By Mike Harris Friday, October 9th, 2026

Like many other high-cost areas, the Ventura County housing market resembles a martini glass, keynote speaker Bill Fulton said at the 25th annual Ventura County Housing Conference.

The bowl at the top of the glass is very full of luxury housing, he said.

There’s some affordable housing production at the base.

But the glass’s stem is very thin, what Fulton calls the “missing middle.”

“We don’t have those starter homes, condos, townhouses,” Fulton, a housing expert and former Ventura mayor,told the Business Times at the Oct. 1 conferenceput onin Camarilloby nonprofit Housing Opportunities Made Easier.

“Basically, all single-family houses are very expensive and then we have a lot of rental apartments,” Fulton, co-director of UC San Diego’s Center of Housing Policy and Design and a fellow at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley, said.

Why aren’t more “missing middle” homes being built?

“Partly because developers have not wanted to build them,” Fulton said.

Middle-priced homes, he said, don’t make as much money for developers.

And sometimes their lenders think they can make more money with rentals.

Other factors include zoning issues and laws that make it easy for developers to get sued over condos.

“So obviously developers are going to build on the high end,” Fulton said.

Another factor in “missing middle” housing is Ventura County’s SOAR laws, which have limited the amount of new housing that can be built, he added.

SOAR — Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources — is a series of initiatives that require a vote of residents before agricultural land or open space areas can be rezoned.

“And so, I think we have to find ways to both allow and encourage that missing middle housing,” Fulton said.

Stratis Perros, Simi Valley’s environmental services director, who attended the conference, told the Business Times that his city is one of Ventura County’s leaders in accessory dwelling unit (ADU) production.

An ADU is a small, independent residential living space located on the same lot as a primary single-family home.

“Since the ADU laws were initially adopted in 2018, we’ve built more than 500 ADUs in the city,” Perros said.

Simi Valley is also “very compliant with all state regulations that require cities to update their codes to accommodate ADUs,” he said.

In his Substack blog, The Future of Where, Fulton writes: “Here’s the weird thing about The VC: There’s basically no population or economic growth, yet home prices and rents have skyrocketed in the last few years.”

Traditional thinking would suggest that the problem is the SOAR laws “and a general hostility to new development, which has admittedly characterized Ventura County since the 1980s at least,” he wrote.

But that’s not the whole story, according to Fulton. 

In addition to Ventura County’s restricted land supply, there is the martini glass structure, he said.

“What’s supposed to happen is that when a house is sold at the top, the availability of housing filters down,” Fulton wrote.

Under that scenario, for instance, when somebody sells a $1.5 million house, it gets bought by somebody who sells a $1.2 million house.

And the $1.2 million house gets bought by somebody who sells a $1 million house, and the $1 million house gets bought by somebody who sells an $800,000 house, etc.

That ultimately is supposed to free up rental housing further down the filtering chain, Fulton wrote.

But that’s not happening, at least not at the level below $1 million houses, according to Fulton.

“That’s because those $600,000 to $800,000 houses aren’t being built,” he wrote.

“That means households that should be moving into home ownership aren’t,” Fulton wrote.

HOME was formed in 2001 as a housing committee of the Ventura County Economic Development Association to promote diverse housing opportunities.

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“I think we have to find ways to both allow and encourage that missing middle housing.”

Bill Fulton, housing expert and former Ventura mayor