I’d like to explain why we should be building housing.
In Santa Barbara, people tend to look at housing as a closed system. People claim that if we allow our city to grow in population, it will increase traffic and pollution, and that we don't have enough water for more people. This has resulted in little to no population growth in the city for 30 years; many anti-housing people might tell you we've avoided catastrophe.
However, if we look at the statistics, we see a different story. Around 40,000 people commute into the City of Santa Barbara each day as of 2021. That's 71.3 percent of people who work in the city. Further analysis shows that around a third of these people live more than 50 miles away. Meanwhile, the populations of Santa Maria, Lompoc, Ventura, and Oxnard have increased by the tens of thousands, collectively. This happened because although we limited housing production, jobs continued to grow. At the same time, when a teacher or nurse in Santa Barbara retires and sells their home, it is often bought by someone in a higher socioeconomic strata. This means that the new teacher or nurse has to live somewhere else.
