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Plan Santa Barbara Comes Alive with Street-Level View
[Noozhawk’s note: To get a better sense of the effects of Plan Santa Barbara, the city’s laborious General Plan update currently under way, Noozhawk contributor David Petry walked a portion of Santa Barbara with city planner Bettie Weiss and principal transportation planner Rob Dayton. His account is republished with permission from his blog, Decomposing Santa Barbara.]
How do you plan Santa Barbara? How do you shape the future of a city as complex and historic and beloved as this one?
Santa Barbara has been planning its future through a General Plan originally adopted in 1964, amended many times since, and now in the process of the first significant overhaul in 45 years. The General Plan lays out the rules and priorities for what, where and how development will take place in the city. The City Council has some leeway in its final determinations, but the philosophical, policy and regulatory basis for all land-use decisions is the General Plan.
This time around, the process to determine what updates to make to the General Plan is called Plan Santa Barbara. Launched in 2005 by the City Council, it has turned out to be large, expensive and controversial.
Randy Rowse, owner of the Paradise Café, 702 Anacapa St., and a longtime participant in the Downtown Organization, recommended I look at the Plan Santa Barbara Web site.
“There’s a vision of Santa Barbara there that is surprising,” he said. “I think it will surprise a lot of people.”
What Is a General Plan?
The General Plan contains sections — called elements — covering land use and growth management, economy and fiscal health, environmental resources, historic resources and community design, housing, circulation, and public services and safety. There are goals and objectives and policies for each element.
Plan Santa Barbara, available now for review and to be released in draft form on March 18, consists of a number of studies, presentations and workshop records. The primary document is the 75-page Policy Preferences, which pulls together all the Plan Santa Barbara-recommended changes to the General Plan.
New to the plan with this update is something called a Sustainability Framework, which defines sustainability, includes a vision of Santa Barbara in a sustainable future and sets forth sustainability principles. As the draft plan states, “Being a sustainable community means making decisions based on the connections between the environment, the economy and the people of the community, for the benefit of all and to preserve and enhance our community character.”
Also in this iteration is an adaptive management element. Adaptive management is a catch-phrase meaning that the city will evaluate progress toward the plan goals and objectives.
The city has made the Plan Santa Barbara process as public as it could. Each study has been rolled out to public review. Every workshop has been announced. The City Council has held review sessions. Special workshops were held for high school students.
But there are multiple problems in making the process accessible. Planning is an abstract practice. The General Plan lies behind the decision-making of the city in regards to infrastructure, housing, commercial development, environment and services. To some, it’s a bit like knowing the calculus behind architectural requirements. When it comes down to it, architects just use a formula. And that’s pretty much what the city does. It applies formulas from the General Plan that are based on more complex calculations.
Like calculus, there is a technical terminology at play in the planning process. This time the terminology includes Mobility-Oriented Development Areas, form-based codes, adaptive management, sustainability frameworks, floor-area ratios, inclusionary ordinances, Smart Growth, historic integrity, and old favorites like affordable housing, transit corridors and cumulative open space.
The Abstraction Blues
Finding a toehold in the dialogue is almost as hard as getting a mortgage in this town.
The Plan Santa Barbara Policy Preferences document is obscure, at best. The first sentence stalls the average reader: “The purpose of this document is to set forth the sustainability framework and policy direction for updating the General Plan.” What is a “sustainability framework?” It’s not defined for another nine pages. What is a “policy direction for updating” anything?
The remaining 74 pages stir the dense planning terminology in scores of ways. Affordable housing, a high priority in the existing General Plan and in this update, appears 54 times, each time the context, need, objectives and the means of achieving the ends are restated. It would seem that every concept must be linked to every other to convince us of their necessity and immediacy.
The magnitude of the city’s responsibility identified in the document is also overwhelming. The Policy Preferences document places responsibility on the city for a successful local economy with businesses oriented to global and environmental imperatives, for shaping development to specific ends such as high-density and lower-cost residential units in the downtown core, getting us out of our cars, reducing obesity, and making our lives and the spaces around us vital and livable.
To an extent, the city does tackle all of this, and none of it is necessarily bad or wrong. But in many cases the values and imperatives the document adopts are shaped by current thinking, taste and assumptions. For example, the document posits as a given that “Socio-economic diversity is essential for maintaining a healthy culture and stable economy, and should be supported through housing affordable to all income levels; affordable mobility options; economic policy to encourage livable wages and good jobs; and opportunities for all to participate in education, cultural events and arts.”
This is not the model Santa Barbara has followed to date. The gap between the wealthy and poor continues to increase and the middle class continues to become a smaller percentage of the population. Some might argue that catering to wealthy condo owners is exactly what is needed to create a stable economy.
Regardless of one’s point of view about the document’s premises, it begins to read like a wouldn’t-it-be-nice-if fantasy. In the vision portion of the document, 20 years from now we’ve given up our personal cars and have opted for car shares. Such massive societal changes seem less designed and more an outcome of personal and economic options that arise.
There is also a level of indirection in the document that is hard to pierce. The methods outlined for achieving the idealized future state are largely passive. One example is the shift in housing density and values. By pushing any residential development that does occur to focus on affordable housing in the downtown area, improving access to transit and by making the area more livable, it is assumed that fewer people will need to drive cars, or possibly, over the long term, need to acquire them in the first place.
