City Plan Steps into Limelight

The draft of a new blueprint for the City of Santa Barbara will be presented by planning staff to the City Council December 11. Forty-two pages long and two years in the making, the proposed General Plan Update Framework would make sustainability the organizing principle for all future development in the city. “Santa Barbara is an ecosystem,” the policy report states, identifying “equity, environment, and economy” as keys to its sustainability.

The culmination of almost two years’ worth of Plan Santa Barbara public workshops, and unanimously approved in November by the city’s Planning Commission, the framework identifies unaffordable housing prices as an enemy of sustainability, along with overuse of single-occupancy vehicles both within the city and regionally. Accordingly, the framework would create more affordable housing by allowing more second or “granny” units, requiring downtown residential developments to provide only one parking space per unit, and reducing the size of dwelling units. It calls for each neighborhood to develop a unique Sustainable Neighborhood Plan to map out such features as housing types, neighborhood-serving businesses, street trees, creek restoration and access, and community gardens on vacant lots. It proposes a series of multimodal transportation hubs throughout the city.

In addition to these policy statements, the City Council will be asked to refer five potential growth scenarios for environmental review, each representing a different amount of commercial and residential development by the year 2030. One of these, known as the PlanSB Project, is the scenario described in the draft framework, the one that planning staff claims represents the consensus-or at least a happy medium-of the views expressed in the community workshops.