On Tuesday, November 19, the Santa Barbara City Council will decide whether to approve, deny, or require an environmental impact report for the second biggest hotel in the city, a 250-room hotel on the east side of the Funk Zone.
The city needs housing, not a massive new hotel in the Funk Zone. The city’s 1983 Specific Plan for the property authorized development for either housing, recreation, and open space, or a hotel. In a stroke of foresight, the Specific Plan required developers to prepare a housing impact study and include programs to minimize housing impacts.
The developer submitted a deeply flawed study, which justified including only six employee apartments for 60 hotel employees. The housing study assumptions conflict with local demographics and seek only to perpetuate current housing conditions, with 70 percent of the hotel staff expected to commute from outside of Santa Barbara. Even with their employee units and housing fund payments, the hotel will demonstrably worsen housing conditions in Santa Barbara. Housing constructed on this site could be subsidized by Funk Zone businesses for their employee housing and support the struggling artists and craftspeople that give the Funk Zone its flair.