The obvious means to get people out of their cars is not to slowly move more of the housing stock to a downtown corridor, but to increase the cost of driving. Add a $1 per gallon surcharge to all gas in the city. If congestion remains too high, increase it. To get parked cars off the street, add a $1,000 annual registration fee.
But it is not so simple. Not only are such laws illegal, but they are obviously very unpopular. So cities must satisfy themselves with slow, veiled movements with the hope that their movements precipitate intended results.
Rowse believes the proposed updates are a “monumental artist’s concept” of what Santa Barbara should be, but one that bears little resemblance to what the town is now, or will likely become.
The plan is expensive ($2.4 million to conduct the EIR), it is large and it is abstract. And it is, in many senses, our future.
For all the heat that might arise with the updated plan drafts, however, city planner Bettie Weiss believes the Plan Santa Barbara process will remain solid. The majority of the new City Council has a strong background and familiarity with the planning process, and all members have seen, and have had the opportunity to comment on, the various components of the update.
“We’ll have hearings at the Planning Commission where the city will hear from the public,” Weiss said. “Then we take it to the City Council in June.”
Weiss is hopeful that the council will “give us guidance and send us away (and) we’ll come back in October with a finished General Plan.”
It’s a tough exercise, but one the City has completed multiple times before. Each time with intended, and unintended, consequences.
Walking the Walk
To better understand what Plan Santa Barbara means, I invited Weiss to take a walk through a portion of town of her choosing where we could see firsthand some of the issues the city is attempting to tackle with this General Plan update. Because a critical component of Santa Barbara planning is the transportation component, she invited Rob Dayton, principal transportation planner with the city’s Public Works Department, to join us.
The route Weiss chose started on Wentworth Avenue on the Lower Westside. The plan was to walk from Wentworth, cross the Union Pacific railroad tracks and Highway 101, and then walk along Ortega Street and through the Chapala Street corridor, across State Street and back to the city planning offices on Garden Street.
Along the way, we would talk about Plan Santa Barbara as a process and a set of guidelines, and we would look at many of the situations that the General Plan update is attempting to address.
I am hoping this walk will connect some of the dots, make some of the concepts come down out of their aeries and take shape.
When we arrive at our starting point, Weiss stops us before we’ve gone 20 feet.
“I want to talk about a premise here, a philosophy, that’s not always understood,” she said, providing a colorful one-page handout.
“The council set the goals (for Plan Santa Barbara) in 2005. But those goals are a reaffirmation of the goals set 20y years earlier. And before that in the 1970s. And before that in the 1960s. The (current) process is based on that foundation. People have responded with fear. Fear that things will change. But the process is based on that foundation. Not a lot has changed since those plans were put in place.”
Dayton nods his agreement that this is important to get across. “That’s good,” he said.
Numbered 1 through 9, the goals are:
» Live within our resources by balancing development with available resources and promoting sustainable, pedestrian-scale, transit-oriented development.
» Ensure affordable housing opportunities for all economic levels in the community, while protecting the character of established neighborhoods.
» Provide safe and convenient transportation through improved transit, circulation and parking.
» Ensure a strong economy that provides the revenue base necessary for essential services and community enhancements.
» Advance regional thinking, collaboration and solutions.
» Maintain the unique character and desirability of Santa Barbara as a place to live, work and visit.
» Provide adequate services and facilities.
» Encourage public involvement and participation at all levels of city planning and other government activities.
» Develop explicit environmentally sustainable policies.
But we had to start somewhere, and with the big picture in hand, we dropped immediately into the details.
Small Changes, Big Improvements
“Stand in the middle of the street,” Dayton said, pointing to the barren asphalt, midstream on Wentworth. “This street is wider than the average street.”
The average Santa Barbara street is 36 feet wide. Wentworth is 42 feet wide.
Before the city went to work on the street in 1995, the roadway felt at once depopulated and urban. As a result, drivers tended to drive faster on Wentworth. People were more likely to abandon cars and unwanted furniture and televisions there. With the railroad right-of-way on one side, it felt less like a neighborhood and more like a thoroughfare.
The city has a limited tool bag, but some of the most concrete are infrastructure improvements and park development. For Wentworth, the city used both.
One end of the street was anchored with a neighborhood park, El Parque de los Niños. The park wraps around a couple of residences at the corner, one leg of the park providing community gardens, the other a playground.
According to Weiss, “Critics of the plan said the park would be too noisy” because it backs up to the railroad tracks and the freeway. “But now that it’s here, I think you have to say it’s better to have it than not.” Every time I visit the neighborhood, the park is in use by children and their families. The park is largely garbage- and graffiti-free.
To reduce the impact of the open width of the street, the city added relatively inexpensive tree planters in the parking lane. These are free-standing, raised curbed areas that don’t impede drainage or consume limited parking (on a street where parking is more than adequate). As the trees matured, they created a sense of narrowing overhead closure on the street.
The street is one of the city’s success stories. It feels more like a neighborhood now, calmer and quieter. The traffic is slower. People dump less often, and when they do, they tend to at least shove their unwanted goods over the fence into the Union Pacific right-of-way.
That right-of-way is the first of Santa Barbara’s big barriers.
Where Are We
“We’re constantly trying to break down barriers,” said Dayton, who has stopped high on the pedestrian overpass that links Ortega Street from west to east. The overpass is relatively new, replaced after being structurally damaged by a passing truck on the highway below. The gaunt steel vultures and toucans designed by local artist David Shelton peer down at us, cars slip past, a tidal signature of garbage and graffiti crusts the railroad bed below.
