For five and a half grueling hours, the Santa Barbara City Council dissected the byzantine permit history of a sprawling four-story boxy, perpendicular, modern-looking mixed-use, high-density rental housing project that will forever alter the profile and course of development of Milpas Street. At times, the council proceedings felt more like a forensic autopsy; the only thing missing, it seemed, was a corpse. Ultimately, the council would vote 5-2 to give project developer Alan Bleecker and his architect Detty Peikert the green light that the city’s Architectural Board of Review (ABR) had voted last November to deny.
The showdown — simultaneously theatrical, entertaining, confusing, infuriating, and exhausting — highlighted the intractable tensions on the South Coast between the desperate need for additional rental housing and Santa Barbara’s historic insistence on low-impact, smaller-scale development. Inflaming this tension further are new state housing laws — passed in response to California’s escalating housing emergency — that threaten to strip local governments of all discretionary authority over housing developments.
It will take a long time for the dust on Tuesday night’s vote to settle, if it ever does. Both sides argued that their due-process rights had been violated. Both sides accused the other of bad-faith and bait-and-switch tactics. Both sides, in their own ways, were right. Both walked away nursing wounds of outrage. After Tuesday night, the city’s controversial, experimental, high-density AUD rental housing program — short for Average Unit-Size Density — just got even more controversial. Lining up against it were not just the surviving remnants of the city’s original slow-growth establishment — for whom “quality of life” was a mantra — but a new breed of neighborhood activists who are uncommonly tough, smart, confrontational, theatrical, and, when it comes to City Hall, totally distrustful.