The ongoing tariff war may seem far away, but its impacts soon may be felt by Santa Barbara businesses, which rely on imports and exports to make their products.

Tariffs were one of a few obstacles mentioned during the 2025 Santa Barbara County Economic Summit on Monday, where economic experts explained how the ongoing trade war could hurt businesses in Santa Barbara.

In his address, Peter Rupert, director of the UC Santa Barbara Economic Forecast Project, explained how the tariffs affect the prices of clothes.

The jeans he was wearing were purchased from Ace Rivington, a shop on State Street. Even though it is a local business that uses California cotton, the cotton is shipped to Italy to make the denim, and then shipped to Mexico to make the jeans.

Under the new tariffs, Rupert said companies such as Ace Rivington will pay more to operate. He also mentioned that his watch band was from a local business that purchases supplies from China.

“I think if we personalize it, we realize, ‘Hey, these are businesses we love here. We love them to be here. We want them to succeed,'” Rupert said.

He also raised the issue of Santa Barbara County’s weak employment rate, which is lower than the state and national levels. He added that the rate has been falling since 2000.

He continued by saying that retail, leisure and hospitality employment is also falling in Santa Barbara — a bad sign for a city that relies on tourism for income.

“We’ve seen very slow growth, actually, in employment. It’s something we should be worried about. (In) Santa Barbara, we’re not even back on pre-COVID levels, and it’s still falling,” Rupert said.

Another speaker was Lee Ohanian, an economics professor at UCLA and senior fellow at Stanford University.

Ohanian discussed the rising costs of housing. He shared a statistic showing that the median home price in California is now $884,000. That number is 115% higher than the national average, and only 16% of California households can afford it, according to the California Association of Realtors.

In Santa Barbara, the median price for a home is $1.4 million.

Ohanian attributed the rising costs to stricter regulation at the state level. He believes that the amount of regulation makes it harder for developers to build and slows down projects.

Even though new housing laws have been passed to encourage building, Ohanian said they have not been effective, and there are fewer private building permits than before those laws were passed.

“Over 100 new housing laws have been passed in Sacramento over the last few years to try to create new housing and reduce costs, but they haven’t really moved the needle, because unless you reduce the cost of building, we cannot legitimately reduce the cost of California housing,” Ohanian said.

He also discussed homelessness in California. Despite investing $37 billion into housing programs since 2019, the number of homeless people in the state has continued to climb, he said.

The official number for homeless people in California is about 186,000, which is up by 60% since 2015, according to Ohanian.

Near the end of the summit, Rupert shared a graph detailing the United States’ real Gross Domestic Product, or purchasing power, which he says is still good. He explained that the graph has mostly gone up over the last century with two “wiggles” during the Great Depression and World War II.

He added that the economy is extremely resistant to presidents.

“How many bad presidents have we had since World War II? How many good ones? They’re little wiggles,” Rupert said. “The presidents are little wiggles. That’s what they are.”