Housing costs in Santa Barbara are high. They are so high it's become cliché simply to say, “Housing costs are high.” As the first speaker at the recent city forum on the cost of living, I decided to focus squarely on housing rather than the living wage, though the forum sponsor was the city's Living Wage Advisory Committee.
We rarely give any explanation of how high that housing cost is. Instead of rolling our collective eyes and just talking about how cool it is to live here, we need to truly understand the problem to begin to address it. For many who have lived here 20 or more years, it’s hard to understand. They acquired their houses back before the run-up in prices and don’t face the same issues as the majority of people trying to make a go of it.
So how bad is it? To find out, I’ve gone to a “cost of living” calculator. This system takes into account all of the factors that determine the cost of living in a place, everything from the price of energy to food to entertainment. Generally, these systems have 90-100 data points, which are gathered in cities across the country, then compared to one another. In each category, a median price is found, and that price is set at 100 points. All other prices are then assigned a point value based on that median price — and a score is determined.