In a good month, Chepe and his wife made just enough as farmworkers to cover the $2,400 rent on their two-bedroom apartment in Oxnard, California. But they still had other expenses, including groceries and occasional child care for their four children. So Chepe’s tight-knit community of farmworkers often borrowed money from each other, in an endless cycle of IOUs.
But finally, two years ago, the family moved to Las Vegas, where rent was more affordable: A similarly sized apartment cost half of what they paid in Oxnard. Chepe missed the community he’d built during his years in Ventura County, he said, but given the ever-
increasing rent and fluctuating work hours and pay, “we couldn’t afford to pay that amount.”
The impossible math Chepe faced in Ventura County isn’t new. Throughout the two decades he lived there, farmworker advocates warned about the region’s increasing housing prices and scarce affordable housing, concerned about how that would affect the county’s now $2 billion-a-year agricultural economy.
Ventura County has some of the nation’s strictest protections for open space and agricultural land, but it’s also considered one of the country’s least affordable housing markets. And farmworkers are especially impacted by the high housing costs, often forced to live in unaffordable, overcrowded and substandard conditions. Now, however, the county is experiencing a small boom in affordable farmworker-housing development, spurred by a 2016 exemption to a slow-growth initiative first passed in the 1990s.
The exemption, which sought to juggle farmland protection with the need for affordable housing, made it easier to build farmworker housing on agricultural land. For years, the region has grappled with the question of how a community that prides itself on preserving agricultural lands could also improve its farmworkers’ housing. And with the Trump administration’s ICE raids increasingly impacting the financial situation of undocumented farmworkers, stable housing is more important than ever, both for the workers and the industry that relies on them.
Ventura County has some of the nation’s strictest protections for open space and agricultural land, but it’s also considered one of the country’s least affordable housing markets.
IN A COUNTY where the average monthly rent now exceeds $2,500, Somis Ranch, a 360-unit affordable housing development for farmworkers, has advertised one-bedroom apartments for $1,350, and a three-bedroom for $2,000. More than 200 units are currently leased. The project, located on a parcel of land zoned for agriculture in an unincorporated area, is the largest farmworker-housing project of its kind in the county’s history.
In the past six years, California’s long-running farmworker-housing grant program has awarded more than $400 million in funding for more than 4,000 units. The state is also expanding similar efforts: Last fall, Gov. Gavin Newsom, D, signed a law that could allow larger farmworker housing developments in Santa Cruz and Santa Clara counties, and another that could create more permanent housing for migrant farmworkers, some of it on excess state land. And California recently commissioned the first-ever statewide assessment of farmworkers’ housing needs, with a report due next year.
Somis Ranch is located right along the line where suburbia gives way to farmland. Thirty multistory, Spanish-style buildings abut active farm fields on one side and the city of Camarillo on the other, positioning residents near agriculture, a public library and a high school.
In recent years, local farmworkers have reported annual median incomes well below $25,000, making the average monthly take-home pay often below $2,000 — more than $500 short of the region’s average rent.Many farmworkers find themselves forced to double and even triple up in places meant for one family. More than 70% of the farmworkers surveyed live in overcrowded housing.
V., who has worked in the county’s berry industry for over 20 years, splits her four-
bedroom home with two other families, a total of 10 people. V. and her husband, also a farmworker, pay $1,800 a month for two bedrooms, one for them and one for their two daughters.
“There are places where more people are living in a house, where they’re sharing everything because there isn’t enough money to pay for a place as just one person,” said V. “Paying less than what I’m paying would be very difficult,” she added, especially with a family.
S., another longtime farmworker in Ventura County, also triples up in a two-
bedroom unit in Oxnard that costs $2,900 a month. He lives with his wife and five kids, plus two of his brothers. For his family to live on their own, he and his wife would have to work 16 hours a day.
And options are limited: In a region that’s home to around 36,000 farmworkers, fewer than 2,000 affordable units have been built or planned over the past two decades. The nearly 700 units in Somis Ranch and a second project, Ventura Ranch, amount to around one-third of this figure. Both were developed by AMCAL, a company focused on market-rate, affordable, student and workforce multi-family housing projects in California, Texas and Washington.
V. has not considered existing affordable housing options; many developments exclude farmworkers who lack permanent legal status. Most federally funded rental and housing assistance programs exclude undocumented people. “I’ve seen that many houses are being built for farmworkers, but for us working in the fields, there’s no opportunity to get that housing because of our immigration status,” V. said.
Though it’s hard to get an accurate number, most sources estimate that well over half of the farmworkers in Ventura County are undocumented, leaving them ineligible for much of the region’s affordable housing. Somis Ranch, meanwhile, is open to farmworkers regardless of immigration status.
“There are places where more people are living in a house, where they’re sharing everything because there isn’t enough money to pay for a place as just one person.”
