Where to Store a Trailer or a Boat?

Santa Barbara County has been mandated to produce a certain amount of low-income housing to help solve the housing crisis in California. In Stuart Kasdin’s commentary about the unsuitability of many of the sites primarily located in Goleta along western Hollister Avenue, he states that the decisions regarding the choices of property sites to be developed are “neither fair nor equitable.”

An additional argument can be made regarding the site at 469 South Kellogg Way in Goleta. The property is listed as “underutilized,” but in fact it is completely utilized as the only major vehicle storage site in the Santa Barbara area, containing approximately 200 work trucks, trailers, boats, RVs, campers, and other storage.

In doing research as to where these vehicles could be stored if the property were mandated for construction, only one available site was located in Carpinteria. This leaves Santa Paula or Santa Maria as alternatives.

If this property is to be mandated for construction and all of those vehicles have to be relocated, that event would impose an irreconcilable challenge to the residents of the Santa Barbara area, who have not even the resources to store them where they live, being that most of Santa Barbara residences are shared housing, apartments, and condos. Even the low-income housing on the property does not allow enough on-site parking for the residents.

Local government must seek this needed land from the entire community, and the entire community must embrace the need to provide housing for the thousands of commuters who brave the freeways from Lompoc and Oxnard to provide businesses with the support staffs that they are desperate for, just in order to keep their doors open.

Just making housing for upper-income residents who move here from other areas won’t work; these people require even more support people to keep their lives together. This goes to worsen the problem.

If Goleta is ready to submit those listed properties to the state to satisfy the quota demanded, then they should be prepared that this will just create other problems, and that voters vote.

How about building on the News-Press printing press site instead? Who needs it for printing a newspaper?