Throughout the late 1950s, the UCSB student population increased and new buildings were quickly built on campus. Meanwhile, Isla Vista was working hard to get its act together.

A sewer system was finally installed, old shacks were being demolished and properties were being cleaned up. Some property owners wanted to move old houses from Santa Barbara to their Isla Vista lots, but most residents protested against that and the university agreed.

UCSB requested that the county monitor all development on the perimeter of the campus, so the county passed a design regulation to cover all of Isla Vista.

But the county also allowed exceptions to most every request on lot density to allow for much-needed university housing. This would become a trend that could not be reversed.

The tireless efforts of the Isla Vista property owners was beginning to pay off, and property values skyrocketed.

The entrance road name was officially changed to El Colegio Road. By the late 1950s, even UCSB couldn’t afford the land to build a fraternity and sorority row, leaving them to fend for themselves in Isla Vista. This would cause problems for future residents that had to live next door to the Greek houses.

UCSB has had a housing problem since the day it opened. In 1954, very little housing existed in Isla Vista and even the whole Goleta Valley. As the enrollment increased, the housing could never keep up.

When there was a housing boom in Goleta in the late 1950s, the majority of those were filled with employees of the new research and development companies opening in Goleta. To make matters worse, the UC Regents announced they were increasing enrollment of UCSB to 10,000 students.

The university came under fire for not providing safe housing for its female students. Multiple male students could pile into small houses or apartments, but the college was held accountable for the safety and supervision of the female students.

To remedy this, the dean of students recruited a Los Angeles developer to build some apartment buildings specifically for female students.

The Tropicana Gardens, Fountainbleu and Westgate apartments were opened specifically for females with security entrances, pools, cafeterias, and even a beauty parlor.

Around this time the university also hired a reputable architectural and planning firm from L.A. to help formulate a future housing plan. The “Santa Barbara Campus Community Study” took a year to complete, and when it was unveiled it proposed a stadium, a golf course, and turning the slough into a small boat harbor.

Isla Vista, however, still presented a problem, even to these highly acclaimed experts. With the over 500 separate land owners, poorly designed streets, expensive utilities and high taxes, the expert suggestion was to designate it an “Urban Renewal District,” bulldoze it and start from scratch.

But it was too late for that. The door had been opened for less reputable and more aggressive developers to come in.

Before long, apartment buildings were popping up and the overwhelming demand for more student housing forced the county to agree to only one parking space per unit.

An article written by a popular real estate columnist in 1959 pointed out how Isla Vista was an unplanned “hodge-podge,” full of developers out to make a quick buck building “cracker boxes” with no style.

The dream of Isla Vista becoming a charming seaside community was drifting further out to sea.

The 1960s brought more of the same. Aggressive developers from out of town had joined the Isla Vista Improvement Association. and they had a dominating influence on the planning.

Jack Schwartz was the most prominent developer, and he led the others with “bulldog tactics.” By 1967, Schwartz was instrumental in the approval of a new ordinance for the already overpacked neighborhood.

An “S” designation for student housing would further reduce the parking requirement for new developments to less than one space per unit! An obviously bad decision that would haunt the community forever.

Schwartz also led the charge to change duplex-zoned parcels to multiple-unit zoning. One Realtor who specialized in Isla Vista sales was quoted as saying, “We’ll build until we run out of room. Then it will go to high rise apartments.”

He wasn’t wrong.

Those tiny blufftop lots the Ilharreguys had laid out for oil wells were sold in groups to make them big enough to build apartment buildings on them.

No one was concerned about building on the constantly deteriorating cliffs. In fact, the structures were built closer to the cliffs to provide parking in front. Developers were blinded by the promise of short-term profits.

Meanwhile, the commercially zoned property around the Embarcadero Loop failed to develop in an orderly fashion, and was also a random hodge-podge of style and uses.

A volatile combination of greed and power was building this little village by the sea. The university and its unending desire to enroll more and more students and the developers that were eager to provide that housing for the ever increasing population.

Meanwhile, a tidal wave of social change was about to break on Isla Vista.