In recent months, the Trump administration’s mass immigration raids and deportations have only added to the urgent need to create safe and affordable housing for the county’s thousands of undocumented farmworkers. More than 620 people were arrested along California’s Central Coast between mid-January and late July, according to local immigrant advocates. Over 300 of them were detained in one day at the chaotic raids of two cannabis farms that resulted in the death of Jaime Alanís Garcia.
The raids have further increased the farmworkers’ financial insecurity. Many are afraid to report to work, and families have lost income when working family members are detained. Local nonprofits are experiencing “unprecedented demand” for help, according to the Ventura County Community Foundation, which recently launched an emergency fund to support organizations providing food, rental assistance and other necessities.
A place like Somis Ranch can be “transformational” for farmworkers, said Lucas Zucker, co-executive director at the Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy. “When you’re living in the living room of an apartment or in somebody’s garage with your kids and your partner, to be able to have an apartment of your own that’s subsidized rate and affordable — that’s actually quality family-style and has good amenities and is brand-new — is like a dream.”
However, he added, such housing units are also “basically impossible to find on the free private market.”
LESS THAN A DECADE ago, building nearly 400 apartments on agricultural land in Ventura County also would have been almost impossible.
In the 1990s, environmental advocates worried about sprawl in Ventura County passed “Save Open-Space and Agricultural Resources” (SOAR), which requires a majority of the voters to rezone open space or agricultural land for development. Proposed developments in unincorporated Ventura County require majority approval from county residents, while proposals in the eight incorporated cities that approved SOAR require a majority vote by those cities’ voters. Voters have since approved only a handful of housing developments.
In 2016, voters renewed SOAR through 2050. But this time, the initiative’s backers added language to the county initiative that allows those protected lands to be re-designated for farmworker housing without a ballot measure. Instead of first requiring the general public’s approval, AMCAL’s two projects are subject to county officials — the same process the county uses for lands not designated as agricultural or open space.
Somis Ranch would not have been possible without these changes, according to Alex Pratt, AMCAL’s vice president of development. The project is on one of “only so many sites” in the county where a project of that scale could work, said Pratt. “Finding these parcels that are big enough to support a significant housing development in a place where all of the regulations actually allow it. … These are unicorns,” said John Krist, former chief executive officer of the Farm Bureau of Ventura County and a current board member of House Farm Workers!, a local nonprofit.
Pratt is now testing whether Somis Ranch can be replicated. AMCAL’s proposed Ventura Ranch project would build 328 units of affordable farmworker housing about 25 miles northwest of Somis Ranch, on a former orchard between two small residential areas.
But nearby residents oppose using this agricultural land for the housing project. The development would “tower over the single-story residential homes” nearby, and “precious lands may be sacrificed for profit-driven construction,” according to a Change.org petition started by Sarah Swidler, who lives nearby. Another website, noventuraranch.com, called the proposed apartment buildings “monstrosities,” characterizing the development as “profit driven high-density building where it should not be.” Opponents have also highlighted fire risk and possible impacts on evacuation routes.
“Initially, (the petition) was kind of a reaction to getting news of the proposed project site by watching what was a lemon orchard be demolished and mowed down,” said Swidler. This was a “shocking development” for Swidler and her neighbors, she continued, adding that many longtime residents were under the mistaken impression the land was still protected from that type of development by SOAR. Swidler hoped the petition would create opportunities for residents to weigh in.
Their petition asks Ventura County to put the development to the voters — the very step that SOAR’s 2016 renewal eliminated.
Longtime SOAR advocates have responded by trying to convince Ventura County residents to support the creation of actual farmworker housing on agricultural land, three decades after convincing them to support a ballot initiative that would curtail such development. Richard Francis, co-author of the initial SOAR measure, told a crowd of opponents at a community meeting in late 2023: “You’ve got to have farmworkers if you’re going to have farms.”
Swidler and her neighbors have long lived in the “very high” fire hazard severity zone, Cal Fire’s highest designation. In an updated map released this year, the Ventura Ranch site was added to this zone, further complicating the proposal. Now, opponents are highlighting the fire risk. “This isn’t anti-housing, this isn’t anti-farmworker,” said Swidler. “It’s about safety.”
“I’ve seen that many houses are being built for farmworkers, but for us working in the fields, there’s no opportunity to get that housing because of our immigration status.”
County guidelines state that farmworker housing cannot be built in high fire hazard severity zones. However, the project is currently undergoing environmental review, and “the fire hazards will be addressed” during that process, according to a county spokesperson in mid-August.
Meanwhile, many locals worry that more farmworkers will decide — like Chepe did — that they just can’t make the math work anymore.
Chepe still thinks about returning to Ventura County someday, if the housing situation improves or he gets a different job. In the meantime, he’d love to see his fellow farmworkers end up in a newer, more affordable development.
“I know what it’s like in the fields, how you suffer,” he said, “how (it feels) when work slows down. … You feel bad or sad because you’ve been through that, and you know how you suffer to be able to pay for that apartment month after month.”
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This article appeared in the October 2025 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Fertile ground for housing.”
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