Is housing a real problem?

BY LORETTA REDD
Einstein opined that, “We cannot solve the problems we have created with the same thinking that created them.”
As residents spend hours in guided conversation with neighbors, planning specialists, and City employees, they are being encouraged to ‘think outside the box’ to solve the problem of growth and housing, The entire premise of YouPlanSanta Barbara is that we are running out of housing for those who should be able to live here.

“Whoa, Nelly..,” just who got to determined that there is a problem to actually solve?
We have busied ourselves generating recommendations for permutations on mass transit, downtown density, rapid rail and other urban ‘au currant’ idea, based on models, analyses, and projections, while being somewhat oblivious to a variety of failed social experiments within a few hours drive.
A 2006 posting to Reason.org, argued that Smart Growth is at the heart of the unaffordable living in Santa Barbara, where after 30 years of “strict environmental regulations and tough growth management laws…the city ranks among the least affordable in California, has virtually stagnant population growth in the city, is experiencing rapidly rising congestion, and is experiencing an exodus of businesses to more affordable areas.” The unafforability, they surmise, is the consequence of “policies that restricted housing supply and land development.”
That argument, of course, ignores the impact of changes in demand, brought about by a runaway housing bubble, whose burst has splattered even well-heeled Montecito.
“Whoa Nelly, I haven’t seen this many real estate sandwich boards, crowding every sidewalk and neighborhood intersection, since this economic run-up began.”
Another article declared that the Oregon Smart Growth and New Urbanist policies create housing that is less affordable. “Smart Growth is at its heart a movement that is asking Americans to change their behavior by giving up cars, backyards and single-family homes.”
Not surprisingly, most of those invested in this vision of a new America are either so young that backyards are irrelevant because ‘single’ hasn’t’ yet become ‘family,’ or are unable to afford a car to ‘give up’ even if they wanted to.
A few years back, ARCNews, an information page for architects, heralded SLEUTH, a digital growth model which looks at the impact of urbanization on global change. Such visualization, brought to us largely by UCSB’s Chair of the Department of Geology, Dr. Keith Clarke, used the assessors parcel maps to project impacts of unrestricted growth.
UCSB has also offered a planning course for over a quarter of a century. The course description begins, “Although the forces of natural systems are perceptually slow and change is subtle, with occasional abrupt events, humans are generally oblivious to the environment that supports them…Adaptation should not mean serious decline in quality of life, which is where planning enters stage right, as most issues confronting both the global environment and humanity can be connected in some way to the cumulative impacts associated with the use of land.”
While UCSB tackles ways to adapt the global environment to humanity’s needs, here at home, we struggle with less heady, but still impacting issues of housing and the meaning of sustainability for the population of our city.
If density brings people together, zoning is what separates them. Our ‘affordable unit’ experiment has failed in Santa Barbara, bringing a paltry number of price controlled dwellings at the cost of view obliterating, multi-million dollar (now un-sellable) condominiums. Those behemoths, which once ‘penciled out’ for everyone from planners to developers to Council, now sit empty in the current downturn.
But to the rescue comes the current Smart Growth envisionists, with even higher density, but at a lower price tag. “If any principle provides underpinning of Smart Growth, it’s density- multistory homes around rail stations, on bus corridors and at the heart of urbanized areas.”
“Whoa, Nelly...,” has anyone looked to our south recently? In 2007, the average speed of the widely used bus service had slowed to 11.7 miles per hour. My 18 year old cocker spaniel walks faster than that!
In the past year in Los Angeles, the planning department has approved over eight thousand units, all within 1500 feet of a transit stop to accommodate ‘new’ residents. Remaking the city on such a dramatic scale has residents of the “City too busy to hate,” spewing smoke, if not exhaust fumes, out of its ears.
“Buses, which will serve in many ways as the backbone of smart growth, are stuck in traffic along with everybody else,” writes David Zahniser in the LA Weekly. “Advocates of smart growth are making a second risky bet, arguing that once someone makes a home in a condo or a multistory apartment building, he or she will work nearby—reducing the number of cars on traffic-choked streets.”
The article got me to wondering if our local proponents of bringing the ‘new urbanization’ to our downtown areas and ‘traffic corridors’ actually live in anything vaguely resembling density housing.
Nope.
Though our city council draws its home owning members from a variety of neighborhoods, such as the Westside, Downtown, and Mesa, the one renter among them lives in a single family dwelling along the hillside of the Riviera. I’m certain most of the planning committee members and Architectural Board of Review folks have also chosen the highly restricted R-1 zoning lifestyle.
To be fair, the smart growth and urban planning is ‘working,’ however, in the city of Pasedena (population 146,000) which has added 42 high density housing developments to its business district. But Pasedena doesn’t have the gorgraphic restriction so ocean and mountain, and it is sufficiently spread out to warrant rapid rail. Even there, the number of cars hasn’t decreased, as people dare to accept jobs outside of walking distance, or simply want transportation to use on weekends, when they are out looking at dream homes in the R-1 neighborhoods of Bungalow Heaven, Garfield Heights or the Historic Highlands.
The premise that we can build a city that will ‘accommodate’ all that might wish to live here, is defying Einstein’s theories. The YouPlan densification, masked as ‘Smart Growth,’ is being driven mostly by young workers at the lower end of the pay scale (though our government pay scales are incredibly generous,) and to some degree, by those representing the hourly laborers entering the job force from other cities or countries.
Before we rely on SLEUTH, or models of livability already failing in other cities, lets first do the most logical and politically suicidal task of all: let’s determine an accurate census count for the city of Santa Barbara, and an accurate dwelling assessment.
Only then, can we determine is ‘Smart Growth’ is an opportunity or an oxymoron.

Loretta Redd's column appears every Tuesday in the Daily Sound and every Wednesday online at thedailysound.com. You can e-mail her at Loretta@thedailysound.com