“The 101 corridor is a challenge for cars, pedestrians and bicyclists,” Dayton explained. “The most congested intersections are along this corridor. The walking experience in those intersections is not good. For cyclists, it’s a narrow point. The freeway becomes the barrier.”
The barriers are as old as Santa Barbara, and are worth thinking about.
Downtown Santa Barbara is essentially an alluvial fan of eroded soil from the Santa Ynez Mountains. The spread of soil is boxed in on the south by the Mesa. Mission Creek, Rattlesnake Creek and Sycamore Creek drain to the sea along the beaches and carry fresh soil. Although we like to think of Santa Barbara as “all cooked,” the terrain has changed fairly dramatically in the last 100 years.
Laguna means lake and for the first several decades of European development in Santa Barbara, a seasonal estero or lake, according to Stearns Wharf. Hides, otter skins, tallow, asphaltum and a smaller number of passengers leaving than arriving shipped out.
Coach roads slipped in from the south along the coast, crossed a rise that lay between the beach and the estero or lake, and then turned up State Street. Coaches carried passengers and their luggage, mail and smaller commercial packages.
Access and commerce were nearly one and the same. One needed the other, like blood and breathing.
When the railroad arrived in the late 1880s, the rails paralleled the old Los Angeles Stage Road, and then, instead of turning up the State Street corridor, it jogged out a few blocks to run between San Pascual and Rancheria streets, and ran north from there. To get across the estero, a raised railbed several feet deep was built like a levee across the lakebed with intervening bridges and culverts to enable the water to run off to the sea. Commerce and access were separating, but just by a few blocks.
The fate of the town was set.
When the state highway came through, or more accurately was organized from disparate existing roads into a contiguous system, it linked Coast Village Road to State Street and then Hollister Avenue as California’s Pacific Coast Highway 1 for a time. Where the road bed entered town from the south, it was also built like a levee and crossed bridges and culverts for drainage. But when Highway 101 was built in 1951, it hugged the railroad, consuming Rancheria Street with eminent domain. In 1995, when the stoplights were finally removed from Santa Barbara’s interface with the freeway, transportation was finally transportation. Commerce was effectively separated from local access.
As a result, much of what we inherit is, as Dayton says, “two different Santa Barbaras.” One lies north and east of the Union Pacific/101 corridor, the other to the south and west.
A significant portion of what the city has accomplished in the 20 years since the last General Plan amendments has been focused on breaching the barrier between the two. Successful projects include the Mission Street underpass, the Micheltorena Street bridge replacement, updates to the Carrillo Street underpass, major improvements along the State and Garden street crossings, and now under way, an overhaul at Milpas Street.
Much of the work has been done by Caltrans, but the city has worked closely with Caltrans architects and engineers to produce the best possible experience for pedestrians, bicyclists and motorists.
We start across the pedestrian bridge and look down.
The Line Between
Neither Weiss nor Dayton stands on sure footing when we talk about the freeway and rail lines that pass beneath us. Like the pedestrian walkway, their primary interests lie in getting over the obstacles, less in the nature of the obstacles themselves.
Weiss recognizes these as major transportation corridors.
“They’re going to generate noise and air pollution,” she said. They attract crime, dumping, graffiti. But, she points out, the jurisdictions for these corridors overlap. The governing bodies are Union Pacific, Caltrans, the Santa Barbara Police Department and the California Highway Patrol. “The problems (in the corridor) are mostly treated as public safety and enforcement concerns,” she said.
Weiss notes that one way to deal with the noise and pollution is to invest in heavy landscaping. But the heavy landscaping tends to increase the other problems of homeless use, dumping and more serious crimes. A lot of landscaping has been removed from along the freeway and railway in the last 10 years. As a result, crime is down; noise and air pollution along the corridor are up.
One potentially large impact to the city plan update during the Plan Santa Barbara cycle is a request from the Santa Barbara County Air Pollution Control District that new development along the downtown freeway corridor occurs only outside a 500-foot buffer zone. For reference, 500 feet is roughly the length of a city block. If the buffer were to be realized, think of a dead zone for new development that stretched from San Pascual to Castillo streets, and Gutierrez to Yanonali streets.
Smaller buffer zones are being debated.
The buffer is directly counter to stated objectives elsewhere in the plan, specifically of locating workforce housing close to transportation corridors. If the workforce lives close to major transportation lanes, workers’ travel distances are shorter and their access to alternate transportation easier to orchestrate.
We descend to Ortega Street on the east side of the freeway. Here, the city has pulled out its infrastructure tool kit again, targeting the highly traveled corridors leading to and from the two pedestrian freeway overpasses.
Red-Carpet Treatment
In a development called the West Downtown Project, the two streets feeding in from the two overpasses are receiving what Dayton calls the “pedestrian red-carpet treatment.”
The treatment includes pedestrian light standards, brick intersection crossings, curb extensions with ramps for handicap access and tactile surfaces for the blind, and plantings. The tactile surfaces are federally mandated.
“The feds have changed their minds twice in the last 10 years about what the (tactile) surface should be,” Dayton noted. Thus, different surfaces have been implemented at different intersections throughout downtown, depending on the standards in place when they were put in.
The pedestrian light standards are shorter than street lights, they hang over the sidewalks instead of over the parking lane, and they use a lower wattage.
