By most standards, Santa Barbara’s high-density housing experiment has been nothing short of a wild success. In just three years, the program’s grab bag of incentives accomplished what city planners struggled to achieve for decades — usher builders away from luxury condos and stimulate the development of smaller, more affordable apartments. Thirty-six new high-density projects now sit on the horizon, representing potential relief for workforce renters priced out of the city’s drum-tight housing market. But for some Santa Barbara leaders, even those who helped shape the magic formula that’s given rise to the building boom, the experiment is working too well.
Last week, in an op-ed piece published in this paper, Councilmember Bendy White asked City Hall to pause and reevaluate its Average Unit-Size Density (AUD) Incentive Program, a policy hatched in 2013 out of prolonged negotiations between slow-growth and smart-growth advocates involved in the city’s General Plan update. Both sides agreed that housing needs had reached critical levels — vacancy rates were dipping below 0.5 percent — but they had a hard time finding a solution. Parking became the sticking point. It was some deft political maneuvering by White around his more conservative pro-car colleagues that led to the compromise wherein developers would be allowed to squeeze more units per acre into their projects and offer fewer parking spots per unit. The double hit of increased density and added building space proved potent investment catnip.
White’s concerns that the AUD is moving too fast too soon crystallized when he read a Planning Division report in late March that highlighted pending and approved projects under the new program, which includes a test phase of eight years or 250 completed units. “The numbers took my breath away,” White said. Over the last six years, the city added 455 total housing units, including single-family homes, multifamily condo complexes, and low-income residences. At the moment, there are 1,308 units in the pipeline, 753 of which are AUD rental projects; two AUD units have been certified for occupancy, 132 are under construction, 166 have been approved, and 421 are pending review.