[Noozhawk’s note: Second in a series. Click here for the first commentary.]
In the late 1980s, Nike launched the famous “Bo Knows” commercial, which combined a Bo Diddley soundtrack with footage of Bo Jackson cross-training and testimonials from several professional athletes saying that Jackson could do anything they could do, perhaps even better (e.g., Michael Jordan proclaiming “Bo knows basketball”).
The penultimate scene shows Jackson playing a guitar solo on stage with Diddley, implying that Bo even knows guitar.
In the 21st century, it is not Bo who knows, but AI.
In Part I of our series exploring whether artificial intelligence should replace the Santa Barbara City Council, we demonstrated that “AI knows” that rent control does not work, unlike council members Kristen Sneddon, Wendy Santamaria, Oscar Gutierrez and Meagan Harmon.
Rather than pursue rent control, AI advised the council to improve housing affordability by increasing housing supply and reducing construction costs.
In this second installment of our series, we asked AI to elaborate on its prior advice to the council by making specific recommendations.
Question: What policies should the City of Santa Barbara pursue to increase housing supply?
Answer: ChatGPT asserted that the three most impactful policies the city could adopt to increase housing supply would be (1) changing zoning to permit residential development and greater density, (2) speeding up permitting processes and reducing regulatory and related costs, and (3) further incentivizing and streamlining adaptive reuse and infill housing projects.
Without any additional prompting from us, ChatGPT also felt compelled to remind us that although “rent controls or rent freezes (like recent temporary actions in Santa Barbara) address affordability for existing renters, they generally do not increase housing supply and can, according to many economists and landlords, deter future construction.”
Question: What policies should the City of Santa Barbara pursue to reduce housing construction costs?
Answer: Copilot first recommended that the city should incentivize the use of pre-fab housing built from alternate materials.
Copilot does not know Pearl Chase. But it does know that Santa Barbara’s regulatory climate discourages housing construction.
Its next recommendations, which echoed ChatGPT, were to streamline permitting, reduce fees, expand adaptive reuse, and modernize building and zoning codes.
When asked “which was the most important,” it stated that “streamlining approvals matters more than anything else.”
Is the regulatory climate here in Santa Barbara really that bad? To answer this question, we asked ChatGPT to compare Santa Barbara to Austin, Texas.
Austin’s unofficial motto is “keep Austin weird.” Not surprisingly, many locals use zoning, environmental and neighborhood character rules to resist development. Sound familiar?
Given the obvious parallels, you might expect that the regulatory climates in Santa Barbara and Austin would be similar. AI knows you would be mistaken.
Question: Does Austin, TX or Santa Barbara, CA impose more regulatory burdens on residential construction?
Answer: ChatGPT noted that “Santa Barbara, California generally imposes significantly heavier regulatory burdens on residential construction than Austin, Texas.” (emphasis added).
In a follow-up exchange, ChatGPT noted that these burdens — including permitting costs and lengthy project timelines — are significant contributors to the much higher construction costs in Santa Barbara than in Austin.
AI versus City Council
So how do the actions of the City Council stack up against AI’s recommended policies?
The city is not making tangible progress on the most important recommendation: streamlining permitting and reducing fees.
If it were, the council would have formed a public-private task force to make recommendations for slashing red tape and reducing fees, voted to implement those recommendations, and then tracked increases in the number of residential construction permits issued, the number of new residential units built, and the number of residential properties on the tax rolls.
We would see performance goals and metrics in the city budget for these and related data, regular news releases touting the city’s successes in these areas, and a dramatic increase in property tax collections.
None of this has happened.
Instead, the city appears to have been backsliding.
Residential building permit applications and grants have declined for the last three years. Property tax collections are barely outpacing inflation during the same period.
So the City Council has made about as much progress on improving housing affordability as it has on revitalizing State Street — one of the topics in our next installment of this series.
We asked AI how the council could turn things around. ChatGPT’s recommendation to the other members of the council for increasing the supply of affordable housing was to “be like Mike” — Councilman Mike Jordan — and vote for “streamlined approvals” and “strategic development.”
Unfortunately for the community, four members of the City Council — the majority of Gutierrez, Harmon, Santamaria and Sneddon — just (can’t) do it.
Two of these members — Gutierrez and Harmon — would likely argue that they are supporting other AI recommendations.
They would point to the recent Adaptive Reuse Ordinance and portions of the current Housing Element as evidence that the city is taking steps to increase housing supply and reduce construction costs.
Given the enormity of Santa Barbara’s housing shortfall, these baby steps are, at best, too little, too late.
Moreover, any positive impact they might have on affordable housing will be dwarfed by the damage that will be caused by the council’s reckless reliance on rent stabilization and rent control — the very policies that AI felt compelled to remind us will not increase the supply of affordable housing in Santa Barbara.
In the end, AI knows. And so does Bo … Diddley.
After listening to Bo Jackson playing guitar, the iconic commercial ends with his clever play on words: “Bo don’t know Diddley.”
The same can be said for the Santa Barbara City Council when it comes to increasing the supply of affordable housing.