Dayton particularly likes the corner treatments. When we reach the first corner at Ortega and Castillo, there are cars, bicycles and pedestrians passing through. A resident working in her yard, takes a break to talk with a neighbor. A work crew is installing the new light standards in the next block.
Some people have called the curb extensions “bulb-outs,” which are physical obstructions meant to slow traffic. Mistakenly, in Dayton’s view.
“The curb extensions are not bulb-outs,” he said. “They don’t obstruct the traffic lanes.”
Dayton sends me out into traffic again to see the intersection and the flow from the perspective of a bicyclist or motorist. Standing in front of an on-coming burgundy Jetta and looking north, I can see the bicycle and traffic lanes are unobstructed. Weiss points out that “only the dead areas where there’s no parking are used.” The curb extensions shorten the pedestrian crossings to 24 feet from 36. It feels safer as a pedestrian. When you stand in the extension, ready to cross, your intention to traffic is clear.
Dayton turns to two middle-aged Latina women as they pass through the intersection.
“How do you like this?” he asks, pointing to the fresh plantings, the new concrete ramps, the bricked-in crossings.
They smile and nod, “It’s nice.”
“Do you feel safer? Does it make the street look nicer?”
“Yes. We like it.”
But the city’s investment is more strategic than simply enhancing the walking and bicycling environment. Weiss points out the homes along Ortega, all of them well-kept, many of them original architecture from the early 1900s, and tasteful where additions have been made.
“If you create quality infrastructure, the neighborhood tends to live up to the quality,” she said.
The discussion quickly shifts from infrastructure to what is happening inside the structures on the street.
Luxury Creeps Downtown
The zoning along Ortega, and throughout this section of the city, is multiunit and has been for decades. As a result, there are a lot of what might be called pop-ups and carve-outs. The pop-ups are the more recent two-to-four-unit structures built in the back yard of the original home. You generally don’t see them until you’re right out in front of the house and then the higher roofline of the rear units looms between the trees.
The carve-outs are the larger original homes, often Victorians that have been cut into multiple units. These sport a row of mailboxes on the front porch and a variety of curtains in the windows.
Both types of development leave the character of the street largely untouched. Except, of course, for increased numbers of cars on the streets and more people in the neighborhood. But because the transition to multiple units from single-family homes has occurred over many years, the impact of increased density is not experienced as a sudden, negative shift.
In previous general plans, Santa Barbara has focused on the number of permissible units in neighborhoods like this.
“That has had some unintended consequences,” Dayton said. We’re in the 400 block of Ortega, where Dayton owns a rental and has some personal experience with the changes that have occurred.
Most of the homes in the block are older, circa 1910 to 1930. All have been split into multiple units running from two units to six. The individual units range from 450 to 1,200 square feet. In any classification, these would be considered workforce housing. More recently, a residence went in with three units, averaging 2,200 square feet.
The development was permissible based on the number of units, but the size of the units and the new construction significantly increased the value of the units relative to the neighborhood. The differential can create stresses, both now between the expectations and means of neighbors, and for property owners in the neighborhood as decisions are made in the future about selling or remodeling, and in determining what the neighborhood and market will bear.
More important, the structure was seen as a loss to one of the city’s closely held objectives, that of retaining and creating more workforce housing. The new units were not considered workforce. As former Mayor Sheila Lodge, writing from her position as chairwoman of the General Plan Update Committee for the Citizens Planning Association wrote, “We do not need more luxury condos.”
“How do you avoid these kinds of unintended consequences?” Dayton asked while moving toward Bath Street. “One way is to limit the size of units.”
Limiting unit size is one of the key means that the city is considering to encourage the retention and development of more affordable workforce housing. And workforce housing, according to many of the plans’ developers and critics, is the heart and soul of Plan Santa Barbara.
Workforce Housing
Where Ortega crosses De la Vina Street, the intersection appears under siege. For the moment, De la Vina is narrowed to a single lane as a result of the city’s ongoing curb and brick work. On the corner, yellow tape and raw plywood signify ongoing construction on a multiunit building at 633 De la Vina St.
Weiss stops to admire the work.
“I don’t know this project, but it looks like a great project,” she said. “First of all, I see the yellow Notice of Development sign up, which means it has come through the city. It’s been reviewed once or possibly twice by the ABR.” The ABR — the Architectural Board of Review — reviews development with an eye to the consistency of the project with aesthetic standards for the downtown area.
“It’s a conversion of a 1950s or ‘60s boring stucco box to more of a Spanish Colonial,” Dayton said. “It looks like it started with six to eight units and will keep that many. So it retains the density.”
The contact on the Notice of Development sign is architect Christine Pierron. “Santa Barbara Housing Authority owns the property,” Pierron explained when I call her later. “These are the kinds of projects they like to do as they get funding.”
Grants were received to upgrade the windows and utilities. The funds also were extended to upgrade the appearance of the structure. The building started with eight units and will retain eight units.
To a large extent, the battle for workforce or affordable housing is at the crux of the General Plan update, and has been a Santa Barbara stumbling block for more than 60 years.
Naomi Kovacs, executive director of Citizens Planning Association, wrote in a letter to the Planning Commission that the fundamental problem is that “given the worldwide competition for real estate in the Santa Barbara area, the expense of owning or renting a place of residence here will remain above the national average for the foreseeable future. As a result, the private sector cannot build our way out of the jobs/housing imbalance. Indeed, all four basic ‘scenarios’ analyzed by the consultants produce considerably more market-rate than affordable units and would thus increase that imbalance and decrease our city’s economic and cultural diversity.”
