A recent Voices piece asked if it might be the man in the mirror who helped to create our current affordable housing crisis by buying and upgrading a house which had been an affordable rental. While it may sound like something you say to make yourself feel better, the fact is that if you had not bought your home, someone else would have. Even if it were still on the rental market, it would no longer be affordable. The housing shortage is national, but in Santa Barbara, it was our rapid conversion to a tourist-based economy that has made it a crisis.
When I came to Santa Barbara in the early '70s, it was a middle-class city of around 75,000, the middle-class incomes supported largely by UC Santa Barbara and the R&D firms in Goleta. Affordable rental housing was plentiful. Contrary to encouraging tourism, the City Council was exploring ways to limit growth. In 1973, they commissioned the “Impacts of Growth” study to examine how various levels of growth would affect our quality of life. The council chose 85,000 as an appropriate population goal. But as the council began downzoning residential areas and trying to find ways to curb commercial growth, something happened that would change everything: Fess Parker proposed a huge luxury hotel for the jungle across from East Beach. The property was legally zoned for commercial/hotel use, and Parker made many concessions — among them, the land to expand Chase Palm Park across Cabrillo Boulevard. The project was approved.
So, the Red Lion Inn (now the Hilton) was built, and the company needed to fill it. The hotel chain started promoting Santa Barbara as a destination vacation spot. Santa Barbara had never been that before; our limited tourism was made up primarily of people passing through on the 101 looking for a place to eat and relax, or visitors looking to see the Mission or enjoy the beach. There was no night life to speak of, and the waterfront was separated from downtown by the freeway. But when the Red Lion started bringing in thousands of tourists looking to enjoy Paradise, businesses responded.