By Mike Harris Thursday, October 9th, 2025

Ventura County is the second least affordable metro area in the nation to buy a home.

The median price of single family homes sold in the county in 2024 was $924,000, according to California Lutheran University’s Center for Economic Research and Forecasting.

To afford that median home, a household would require an income of about $360,000, more than twice the national average, CERF reports.

An Oct. 9 program hosted by Ventura Housing, formerly the Housing Authority of the City of San Buenaventura, addressed such housing challenges.

Ventura Housing CEO Jeff Lambert told the Business Times that affordable housing projects need to be increased 100%.

“We need new funding sources,” he said. “The federal government has to make it a priority. This administration hasn’t to date.

“We also rely on a lot of private investors,” Lambert said.

Philantrophists are another source, he said.

“We haven’t tapped philantropy enough,” Lambert said. “We need to do a better job.”

Featured speakers at the event at the Rumfish y Vino restaurant in downtown Ventura were State Senator Monique Limón, State Assemblymember Steve Bennett and Gustavo Velasquez, director of the California Department of Housing and Community Development.

Velasquez said homelessness, largely due to a lack of affordable housing, “is the crisis of our time.

“We are doing a lot statewide to address that through funding,” he said. 

But, Velasquez said, “we are confronting a federal government that is just trying to cut housing resources left and right.”