According to ConnectCRE, Pacific Retail Capital Partners CEO Steve Plenge said, "The property has served the Ventura community for more than six decades," when his firm closed a joint venture with Conversant Capital to buy Pacific View Mall on September 22, 2026.
That sale is a retail story on its face. But the mall sits on one of the only parcels inside Ventura city limits currently zoned for the kind of housing density that could meaningfully add supply to a market that has been short on it for years. Understanding why that parcel matters, and why there are so few others like it, explains something about Ventura that the county median price never will: this city cannot grow outward, by design, until 2050.
The Boundary Voters Extended Through 2050
In 1995, Ventura voters approved the city's first SOAR initiative, short for Save Open-space and Agricultural Resources. The county followed in 1998 with its own version, passed with 63 percent of the vote. Both set up what's called a City Urban Restriction Boundary, or CURB line, around the city. Land outside that line, designated agricultural, open space, or rural, cannot be rezoned for urban development without a public vote.
In November 2016, voters renewed the countywide SOAR initiative and its city-level companions, extending the boundaries through 2050. The renewal passed with 59 percent of the vote, even after opponents placed a competing measure on the ballot aimed at weakening the protections.
What that means in practice is simple and unusual. Ventura cannot annex farmland or open space into new subdivisions unless the entire voting public agrees to move the line, and that vote isn't coming up for renewal again for another 24 years. Every other city in the county operates under the same structure. Camarillo, Oxnard, Simi Valley, Thousand Oaks, Fillmore, Santa Paula, and Moorpark all passed their own SOAR measures and renewed them on the same 2050 timeline. Ventura's version is what a buyer touring the city actually runs into, because so little land remains available inside its line.
What "New Construction" Has to Mean Instead
Ventura's 2005 General Plan responded to this constraint years before the 2016 renewal locked it in for good, adopting what the city calls an Infill-First strategy. Rather than planning for outward expansion that voters would never approve, the city started rezoning its own commercial corridors for housing.
The clearest example is the Midtown Corridors Code, adopted in November 2007 to cover Thompson Boulevard and Main Street. It rezoned aging, auto-oriented strip commercial land for denser, walkable infill instead, and the plan earned a national Driehaus Award from the Form-Based Code Institute the following year. It's a two-decade-old planning document, but it's still the operating logic behind why certain Midtown corridors look the way they do today: old strip retail slowly giving way to denser housing rather than empty land opening up on the city's edge.
The city's current Housing Element, covering the 2021 through 2029 cycle, puts a number on how tight that infill capacity really is. The site inventory identifies capacity for 4,971 units citywide to meet the state-mandated housing target without further rezoning, split across income tiers. To add any cushion beyond that baseline, the city named three specific additional opportunities: the Pacific View Mall site, land along Johnson Drive, and parcels along Ventura Boulevard. There is no fourth or fifth option waiting in reserve. These are the sites.
Why the Mall Sale Is the Real Signal
Pacific View Mall sits in Midtown, at 3301-1 E. Main Street, and its zoning already allows residential development up to six stories and 75 feet. The city's Housing Element set 2026 as the target year to finalize development standards that would let a property owner reconfigure the existing structure and add residential units on site. That target year is the one we're in right now.
The new ownership group is not a residential developer. Pacific Retail Capital Partners specializes in retail operations and leasing, and the joint venture's stated plan is to keep building on the mall's existing foundation as a shopping and entertainment destination. That tracks with what's already happening on site: Round1 has been planning to convert the former Sears space into a two-story arcade, bowling alley, and food hall opening sometime in 2026. None of that forecloses future housing on the property. The zoning still allows it and the city's plan still counts on it. But a retail-focused ownership group taking over the property right as the city's own development-standards deadline arrives leaves the timing of any housing uncertain, even with residential zoning already in place.
For a buyer watching Ventura's inventory and wondering when more supply might show up, that's the update worth knowing. The single largest identified infill opportunity in the city just landed with an owner whose short-term plans point toward entertainment tenants, not condos.
Where the Two Ventura Markets Actually Diverge
Because so little land can absorb new building, Ventura effectively runs two separate housing markets under one city name, and they don't compete with each other the way a buyer might expect.
| Area | Housing stock | Approximate price range | New construction available |
|---|---|---|---|
| Westside | Folk Victorian homes, 1950s to 1980s tract homes, some newer semi-custom homes in the Avenue section | High $500,000s to $1.5 million | No, resale only |
| Midtown | Early-1900s Spanish-style ranch homes, 1950s ranch homes, condos | High $300,000s to $1.8 million | No, resale only |
| East Ventura (Del Sol master plan) | Townhomes and single-family homes built within the last several years | Mid-$700,000s to roughly $1.3 million and up | Yes |
The Westside and Midtown are resale markets almost by definition. Their housing stock reflects decades of individual owners renovating, adding units, and converting garages rather than large-scale rebuilding, because there has been nowhere left inside the city to build large-scale anything. The price spread in each area, from a modest condo to a fully remodeled custom home, tracks the condition of the individual property far more than it tracks any pipeline of comparable new inventory arriving nearby. There isn't one.
East Ventura is the exception, anchored by the Del Sol master plan, which breaks into three distinct sections. Primero offers townhomes starting in the mid-$700,000s aimed at first-time buyers. Novato offers single-family homes between roughly 2,000 and 2,800 square feet starting in the low $900,000s. Fresco is the higher-end wing, with homes starting around $1.1 million and reaching past $1.3 million with upgrades. Seaview at Midtown by KB Home is the other current example, described locally as a rare chance at new construction inside the heart of the city rather than at its edge.
A buyer comparing a resale home on the Westside to a new-build home in Del Sol isn't really comparing two options in the same market. One purchase is buying into a fixed, aging supply of homes with no meaningful new competition coming. The other is buying into the small handful of parcels where the city's own growth boundary still permits building anything new at all.
What This Changes About the Search
None of this means Ventura has stopped changing. Accessory dwelling units are still permitted under state law regardless of the SOAR boundary, since ADU rules operate separately from land use redesignation. Individual lots inside the city can still be remodeled, expanded, or rebuilt. What the boundary actually prevents is the city adding new subdivisions the way many other markets do, by developing raw land at the edge of town.
For a buyer, the practical takeaway is to stop treating "new construction" as a filter that applies evenly across Ventura neighborhoods, because it doesn't. It applies to a handful of named places: Del Sol and Seaview at Midtown right now, and potentially the Pacific View Mall site somewhere down the road, depending on how its new ownership group balances retail leasing against the residential zoning already on the books. Everywhere else in the city, the search is a resale search, and the right comparison point is other resale homes in that same corridor, not a new-build listing that isn't actually competing for the same buyer.
A Few Questions Worth Asking
Does the SOAR boundary mean Ventura will never add housing again? No. It restricts rezoning agricultural, open space, and rural land outside the CURB line for urban development. Infill, ADUs, and redevelopment of already-urbanized parcels inside the line, like the Pacific View Mall site or the Midtown corridors, remain possible and are exactly what the city's own housing plan is built around.
If I want new construction in Ventura, is Del Sol really the only option? It's the primary active master-planned community right now, alongside the smaller Seaview at Midtown project. Individual infill lots and small-scale new builds do come up elsewhere in the city, but they arrive one parcel at a time rather than as a subdivision, so they're worth asking about directly rather than expecting to find through a standard search filter.
If you're weighing a resale home against something newly built, or trying to figure out which corner of Ventura actually fits what you're looking for, I'm happy to walk through it with you. Rick Pena has spent 24 years watching this city's blocks change one parcel at a time, and that's usually the more useful conversation than the median price.
This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.