What Kovacs is pointing to are the two mutually exclusive principles Santa Barbara planners are perennially asked to address: to retain Santa Barbara’s “small town feel,” which is a product of the city’s “slow-growth path,” while reducing “the current jobs/housing imbalance.”
The General Plan supposedly precipitates the resolution of these two principles down through infrastructure improvements, regulated development and successfully encouraged new behaviors.
Everyone in the battle seems to know, however, that over the long haul, that’s not going to happen.
Santa Barbara’s Old Math
One of the things the planning process brings to the surface in Santa Barbara is the concern about the widening gap in the economic strata, and the flight of the middle class. In other words, the rich are getting richer, the poor poorer, and the middle is slowly leaving.
Limiting the size and growth of a place, especially one as beautiful and climatically equable as Santa Barbara, causes the limited stock of housing to increase in value. As housing values increase, the demographic begins to skew: more people who can afford more expensive homes move in. (If they didn’t move in, the housing values would not rise.)
For people on the lower end of the earning spectrum, rising housing values decrease their opportunities to buy. But rental prices also rise. Ultimately, fewer and fewer can afford their own place. To work in this beautiful town, the lower earners begin to bunk-up, moving more people into fewer units and less square footage.
The middle class, ever-pragmatic, prefer to own rather than rent. Home ownership brings with it the stability a family requires to weather Santa Barbara’s very expensive housing market. You need to get in, set your housing costs, and then increase your earnings over time so that by the time you retire, you have paid down your mortgage and have some security. In the middle-class mentality, a middle-class renter is really just a future poor person. Thus, middle-class Santa Barbarans, if they have not gotten a mortgage within the first five to 10 years of their working life here, tend to leave.
“I agree the trend is real,” Weiss said. “But the city can put a good program in place to maintain the percentages (of affordable housing units). We don’t have to lose ground.”
At the corner, we step out of the workforce housing debate, and back in time, as we enter another type of pocket in Santa Barbara’s complex matrix.
History Street
We hit Bradley Street and head south. Bradley is a one-block long, little-traveled street, with homes on the west side of the street and mostly the rear entries to Chapala businesses on the east.
This is a street with older homes that the city does not treat as an integral historic area because of the mix of structures and uses. A yellow Notice of Development sign flags new development on the street that has been passing through the approval process.
“The building will be more modern in appearance,” said Weiss, who has seen the plans. “It will have a flat roof and be very green, but it will still mesh with the character of the street.”
A quick jog to the west and we’re on Brinkerhoff Avenue. Dr. Samuel Brinkerhoff owned the large white home at 124 Cota St. and graded the lane below his house for development in 1857. Weiss has an affinity for the street.
“There’s a great deal of historic integrity on Brinkerhoff,” she said. “(But) where you have a lot of integrity of historic structures, you have struggles with use. These (structures) have all switched back-and-forth between residential and small commercial use for a long time. Sometimes it happens without permits.
“We would like to beef up our position on code for historic structures in our Historic Resources Program. We don’t want to compromise the character” of an area like this.
One of the components that the Citizens Planning Association would like to see established in the General Plan is a Historic Resources Element. According to Weiss, this will start to happen with this update.
“We call it a framework,” she said. “It’s a table of contents, a placeholder. It will be a section in the General Plan called a Historic Resources Element. We’re putting the existing (historic resources) policies and some new policies in there.”
At a later date, the element will be addressed as a whole and revamped.
We pass through the alley between Brinkerhoff and Chapala.
“This alley is a great buffer zone,” Weiss pointed out. Services, trash cans, garage doors all face each other across the narrow lane, stitched together by overhead cable and phone lines. The difference between Brinkerhoff and Bradley is stark in this regard. Homes on Bradley face the rear entrances and services of businesses; on Brinkerhoff the rear entries of the two distinct land uses — in strictly technical terms — abut.
We turn the corner once, twice, and we emerge on Chapala Street. This is the site of Santa Barbara’s perhaps most visible and talked about unintended consequences. And we’re right back in the debate about workforce housing. Or, more accurately, luxury condominiums.
The Street of Unintended Consequences
Planning is the art of avoiding unintended consequences, and conversely, of achieving intended consequences that age well. But there is no escaping the unintended, and no guarantee that intended consequences will be welcomed once they arrive. For unintended consequences, Chapala One has no match in Santa Barbara. No one expected the building, completed in 2008, to have quite so many.
Chapala One is a mixed-use, high-density development at 401 Chapala St., with 7,700 square feet of commercial space, 1,200 square feet of office space and 46 housing units. It was opened with a ribbon-cutting ceremony on July 9, 2008, but with the exception of an on-site residential manager, has stood empty ever since.
During the permitting of the facility, people close to the development (who asked to remain anonymous) said the project had no difficulty making it through the approval process.
“No one had to twist any arms,” I was told. And that once it was built, “there was a lot of interest from buyers.”
Weiss remembers the approval process differently. The city “always felt it was overparked,” she asaid. The project provided two parking spaces for each condo unit, while the city required only one, an increase to the completed structure of approximately 9,200 square feet. “And we felt the (residential) units were too large.”
