PAINT IT BLACK: I was greatly reassured to read in the last issue of the Economist how Santa Barbara apparently has escaped the turbulence of the recent recession because of our old people, our NIMBYs, and our no-growthers. We haven’t lost that many jobs — at least compared to other parts of the state — because we never had that many to begin with. Likewise, young families have not experienced the agony of home foreclosure because Santa Barbara’s notoriously exclusive housing market had priced them out long ago. I’m sure for all the young people out there — and by Santa Barbara standards, that’s anyone younger than 50 — the revelation that things are even worse elsewhere will provide cold comfort indeed. No doubt the merchants celebrating their economic demise by holding going-out-of-business sales will take solace in the same.

Naturally, I am impressed with how well State Street landlords have conspired to downplay any connection between the recession and all the empty State Street storefronts. In fact, they insist it only seems like there are a lot of empty storefronts. And business owners — rather than going after the banks or their landlords for relief — have concluded their trouble lies with the growing number of homeless and street people. This being an election year, the City Council has pledged to pass a new and improved anti-panhandling ordinance, and city police — when not otherwise distracted by gang violence — have already escalated their efforts against the un-housed and the un-kempt. According to keepers of our Misery Index, no fewer than 11 homeless people have already died this year — murdered, accidentally asphyxiated, or done in by the elements — and it’s barely two months old.

But even the rich are not immune from the vicissitudes of the economic meltdown. One of Montecito’s grandest, most historic, and most celebrated estates — Val Verde — was scheduled to be auctioned off at the Courthouse steps one hour after high noon this Wednesday because its owners got $1.2 million behind on a $13 million loan. That sale will not take place, however, because Val Verde’s owners filed for bankruptcy last Friday afternoon, a move they hope will buy them an additional 18 months to sell off the property themselves for a cool $19 million.

Val Verde’s story is one of rare opportunities squandered, and speaks volumes to the awesome power of NIMBY-fueled mob rule, Montecito-style. Back in the 1990s, Val Verde’s owner, Dr. Warren Austin, decided he wanted to open his historic gardens — which occupy about half of Val Verde’s 17.5 acres — to the public and created a nonprofit foundation bearing his name to secure the necessary county permits. When looking a gift horse in the mouth, few communities on the planet are as formidably perverse as Montecito. And as gift horses go, Val Verde qualifies as a rare thoroughbred.

The gardens were designed by Lockwood de Forrest back in the 1920s, and in the world of landscape architects, he ranks as the equivalent of Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Pablo Picasso rolled into one. Back then, the estate was owned by the very gay Wright Ludington — an heir to a vast fortune based on timber and publishing — who operated his Montecito estate as a gathering place, intellectual refuge, and party palace for the global gay elites of the art and theater world.

Back in the day, Ludington hosted all the best parties for all the best people. His Sunday brunches were must-attend affairs even for straight Santa Barbara, and even the most prim and prudish were known to shed their clothes for a splash in Ludington’s pool. A world-famous art collector, Ludington was big into Greco-Roman art and statuary long before such work became the gay equivalent of Elvis on black velvet, and today his statues grace the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, which he was generous enough to found and fund. Even today, Santa Barbara remains very much a don’t ask, don’t tell community where discretion is prized over valor, and in that light, Ludington’s life — as well as his gardens — presents a compelling glimpse into another time and another world.

But some of Austin’s neighbors violently objected to opening up the gardens to the public. They argued that the prospect of Val Verde-bound visitors competing for space on Montecito’s maze of narrow roads and hairpin turns was too dangerous to contemplate. The notion of tour buses in the ’hood sent them into fits of collective apoplexy. For six years, they fought the proposal, tooth, claw, and nail. In 2000, they defeated it at the Board of Supervisors by a narrow 3-2 vote. For three more years, the battle over Val Verde raged through the courts. Austin, then an old man, died before it was done. But when the dust settled, his project was deader than he was, and his foundation’s endowment badly depleted.

The bankruptcy declaration by the Val Verde Foundation last week hammered the last nail into the coffin of Austin’s dream. In the days to come, many fingers will be pointed. Did the foundation managers blow it by taking out huge loans they couldn’t hope to repay? Or were they doomed no matter what, given the practical impossibility of raising funds for a space no one could visit? Perhaps it was Austin’s own fault that his project was denied. Even his admirers acknowledge that the man — who boasted of having married not one, but two billionairesses — was way too prickly, imperious, and full of himself for anyone’s own good. Or was the project really done, as some insist, by an insidiously homophobic whisper campaign that targeted Val Verde’s gay past?

Now is the time we could really use the crazy, ridiculous beauty of Val Verde’s garden. Notwithstanding the Economist’s relatively cheerful spin on Santa Barbara’s economy, we could all stand to stroll through a less troubled time, and enjoy, for just a millisecond, how the other .0001 percent lived. In the meantime, those who look a gift horse in the mouth run the risk of having their face chomped. Ouch.

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