated downtown last year, four large suburban builders responded along with the Olson Co.
Olson, Lyon Realty and Greystone got the contracts, said Barbara Kaiser, redevelopment bureau manager. They will build three- and four-level homes, some with shops below, that will probably sell for between $200,000 and $300,000.
They are at the end of the Blue Line light rail system to Los Angeles, which recently added a third car to handle an overflow of riders during rush hours.
"We have about 3,000 units on the drawing board," said Kaiser of Long Beach, which was in deep economic doldrums before recovering last decade.
Many of those new units will be in oceanfront towers. The tougher sells are inland 10 or 20 blocks, where the Olson Co. recently built 40 single-family homes and a day-care center in a project honored as the best of its kind for 2002 by the California Redevelopment Assn.
Those Craftsman-style homes, in one of the city's most blighted areas, sold out in six months for $170,000 to $200,000. Built on small lots, they have front porches, river rock on the facades and separate garages.
Many recent in-fill efforts are marked by stylish designs intended to dress up aging communities with artists' lofts, mixed-use storefronts and small-lot houses linked to downtown businesses.
In Santa Ana, where severe crowding stopped approval of high-density development in 1987, the city broke ground last week on an Olson project composed of 86 artists' lofts on three acres in three designs in the downtown Artists Village.
"They were the only ones who came to us when we were looking for someone to build these lofts," said Larry Yenglin, redevelopment project manager. "They were excited about our idea to do them in different designs. They hired good architects, too. They're looking at these as models so they can expand this type of opportunity in other cities."
Indeed, Olson, a 60-year-old Long Beach resident, has been in the forefront of in-fill models since the former Dean Witter & Co. manager founded his company in 1988.
His 110-employee firm is active in two dozen cities. It completed 520 dwellings worth $187 million last year, expects to sell as many homes this year and will start more than 1,000 units next year, Olson said.
Despite increased competition, Olson says his company can continue to grow and prosper by staying with its in-fill specialties.
"That's where the future is in California," he said. "I think we can have a sustainable business of $500 million annually in this state indefinitely."
There is plenty of room for competition.
State studies have found that California's housing shortage becomes more critical every year as new construction falls at least 75,000 dwellings short of demand from population growth.
And Olson notes that another 35,000 dwellings become so deteriorated each year they are virtually uninhabitable.
City redevelopment officials say they are looking for housing help wherever they can find it.
So far, much of the work has occurred in the center of cities that haven't fallen very far, or are on the rebound.
Among Olson's projects, for example, are 232 units in bustling downtown San Diego, 110 condos next to Burbank City Hall, 48 townhomes in the Playhouse District of Pasadena, 277 homes on the Gilbert Street revival in Fullerton and large projects at commuter train stations in Richmond and Hayward in the Bay Area.
Sue Georgino, community development director in Burbank, worked with Olson while she was redevelopment chief in Brea, when that city was reconstructing its downtown.
Olson built dozens of homes linked by a walkway with Brea's community center.
"I've worked with them over the last six years," Georgino said. "And I've always been impressed by how open they are to agency suggestions and community desires. They actually become part of the community."
The same development forces that are pulling residents back to attractive old downtowns are at work in Los Angeles, albeit at a slower pace.
Don Spivack, deputy administrator of the Los Angeles redevelopment agency, said the nation's second-largest city had foundered with downtown renewal but is beginning to gain momentum, thanks partly to the region's new rail system.
About 3,400 dwellings are completed, under construction or planned near subway stations in the downtown, Hollywood and North Hollywood, he said. And more are on the drawing board along light-rail lines to Long Beach and Pasadena.
"People are becoming more and more disenchanted with long commutes, and more people work at home," he said.
"That's leading to an interesting phenomenon in Los Angeles with the conversion of long-vacant office buildings into loft-style housing."
About 2,300 such units are completed or in the works in the central city, and young professionals are flocking to them, he said. Planned development near Staples Center will only speed up that trend.
"It's a brand new thing in Los Angeles," Spivack said. "But I think it's going to be a lasting change."
Los Angeles architect Tom Gilmore, a downtown developer who is transforming old office buildings into hundreds of lofts, said big developers are increasingly interested in downtown for properties.
"It's beginning to tell the end of sprawl as we know it," Gilmore said.
Even Olson, who has worked mostly with smaller cities, said Los Angeles is the promise of the future, especially its rail corridors. He is building a 100-condo piece of a planned 800-unit community near the North Hollywood subway stop.
"In Los Angeles, it's not as easy to go to one central authority and get things done," he said. "But it's an underserved market. And we're focused there now."