By the mid-1960s California was a boiling pot of youth culture. Isla Vista became a natural stopping point for hitchhikers who were traveling between Southern California and San Francisco. Its beautiful location by the beach, lack of oversight, and booming population of young likeminded people made I.V. a groovy destination for hippies.

It was a great place to “turn on, tune in, and drop out.” Local folklore says Jim Morrison of The Doors wrote the song “The Crystal Ship” while tripping on acid and staring at the bright lights of platform Holly, just off the Isla Vista coast.

Due to the close proximity of a major university, some big name counterculture speakers came to the coffee houses and parks of Isla Vista, attracting large crowds of energized youth.

The Vietnam War, the mandatory draft, the sexual revolution, the Civil Rights Movement, groundbreaking music, and experimental drug use were all factors that contributed to the social climate in the overcrowded little beach town.

Folks in Santa Barbara and Goleta became uncomfortable with all the open drug use and drug dealing, so a heavy police presence began appearing in I.V.

When the Magic Lantern Theater was raided by authorities and temporarily shut down for showing obscene films, tension between the students and “The Establishment” climbed higher.

All the tension through the end of the 1960s came to a head in 1970 when Lefty Bryant, a popular local activist, was arrested. A large, angry crowd formed in the Embarcadero Loop and started vandalizing property and real estate.

Local police were reinforced by an overly aggressive police force from Los Angeles, setting off a series of violent riots in Isla Vista.

The ongoing riots built up to a frenzy, resulting in the burning of the Bank of America in Isla Vista. This event made headlines across the nation and resulted in a heavy handed-military police presence. Months of violent protests and riots dragged on through the summer of 1970.

Plenty has already been written about the I.V. riots and the burning of the bank, so we won’t go into much more detail here. But look for Joe Melchione’s photos, as he captured the essence of it all. Riot police in the foreground, preparing to face the students in the distance, with the cheap Isla Vista apartments as a backdrop.

Eventually, a student would be killed by police, causing even more riots and resulting in then-Gov. Ronald Reagan sending the National Guard in to get control of Isla Vista.

More civil unrest happened around the state, and many people thought this was the beginning of a civil war, but thankfully things soon settled down.

After the riots, the UC Regents issued the “Trow Report” that had recommendations for the university to provide more community services, more housing for the students in Isla Vista, and to limit the student population.

Limiting registration at UCSB was probably easy to do after newspapers all across the U.S. had been featuring college-aged kids getting brutally beaten by authorities for months on end.

To make matters worse, a couple months after the riots settled down three young men sleeping on the beach at Isla Vista are brutally attacked, two of them dying on the scene. Nothing was stolen from the victims, and the case was never solved. Another reason the enrollment at UCSB took a dive for several years to come.

The Trow Report discovered what any student of history would have already known. The overbuilding and overcrowded conditions in Isla Vista were a big reason for the social unrest, and it put the blame squarely on the university and the county.

The report was especially hard on UCSB, pointing out how the university had ignored Isla Vista and they needed to actively participate in improving the quality of life there.

Several other studies were implemented, and the general conclusion was that the residents of Isla Vista had no control over their own community.

Moving forward, Isla Vista received funding from the county and the university to create more civil organizations, like a medical clinic, a credit union, a community council and a foot patrol.

The revitalized community was thought of optimistically as a “laboratory of social change.” A renewed optimism and sense of community came to Isla Vista.

Teepees (or tipis) started popping up in the 1960s. A perfect setup for a hippy on the move, they could simply pick up their tipi and move if or when the landowner objected.

In the late 1970s, Carmen Lodise says there were over 60 tipis in I.V., a direct response to the huge rent increases caused by the skyrocketing enrollment numbers at UCSB.

More than 20 of the tipis were in “Tipi Village” on a vacant lot on Sueno Road. They lived there happily for a while, eating vegetables from community gardens, and claiming it was low impact living, environmentally sound and better for the planet.

Unfortunately, some neighbors disagreed, and the authorities shut the village down for sanitation reasons, despite several organized demonstrations to save them. Today there is a sign on the site, commemorating the Tipi Village.

