Do you remember the first day of school? The butterflies in your stomach, the excitement of spotting friends across the playground, the joy of reconnecting with teachers who believed in you. For too many kids in Ventura County, that excitement and joy is being stolen today.
The housing crisis is forcing families to pack up and leave, pulling students away from their friends, teachers, and community. In Oxnard and Ventura, declining student enrollment led to funding cuts, leaving educators facing pink slips. This year alone, Ventura Unified, Oxnard Union and the county education office each approved layoff notices numbering in the double digits. This isn’t just a housing issue — it’s an education issue, a fight for our children’s joy and futures. And unless we act locally, it’s only going to get worse.
We haven’t felt it yet but the federal budget cuts from the “Big Ugly Bill” are about to make our local housing problem a lot worse. Massive funding cuts to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) are coming — the administration’s fiscal 2026 request calls for a massive 44% cut to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) budget meaning offices will close and key programs will be gutted. These cuts could result in thousands of families losing the housing assistance that they depend on.
The state isn’t going to fill the local funding gap. And as the cost of living becomes more expensive and unaffordable, working families with school-age children are being priced out of Ventura County. A National Association of Realtors index measuring home prices against local wages ranks Ventura County as the nation’s second least affordable place to buy a home, behind only Los Angeles.
Fewer students in our classrooms means less funding for local schools resulting in layoffs for teachers and school staff. This creates a cycle that pushes even more people out of our community. This situation isn’t unique to Ventura and Oxnard school districts — in fact, all local public schools are feeling the brunt of the loss of funding from declining enrollment at the hands of the housing crisis.
The housing crisis is a school crisis. And the school crisis is a housing crisis.
The good news: we have the power — and the responsibility — to take on these mounting crises. Cities, counties, and school districts have a powerful but often overlooked tool to address this: Land. Across Ventura County, vacant school property, unused public buildings, and parcels of land could be used for public housing.
This isn’t just theoretical — across the region, it’s happening already. Ventura Unified School District has issued a request for proposals to build employee housing on district-owned land. Oxnard Union High School District created workforce housing a priority by hiring a Director of Bond Projects and Workforce Housing to implement new developments. The Ojai Unified School District is looking into how to use public land for affordable housing.
In 2024, Housing Trust Fund Ventura County (Housing Trust Fund VC) welcomed community leaders to the “A Home for Education” symposium, presented in collaboration with the County of Ventura, CSUCI, Ventura County Office of Education, and the Ventura County P-20 Council at the CSU Channel Islands (CSUCI) campus. The symposium was held to inform attendees of current issues surrounding the development of affordable housing on educational properties and included a guided tour of two developments adjacent to the campus. Both developments were built on educational properties owned by CSUCI and are home to nearly 2,000 residents including CSUCI employees, educational allies, alumni, seniors, and the public.
These projects show the real public benefits for working families and also provide our school districts with incentives to recruit and retain teachers, bus drivers, aides, and staff. These projects will keep families in our community, addressing the root causes of declining enrollment and stabilizing school budgets.
If these school districts can take action, so can the rest of Ventura County. Local leaders — city councils, school boards, county supervisors — should follow their example. That means identifying surplus land, fast-tracking zoning for affordable housing, partnering with nonprofit and mission-driven developers, and dedicating local funding to match state and federal dollars when they’re available.
The cost of inaction is already here: displaced families, shuttered classrooms, and a shrinking workforce. According to the 2025 Ventura Economic Forecast from California Lutheran University Center for Economic Research and Forecasting, a family needs a household income of about $360,000 to afford a single-family home sold in Ventura County at $924,000. That’s nearly twice what a Ventura County household needed to earn a decade ago, and about two-and-a-half times the $145,000 income required to purchase the median-priced home nationwide.
The housing crisis — and in turn the school crisis — touches all parts of our community as classrooms and homes are the foundation for a healthy, thriving community. Local governments have the solutions — what we are missing is the sense of urgency, investment, and the courage to act.
One local organization that is working to find alternative solutions to make affordable housing more accessible is Housing Land Trust Ventura County. In 2021, Housing Land Trust VC was established as a supporting nonprofit of the Housing Trust Fund VC. Housing Land Trust VC receives donated land on which to build permanent affordable housing that adds to the fabric of Ventura County’s economy and community
If you believe that teachers, students, and essential workers should be able to live where they work and study – now’s the time to contact your local leaders and tell them to make affordable housing a priority. The future of our schools — and our community — depends on it. After all, every student deserves the same excitement and joy we once felt on the first day of school, reconnecting with friends and teachers.
Lucas Zucker, a Ventura resident, is Co-Executive Director at CAUSE and a Steering Committee member for the Ventura County Housing Coalition.
This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Guest column: The housing crisis is a school crisis
Reporting by Lucas Zucker / Ventura County Star
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