Saticoy and Wells Community Plan

The town of Saticoy was built in the late 1800s. Shops, anchored by a historic rail depot, frame its small Main Street. Bungalows line its rectilinear street grid. Postwar development added various conventional suburban housing tracts, designed with no relationship to each other, to Saticoy and the adjacent Wells neighborhood. By 2006, eight more separate developments were proposed.

To craft a community-based revitalization plan for the area, the City of Ventura engaged a team led by Crawford Multari & Clark Associates. Patrick Siegman led the transportation planning effort. After an extensive community engagement process, the plan was adopted in November 2009.

The plan aims to create six distinct, yet highly connected, neighborhoods. Each will be compact, walkable, and mixed-use.

Since the plan’s adoption, its requirements for small blocks and street continuity have begun to knit together the area’s disjointed local streets, providing safe, quiet alternatives to walking and bicycling on busy arterials. New mixed-use developments have added shops, dining, and a range of housing types, from bungalows to townhouses to courtyard apartments.

Street and building standards are delivering leafy streets lined with porches, stoops, and shopfronts, instead of the soundwalls that characterized previous subdivisions. The plan also reduces parking requirements and establishes a “Park Once” strategy, encouraging the creation of efficiently-shared public lots in neighborhood centers.

The conversion of State Highway 118 from a stark, high-speed arterial into a tree-lined boulevard has also begun, with bicycle lanes replacing excess vehicle lanes.

In 2010, the plan was honored with the APA Central Coast Section’s Hard-Won Victories Planning Award, in recognition of its success in bringing together multiple developers, interest groups, and the public at large to create a transformational plan.

Images courtesy of Crawford Multari and Clark