Ventura County moved away from its traditional role as a bedroom community for Los Angeles during the 1990s, reversing the one-sided flow of commuters by providing a better balance of workers and jobs, new U.S. census data show.
But while eastern Ventura County workers became less dependent on jobs in Los Angeles County -- and thousands more workers flowed into Ventura County from Los Angeles -- the opposite occurred in the west county, where a horde of housing refugees from Santa Barbara County now caravans north each morning.
The new census figures reflect a maturing of Ventura County, which is transforming itself from a suburb into a more balanced and complete urban area, said planning expert William Fulton, president of the Solimar Research Group in Ventura.
"Ventura County is definitely maturing," Fulton said. "It's no longer a suburban county. The trend has been clear since the 1980s. It's become a fairly self-contained county."
Perhaps the greatest sign of this maturity is that fewer Ventura County residents now have to rise early each morning to beat a freeway rush to the San Fernando Valley or to board a Metrolink train to downtown Los Angeles.
During the '90s, the number of Ventura County commuters to L.A. dropped by more than 3,800 workers, while the number of Los Angeles County commuters to Ventura County increased by more than 8,200, according to the census.
Thousand Oaks, in particular, has become a job center for workers from Los Angeles. And Amgen, the largest biomedical firm in the world, has joined Baxter, another large biomedical company, and other high-tech companies along the Ventura Freeway as employment lures.
"You might call it the Amgen phenomenon," Fulton said. "There's a rapidly reversing commute pattern. It's now out of the San Fernando Valley into Thousand Oaks as well. And that will buy the east county several years of livability that otherwise would have gone away quickly."
The better quality of life will come because the cars of commuters heading from Los Angeles into Ventura County flow against bottlenecks on the Ventura Freeway. And the more that jobs grow in Thousand Oaks, the fewer local residents need to drive to Los Angeles.
"There's going to be a permanent flow of traffic from this county into the Valley," Fulton said. "But now that will be counter-balanced by an inflow, because the east county economy is accommodating more jobs."
