The Santa Barbara City Council on Tuesday moved forward with its plan for creating building size standards for new apartments and condominiums.
Rather than focus on the number of apartments or units, the city’s latest proposal targets building sizes based on the overall size of the lot. The maximum floor-to-lot-area ratio would vary based on the location.
The proposal comes at a time when there’s great demand for housing in Santa Barbara, and when the state is pressuring the city to zone for up to 8,000 units during the next few years.
The matter is controversial because it hits squarely at the heart of Santa Barbara’s conflicting priorities. While there’s pressure to build new housing, there’s also a pull for Santa Barbara to maintain its unique charm and small-town feel, and reconciling those two realities has forced policy leaders to create finessed solutions.
“To me, the only thing that matters in there is that it is going to get us the workforce housing,” Councilwoman Kristen Sneddon said. “That is where we have this huge, gaping hole in what we are providing in our city.”
Sneddon said she does not support development for development’s sake and that the focus should be on workers.
In addition, Sneddon said the city needs to look at taking advantage of its existing buildings in addition to planning for the future.
“We have spaces downtown that are empty,” Sneddon said. “Macy’s, Nordstrom, uptown Sears. We have empty shops. We have space that is not filled with housing, so before we start talking about building other large structures that will maybe make affordable housing, I really think we need to look at the whole inventory.”
Sneddon pushed a feasibility study to determine whether affordable housing is even possible downtown with such a high price of land.
“I suspect that a feasibility study is going to tell us that we are not going to get a large amount of affordability on the most expensive real estate in town,” Sneddon said. “Those two just don’t seem to come together for me.”
The council voted 7-0, based on Sneddon’s motion, to initiate the analysis, and send maps to consultants and ask them to evaluate what sizes make sense based on the cost of land in various parts of town. Based on that, the city’s consultants would make suggestions for how to create developer incentives for greater affordable housing numbers.
In the meantime, the city will continue its controversial average unit-sized density incentive program, which gives developers the ability to build high-density housing projects as long as they are rental apartments. That program, however, has been hit-and-miss, with much of the rental housing that has been built out of reach for most Santa Barbarans.
Former Mayor Sheila Lodge, who is also a member of the city’s Planning Commission, spoke during public comment and said she was wary of using ratios to determine building sizes because each building should be evaluated on its own merits. She noted that there are only 12 buildings along State Street between Cabrillo Boulevard and Victoria Street that are two stories or more.
“Why should big building development be crammed into Santa Barbara’s downtown, completely changing its character?” Lodge said. “The city knows from the AUD high-density overlay experiment that except for the small number of inclusionary units, the rest will not be the kind of housing so badly needed.”
— Noozhawk staff writer Joshua Molina can be reached at jmolina@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.
