Isla Vista historian Carmen Lodise retired to a small coastal city in Mexico in 2005, but his heart has remained in the small coastal hamlet next door to UC Santa Barbara. From a 64-page pamphlet to a popular website collection, Lodise's annals of I.V. have now led to the second edition of his Isla Vista: A Citizen's History. The new edition contains a foreword from "homeboy Das Williams," as Lodise said in an email chat, an edited version of which follows:
How'd you cover Isla Vista from afar? I wasn’t in touch as I had been for 30 years, so I recruited people close to the action and asked them to write nine new chapters for the book, among them about I.V. Food Co-op, the Youth Projects, the jugglers’ club, Frank Thompson’s brilliant analysis of the rise and fall of the redevelopment agency and the creation of the community center, and, of course, the establishment of a Community Services District as chronicled by its lead organizer, Jonathan Abboud.
The weirdness of the so-called Deltopia “riot” is a new chapter, the Rodger shootings of 2014, and Melinda Burns’s remarkable article about I.V.’s housing market being an investor’s “paradise."