The last change made in the plans was a crucial one. The Planning Commission viewed the standard building setback from Mission Creek with unease. The building is squarely in the creek flood plain and the commission wanted a larger setback from the stream. It reached an agreement with the developer that in exchange for a larger setback, the developer would be allowed to increase the building height. According to Weiss, Planning Commissioner Bill Mahan commented at the time, “I feel like this is a mistake.”
In general, the feeling now is that the building is too massive for the location. Sitting on the southwestern side of the street, the structure’s shadow is cast over the roadway most of the day. The larger, luxury condo units are the exact things no one in a planning role in Santa Barbara seems to want for the city. Weiss still wishes the residential units could be cut down in size and made more affordable. And as the building molders in foreclosure proceedings, the taped-up windows on empty storefronts don’t help with downtown vitality, public acceptance or project justification.
But, according to my source close to the developer, the timing of the development was poor.
“If it had been completed two years earlier, it would be all filled up,” the source said. “The timing was just terrible.”
Chapala One was a direct consequence of the city’s stated desire to develop a denser, and yet more livable and vital downtown as expressed in the 1990 General Plan amendments, which in turn were an expression of voter sentiment as stated in 1989’s Measure E. The model most often referred to that supports such development, and one that has cropped up in Plan Santa Barbara in a big way, is the Mobility-Oriented Development Area, or MODA.
We walk the short block to State Street, the center of Santa Barbara’s proposed MODA.
‘I Think I Live in a MODA’
Mobility-Oriented Development Areas is a hot topic in modern planning. As cities have shifted away from traditional planning models that followed the car from one parking lot to the next, they have looked for models that help create or recreate vital, communal downtowns. Los Angeles, Chicago and Manhattan have adopted MODA models.
MODAs are in many ways nostalgic. They hearken back to a time when cities were smaller, more social, less stretched and compartmentalized by the car. Santa Barbara already exemplifies MODAs to an extent.
Dayton stands at Chapala and Cota streets in downtown, watching the light change and cars pass like a gaggle of flushed quail.
“The downtown street system was laid out before there were cars,” he said. The compactness, the assumption of personal contact in commerce, works better for people, and ironically for cars.
“Upper State was designed specifically for the automobile,” he said. “But it moves a lot less traffic a lot less effectively than the downtown system.”
Plan Santa Barbara introduced the MODA concept to Santa Barbara. But many people have responded negatively. City Councilman Frank Hotchkiss moved to remove MODA from the planning drafts. The Citizens Planning Association, the League of Women Voters and the Allied Neighborhoods Association all recommended in writing that it be removed.
MODA on the Plan Santa Barbara draft land-use map spread from Milpas to the Funk Zone below the freeway, and from the Funk Zone all the way up State Street to Highway 154 where city limits give out. The corridor is roughly a six-block strip centered on State Street with bulb-outs (excuse the misapplied term for the apt image) to include Milpas and a six-block square centered at Micheltorena and San Andres streets.
Weiss agrees that MODA created more heat than most other components of the new general plan.
“We’ve removed the MODA boundary from the (draft) Land Use map,” she said. “We’ll use the principles, not a special district.”
During hearings, Weiss recalls, the public was saying, “I like this MODA concept.” Or, “Hey, I think I live in a MODA.”
The MODA principles envision a community where the need to travel outside the defined corridor is minimized. People live, work, shop and get their entertainment and exercise close to home. When they do leave, transit nodes embedded in the corridor offer quick, easy and relatively inexpensive options. As the community becomes more communal and enmeshed, more human and humane, the need for cars simply withers.
Rowse, chairman of the Downtown Organization’s Parking Committee, says he would love to see it. But he doesn’t see the rationale behind the vision in Santa Barbara.
“The housing model is about ownership,” Rowse said. At a certain point, he believes, the people the city is imagining moving into the downtown corridor “are going to have kids. And they’re going to want a yard and swings — a neighborhood.”
In other words, MODA models that focus on dense settings with higher rental rates might best support a childless workforce, or possibly a larger one, in which a younger segment of the population flows through the MODA outward toward single-family tracts.
The result would not be the finished vision of Plan Santa Barbara, but simply a shift to a higher density downtown with pressure remaining on the community to support a widely spread net of vehicle trips to and from the populous centers.
One potential incarnation of a MODA is an urban mall, a downtown business area closed to vehicular traffic.
Closing State Street
At State Street, cars flow past. We wait for the light.
The notion of closing State Street has “been in the General Plan since 1964,” Weiss said. But there’s more to it than just closing the street.
Dayton picks up the thread.
“You can’t just close a street and have it work,” he said. Like roundabouts and Beanie Babies, there was a time when everyone was doing it. Some 170 towns and cities across the United States closed streets and converted them to urban malls in the 1970s. The peak year was 1975. Most of these experiments failed.
“If you walk out on the street, and there’s no one there, you think twice before you come back,” Dayton explained. “There has to be a residential population downtown that supports the (closed) street from early in the morning to late at night.”
Rowse, participating in the Downtown Organization, has seen this proposal surface many times over the years.
“If you talk to the merchants on Third Street,” he’s referring to Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade, one of the few urban malls that took root and held, “I think a lot of them have regrets. They’re dealing with a homeless population there. They’re looking at a bench sleeping ordinance.”
Traffic Equals Vitality
To Rowse, revitalizing the downtown is not about shaping future development, which in his mind is where Plan Santa Barbara is putting the focus.
“Plan Santa Barbara makes most sense in burgeoning times,” he said. During good times, developers are more willing and likely to step up to the built-in disincentives in the city approval process. Development fees, drawn-out approval proceedings — “it can take nine months just to get a sign approved for a new business,” he said — stand in the way of revitalization.
