Ventura County OKs Oak Park Expansion

The Ventura County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously Tuesday to accept a developer’s request to increase the number of housing units in Oak Park, an unincorporated, planned community just north of Agoura Hills.

After two years of discussions among the developer, Metropolitan Development Corp. of Beverly Hills, school and park officials and a homeowners group, the action was the first comprehensive revision of Oak Park’s development guidelines since the supervisors approved the project in 1974.

The revision will permit the construction of 594 more housing units, eventually bringing the project’s size to 5,303 houses and apartments. It will also cut the number of acres set aside for schools and parkland.

County planning staff members said 1,726 units have been built or are under construction on the once brush-covered hillsides.

The plan was designed to end what some homeowners worried was a piecemeal approach to the building of Oak Park, as Metropolitan periodically sold land to other developers who sought their own modifications of the area’s development plan.

Consumer preferences for houses with larger lots caused Metropolitan to cut the development’s originally projected size from 7,391 housing units, and that reduction made possible a cut in school land and parkland, said Nick Pappas, vice president for Metropolitan’s parent company, First City Properties.