Two nearly life-size crucifixes sprout off the walls of the Holy Cross parish auditorium, located at the heart of Santa Barbara’s Mesa neighborhood, and developer Ed St. George might well have thought he’d been nailed to one himself after a roomful of unruly, rambunctious, and decidedly dubious Mesa residents got through expressing their many doubts about his intentions late Monday evening. But St. George, 59, was hardly fazed. “I get the emotion,” he declared. “I love it.”
In person, St. George has almost as much self-confidence as he does money, which is to say a lot. During his 30 years as a big-time Isla Vista landlord, St. George managed to make enough to pay $34 million in cash to buy a cluster of seven apartment buildings last year at the intersection of Cliff Drive and Loma Alta Street on the Mesa. Now he wants to convert this holding — located on seven acres wedged between the east and west campuses of Santa Barbara City College — into a self-contained dorm community capable of housing up to 1,500 students. By contrast, less than one-third that number now occupy the 97 units that compose St. George’s recently refurbished Beach City, a much spruced-up incarnation of what had long been the accessibly dumpy Harbor Heights Apartments.
In their place, St. George hopes to create a legacy project he calls “Playa Mariposa” — Spanish for “Butterfly Beach” — which he described as “full service, high amenity, live-learn student housing.” In addition to the pods and clusters of dorm rooms, St. George is proposing to build a dining hall, café, mini mart, fitness center, playroom, and movie theater. Tenants will not be allowed to own cars, but their transportation needs will be served by Zipcars, ride shares, and bike shares.