Most immediate in Rowse’s mind is the problem of the perceptions and realities of downtown.
“We have a tourist population downtown, but we’re fighting to bring locals back,” he said. “State Street has a reputation for being unsafe and unclean.”
Rowse believes the reputation is undeserved, but recent parking rate increases and the opening of another shopping center — Camino Real Marketplace in Goleta — with free parking, in-place security and co-located stores has siphoned off downtown visitors much as the opening of La Cumbre Plaza did in the late 1960s.
“The city deals with traffic through disincentives,” Rowse said. “They put in calming measures, higher priced parking” — all measures intended to reduce downtown traffic and make transit more attractive.
“To me,” he explained, “traffic equals vitality. I would love to see us go back to 90-minute parking.”
Dayton feels the existing parking models that have been in place for decades are functional.
“The parking code now is extremely consistent with what’s been done with parking in the past,” he said. “The first real focus on parking came in 1974, at which point, the code recognized that all parking is not the same. Parking is lavished on customers, restricted for employees and adequate for residences.”
Around 1981, Dayton explains, most cities doubled their downtown parking requirements for new development. Santa Barbara kept its requirements the same.
“For employees, it adds a little bit of friction,” he said. “It’s harder to handle cars (for workers in the downtown area). They use alternate modes. We have a very high use of alternate modes in the downtown area, particularly from a commuter standpoint.”
Rowse agrees that Santa Barbara has a high per capita-use of alternate modes of transportation downtown — bicycles, buses, trolleys, trains.
“We’re in the top 10 percent of cities our size,” he said.
But he’s beginning to doubt the friction model for employees. In his mind, once an employee is off work, he or she becomes a customer. The distinction between who is parking for what reasons tend to go away in hard economic times like these when Santa Barbara is experiencing a sizable daily inventory of open parking spaces.
“We’re the only shopping district that has paid parking for miles,” Rowse said. “With Camino Real and La Cumbre Plaza, we’re at a competitive disadvantage. I’d love to see free parking downtown but it will never happen. We’re still amortizing the lots we built.”
“We could really reprioritize the shuttles,” he continued, talking now about tourists. “Coordinate with the hotels to pick people up regularly and drop them right here on State.” These are the people who don’t need cars in town, not the locals.
Security is another of Rowse’s hot buttons. The Downtown Organization recently helped fund retired police Officer Bob Casey’s return to a State Street beat.
“State Street is perceived as unsafe,” Rowse said. “We needed some feet on the ground.”
Rowse looks at the plan for a new police station with some doubt.
“A couple substations on State Street — there are a lot of empty storefronts — would go a long way toward resolving the problems,” he said.
The Public Services and Safety Element of the Plan Santa Barbara draft addresses water supply, solid waste, recycling and emergency preparedness. Police focus is absent.
The Way to the Future
We ended the walk in front of the city offices on Garden Street. Before Weiss goes back inside, she reiterates her belief in the process and guiding principles. She anticipates a hard pull between now and targeted plan approval in October.
“Most of what’s in the (draft) plan will remain,” she said. “There will be changes, possibly some significant ones. But this council has a lot of experience with the planning process.”
“I appreciate what they’re doing,” Rowse agreed, referring to city planning staff. “They were here before this council and they’ll probably be here long after.”
But city planning has the role of defining regulations based on City Council direction. One of the stated objectives that Weiss gave me at the start of our walk is to “ensure a strong economy that provides the revenue base necessary for essential services and community enhancements.”
“Bettie (Weiss) and Rob (Dayton) did talk about economic vitality at one of the (Plan Santa Barbara)workshops,” Rowse said. “But the next day at the council meeting, there was nothing mentioned.”
The economic incentives in the Policy Preferences draft are limited to unspecified encouragement, promotion, priority and, in a few instances, “start-up license fee rebates.”
“The economy has traditionally been pretty stable in Santa Barbara,” Rowse said. “But this (economic downturn) is real.”
Rowse believes the economic strength and vitality of Santa Barbara is where Plan Santa Barbara should be focused. He would like to see fewer disincentives to development and traffic flow, none of which are specified in the draft plan, and more leadership in practical business development. He’s even willing to consider another position being added to the city’s staff: a business ombudsman to streamline and foster business development in town.
“The city sees developers as a piggy bank they can hit with fees,” he said. “(Developers) are supposed to see 15 percent” — Plan Santa Barbara assumes a 15 percent profit on development projects to calculate returns on investment for residential housing projects — “but we keep transferring the planning costs to the developers in the form of increased fees.”
That’s a cycle that raises prices and decreases potential margins.
“I don’t think you’ll find an architect who has made money on a Santa Barbara project,” Rowse said. “Their time gets eaten up in meetings” and the resulting plan changes.
Future Tense
The city will release the draft Environmental Impact Report and the revised supporting documents for Plan Santa Barbara on March 18. City officials have booked the Santa Barbara Central Library’s Faulkner Gallery from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. for presentations and open discussions with the public.
In June, the City Council will discuss the plan updates and provide direction to the staff. Between June and October, staff will make the needed adjustments and develop a final set of updates to the General Plan. In October, the plan will likely be enacted.
Out of this plan will come the city’s objectives and philosophy for every land-use and infrastructure decision for the next 20 years. The hope is that, looking back from 2030, the consequences will have been both intended, and welcome.
