Trade Desk to move into vacant downtown Ventura building

• The Trade Desk, an online ad firm based in Ventura, has owned the vacant building at the corner of Main and California streets since 2019.
• The company is planning to renovate the building and make it its formal headquarters. Only about 14 people will be based at that location, but that number will include some top executives.
• The Ventura Planning Commission has approved the project, but a local preservation group plans to appeal the decision to the City Council.

The Trade Desk plans to renovate the vacant building at the corner of Main and California streets in downtown Ventura as its new headquarters, without leaving any of its three existing offices in the area.

The online advertising company was founded in Ventura in 2009 and is now one of the city’s biggest private-sector employers. It is currently based in a building on North Chestnut Street, near E.P. Foster Library, with another office a few blocks away on South Chestnut and a third on Poli Street, adjacent to Ventura City Hall.

In 2019, The Trade Desk paid $4.5 million for a former Bank of America branch at the corner of Main and California, according to Ventura County property records. The company’s plan was to build a multi-story headquarters there and move out of the three other buildings it leases nearby.

Over the years, those plans changed, and The Trade Desk is now envisioning something smaller: an office that will be its official headquarters but will be smaller than its other Ventura locations. The building will have a new partial second floor and a new roof deck, along with landscaping and other design changes, but will otherwise keep the same basic footprint and profile.

About 14 people will work in the building, including some top executives, said Michael Prabhu, a consultant to The Trade Desk, during a recent Ventura City Planning Commission hearing on the project. It will be the company’s “central gathering space, the hub for Trade Desk employees to come together and gather from the other spaces in downtown Ventura,” he said.

The Trade Desk employs about 4,000 people worldwide, according to a recent LinkedIn post by the company’s CEO, but does not disclose employment totals for its Ventura offices.

The Ventura Planning Commission voted unanimously to approve the renovation plans during its Dec. 17 meeting. The commissioners praised The Trade Desk for remaking a long-vacant building without tearing it down and for keeping high-paying jobs downtown, an area dominated by lower-paying retail and restaurant businesses.

“This design is much more attractive than the vacant building we’ve had there and it contributes greatly to what we’re trying to do with that part of the city,” said Planning Commissioner Scott McCarty.

Another commissioner, David Comden, said he hopes the The Trade Desk’s project is the part of a new “civic center” at the intersection of Main and California, “the most important central corner in the downtown area.”

“This is an office setting in a retail space,” he said. “Do we want to have a litany of these on Main? I think the answer is no, but this is a very unique situation with a unique homegrown company that will add a certain panache to the downtown area.”

Decision to be appealed

The Planning Commission’s vote would ordinarily be the final approval The Trade Desk needs, but the matter appears headed for another vote at the Ventura City Council. Stephen Schafer, the president of the San Buenaventura Conservancy for Preservation, said his organization will appeal the Planning Commission approval and ask the City Council to require The Trade Desk to add a main entrance that faces Main Street.

The main entrance in the design approved by the Planning Commission is in the back, facing the parking lot behind the building. The plan also calls for a door on Main Street, but it would be a solid, recessed door that looks like an exit and opens only with an employee’s key card.

Ventura’s design guidelines for downtown call for every building on Main Street to have an entrance onto the street. The city’s Design Review Committee asked The Trade Desk to incorporate one in an earlier hearing, but the Planning Commission voted against requiring it.

Schafer said the conservancy supports The Trade Desk’s reuse of the bank building and thinks the company is “a real asset to Ventura.” The group’s only issue is the entrance, he said.

Every other building in the downtown part of Main has a front door to the street, Schafer said, and those doors are an important element of a downtown that appears open to the public and friendly to pedestrians.

“It’s really unusual for a project to turn its back on the public in our historic downtown,” Schafer said. “It’s definitely a precedent we want to discourage.”

During the Planning Commission hearing, representatives of The Trade Desk said they want the entrance in back for security reasons and because the building won’t be open to the public.

“We didn’t want to give people the false impression that they can come through,” said Adaeze Cadet, The Trade Desk’s architect on the project and a design principal with the firm HOK.

The Planning Commission was split evenly, 3-3, on a motion to require an entrance on Main Street. The motion required at least four votes to pass, and one commissioner missed the meeting.

“This commission has made it clear that we don’t like exceptions” and setting precedents, said Commissioner Jenny Lagerquist, who voted in favor of requiring an entrance on Main Street. “I will admit, this is an exceptional project.”

Tony Biasotti is an investigative and watchdog reporter for the Ventura County Star. Reach him at tbiasotti@vcstar.com. This story was made possible by a grant from the Ventura County Community Foundation’s Fund to Support Local Journalism.