A lot did change for the better in Isla Vista in the coming decades, but the underlying fabric of the community was profit, from its inception. The narrow streets, overbuilt lots and lack of parking continue to be problematic issues to this day.

Another long-lasting product of the greed-fueled overdevelopment are the unsafe conditions on the Del Playa bluffs.

This story from 1968 mentions an earlier report from 1962 that determined the cliffs were eroding rapidly, well before most of the building along the bluffs was even started.

By 1971, most of the tiny, oil-drilling lots on the Del Playa bluffs were built on, most dangerously close to the edge. Most didn’t take advantage of the lot space toward Del Playa to allow for parking.

The cliff erosion and what to do about it has been an issue of debate for as long as there has been housing on the blufftops.

Mother Nature doesn’t seem to care, one way or the other. She just keeps doing her thing. But time is running out for a lot of these units.

Through the years, several attempts to make Isla Vista a city have failed. When Goleta finally became a city, they went to great lengths to ensure the troubled I.V. was not within their city limits.

With such a fluctuating population every year, it will probably never be anything more than an unincorporated bedroom community for UCSB students.

Fortunately, community organizations still play a large role in Isla Vista today, and the beachside location still makes it a lovely place to live.

The young energetic population of Isla Vista has never been short on creativity. Lots of famous rock bands like Rebelution, Lagwagon, Ugly Kid Joe, Jack Johnson, and Iration all say they started out playing parties in I.V.

Several very successful businesses also started on these crowded streets.

A kid with frizzy red hair nicknamed “Kinko” got a $5,000 loan from the Bank of America in 1969, right before it was burned down. His business Kinko’s grew to be worth billions before being bought out by FedEx.

Another popular local business started in I.V. The owners chose the name Rusty’s because the sign on the building was already there. They simply cut the words “roast beef” off and started making the best darn pizza in town.

Isla Vista continues to occasionally make national news for all the wrong reasons. The attraction of a small beach town full of young people continues to draw crowds from all around the nation, often resulting in mayhem.

The local authorities continue to wrestle with controlling the latest Big Party, from Halloween to Deltopia, and they are usually outnumbered.

UCSB being named the Best Party School, year in and year out, certainly doesn’t help. With throngs of rowdy out-of-towners added to the terminal overpopulation of a town teetering on the edge of the Pacific, any number of things can go wrong. Especially when you add alcohol.

Isla Vista has been a constant in this author’s life. As a child in the 1960s, my mother forbade me from going “out there.”

As a teenager, that’s where we scored beer. As a college student, it was party central. And as an adult, it is a town I rarely visit.

When making this page, I paid a visit and saw that while there were more corporate chains than ever before, I.V. is essentially the same old town. Small, dirty, crowded and bustling with activity, and the Eucalyptus Curtain, planted by the Den brothers, is barely hanging in there.

It appears the future for Isla Vista will be more of the same since UCSB continues to increase enrollment and ignore the housing problem they create. Most likely the next phase for development will be demolishing the old, cheaply made apartments and replacing them with new, taller, cheaply made apartments.

What would the Ilharreguys think of the result of their little plan for a seaside community? It was created out of a desire to make a profit, and surely thousands of investors have done just that. So, in that respect, it was a success.

But they had no way of knowing a major university would pop up right next door, drastically changing the course of history forever.

In spite of it all, Isla Vista is still a naturally beautiful place with a perfect climate, and nothing will ever change that.

For a heavily illustrated version of this story, go to www.goletahistory.com.
 
Sources- Walker Tompkins, Wikipedia, Isla Vista Free Press, Jon Erlandson, A Canyon Through Time, Mark Rochester, UCSB, Jennifer Hildreth Strand, Signal Hill Historical Society, Santa Barbara Library, Santa Barbara News-Press, human.libretexts.org, Adam Lewis, Tom Lagerquist photos, Isla Vista Free Press, Carmen Lodise, Goleta Valley Sun, Rustyspizza.com, Santa Barbara Independent, John Wiley, Localwiki, Peter Meissner.