— Noozhawk contributor David Petry is a local historian, photographer and author of The Best Last Place: A History of Santa Barbara Cemetery. Click here to read his blog, Decomposing Santa Barbara, which focuses on aspects of Santa Barbara history that are disappearing.
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» on 03.07.10 @ 10:48 AM
I recently bought an in-fill condo in the Bungalow District and also live in Portland, Oregon where we too have strict but effective zoning to discourage sprawl and traffic congestion. I live a half mile from State Street and walk there nearly every day and rarely use my car so am a good example of how in-fill can reduce traffic and increase the city’s property tax base.
SB should stick to their zoning guns to keep what I think is the most beautiful and desirable city in the U.S. From an outsider’s perspective, parking and traffic are great compared to other cities and the in-fill projects have only served to enhance the neighborhoods and will eventually sell when they get realistic on pricing.
That said, SB’s biggest priority should not be using taxpayer dollars to subsudize lower-income housing since nearby communities offer plenty of options (it is not a RIGHT to live here; it took me decades to finally be able to afford it and I’m OK with that).
The city should instead focus on cleaning up its tourist money-maker and historic center, State Street. I’ve seen city centers quickly go downhill when people fell unsafe and stop coming and businesses close, creating a downward spiral that never recovers. Now every block is a gauntlet of being hassled for change. Other cities have created ‘panhandling zones’ away from parks and tourist areas for this very reason and SB should quickly implement a strategy since the problem has only worsened over the many years I’ve been visiting. Even in Portland, what the media have dubbed the homeless mecca of the U.S., it’s not as bad as Santa Barbara.
» on 03.07.10 @ 05:09 PM
Agree with “Jilt” - infill is an excellent idea for Santa Barbara. More residents create safer streets, vendors and store owners. Right now the empty storefronts and panhandlers do NOT make us feel safe or prosperous.
ALSO AGREE taxpayer dollars should not be used to create “affordable housing” in prime downtown Santa Barbara. It is NOT a RIGHT to live in the prime heart of one of West Coast’s most beautiful locations.
Affordable housing advocates threaten to ruin the much-needed gentrification of downtown Santa Barbara. Enough already. “Affordablize” the West Side, the Milpas corridor, etc. All are within bus lines to beautiful downtown SB.
» on 03.07.10 @ 05:16 PM
Marvelous, detailed essay.
Thank you, Dan Petry, for a lot of work.
Of course, since Mr. Petry chose NOT to participate in most of the last five years
of open, public process on Plan Santa Barbara, there were a certain number of
errors.
Like in Paragraph Two, which wrongly claims that this is the City’s first update in
45 years.
Does Petry even live in Santa Barbara? I got the feeling he was a 93108 kind of
guy.
[Noozhawk’s note: David Petry and Daniel Petry are not related.]
» on 03.07.10 @ 10:39 PM
I thought the majority of our new Council considered Plan Santa Barbara a waste of $3M a year and canned it?
» on 03.08.10 @ 09:40 AM
Thank you Noozhawk and David Petry. Your article is not only balanced and thorough but a terrific read. Great insight into the process. More please!
[Noozhawk’s note: Thank you. We’re about to be covering land use and planning and development issues in a big way.]
» on 03.08.10 @ 10:27 AM
I am glad to see this article. The photographs are all from my neighborhood of West Downtown. I find it interesting to note that we feature prominently in Plan Santa Barbara, yet have not attended meetings or hearings on it. Why? Because we weren’t notified. Just like with the medical marijuana mess our council has fallen into, the notion of representative government doesn’t work here. They don’t come to you, you as citizens have to go to them, take time off work to attend hearings, sit through odious council meetings, so you can have a 2 minute say. It’s terribly inefficient and wasteful. While I am one who enjoys a liveable walkable downtown, decisions the city makes now will ensure that never happens, despite a $2.4 million plan. The decision to encourage homeless to flock here and congregate to receive our lovely services and hospitality creates a real barrier for anyone thinking to live in the middle of homeless-land, which our neighborhood has certainly become. The decision to allow marijuana shops in the downtown corridor brought increased crime and drug trafficking - another major disincentive. When I head home through lower State after 10 PM, I enter a war zone from the bar scene: drunk college kids, cops everywhere, homeless ranting - it’s a nightmare. The city refuses to enforce slumlord Dario Pini’s shantytowns in the middle of working class neighborhoods. Shuttered storefronts and a no-man’s zone between Gutierrez and Cabrillo complete the picture. We’re in the height of urban decay, and we’re saddled with a council without significant business background who really know how to harness and capitalize on this gorgeous jewel of a city. Instead, we’re letting it slip into the sewer, while planning lofty dreams completely at odds with current social policies. A different kind of politician, Rudy Guliani, ran on a platform of cleaning New York up. And he did!
What are our mayor’s priorities?
Providing a bed for every homeless. Worrying about plastic baggies.
And we hang in the balance…
Good luck with that…
» on 03.08.10 @ 02:21 PM
The first vision the city needs to have is how to survive financially. It is painfully obvious that allowing its manufacturing, extraction and agriculture businesses to leave and replacing their entire revenue stream on a fair weather luxury industry like tourism is a colossal mistake. Once they have steady revenue from something that doesn’t require the rest of the world to be stinking rich then they can look at what they want their city to look like. Gotta pay the bills first folks then you can go out and play.
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