Just Do It: Santa Barbara Foundation Launches Affordable Housing Campaign

LIVIN’ AND GIVIN’ LARGE:  Contrary to popular misconception, it was not Albert Einstein who said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results,” now referred to as Einstein’s Parable of Quantum Insanity. The self-appointed nitpickers and bubble-bursters who inhabit the World Wide Web have ascertained there’s no evidence Einstein ever said such a thing. The identity of who did still remains a mystery. It’s possible the phrase — now recited by at least one out of every three people who testify in front of the Santa Barbara City Council — first appeared in an Al-Anon tract first published in 1981.

It doesn’t matter who said it. Whoever did, they were wrong. 

The real definition of insanity is not doing something over and over and expecting different results. I can attest to the veracity of this from personal experiences that will never be shared with anyone not intoxicated. The good news — at least when it comes to Santa Barbara’s radioactively insane rental-housing market — is that the Santa Barbara Foundation has now officially announced it will stop not doing anything. 

That means a lot. Maybe, in fact, everything. For those unfamiliar with it, the Foundation is the 80,000-pound gorilla in Santa Barbara’s zoo of philanthropies and nonprofits. It’s so old and established that its boardmembers’ idea of lingerie is a seersucker suit. 

This Wednesday, the Foundation issued a Red Alert/DEFCON 1 call-to-arms to all other philanthropies and nonprofits — not to mention local governments and private investors — to also stop not doing anything. The folks at the Foundation (don’t you hate how the word “folks” has been misappropriated by folks who are not in the least bit folksy to insinuate a down-home authenticity not allowed for by their DNA?) held a press conference this week in which they released a 40-page document bursting with more specific suggestions than a forest of sticks.

For starters, the Foundation called for putting a county-wide bond measure on the ballot to help fund affordable housing. In Santa Clara, such a bond resulted in the construction of 2,800 new housing units, with another 2,500 awaiting lift-off. 

The report also suggested a ballot measure within Santa Barbara city limits to increase the bed taxes now charged by hotels and motels and using the proceeds to underwrite the cost of affordable housing. 

It identified 222 parcels owned throughout the county by faith-based organizations that could be used for housing development. Apparently, there’s a new movement: Yes in God’s Backyard, a k a “YIGBY.” All the school districts combined own another 83 properties, with nonprofit colleges and universities controlling 92 additional parcels.

That’s nearly 400 parcels bursting with potential. 

Then there’s the vast ocean of existing rental housing that’s affordable because it’s big and run-down and whose occupants are now at serious risk of renoviction. (This housing also has its own acronym: Naturally Occurring Affordable Housing, a k a NOAH.) The Foundation calculates there are 300 multifamily apartment complexes throughout the county with 6,500 rental units for people making less than 80 percent of the area’s average median income. For big private equity funds looking for big, splashy returns, these are irresistibly big targets. That 80 percent figure, by the way, includes households bringing in as much as $112,000 a year and includes nurses, firefighters, and dental hygienists. In Santa Barbara, this 80 percent sector qualifies as “low income.” 

In short, the Foundation found that an average wage earner now has to make $47 an hour to afford Santa Barbara’s average monthly rent of $2,447. Unfortunately, our wage earners take home — on average — $29.82 an hour. Little wonder that 55 percent of Santa Barbara renters spend more than one-third their take-home on housing, and 30 percent spend more than half. Little wonder hospitals can’t find nurses and all businesses struggle to find workers. Even the city’s new chief of police — not a poorly paid position — experienced toxic sticker shock when dipping her toe into Santa Barbara’s rental market.

The Foundation is suggesting its vast wealth — and that of other philanthropies — can be tapped to underwrite low-income loans to either build new housing or to affordably rehabilitate places at risk of gentrification. 

But in many ways, the Foundation report calls to mind the adapted famous last words of labor organizer Joe Hill shortly before being shot in 1915 by a Utah firing squad for a murder he did not commit: “Don’t mourn, organize!” Hill then reportedly shouted, “Fire!” He also told a friend to bury his body across the state line, explaining, “I don’t want to be caught dead in Utah.” 

That happened four years after Foundation founder Max Fleischmann, who made his gazillions manufacturing and marketing yeast and gin, first visited Santa Barbara with a string of polo ponies in tow. Before he was done, Fleischmann would build three polo fields bearing his name, own 22 yachts, and generously bamboozle the city into building the breakwater. He hunted big game around the world so enthusiastically that he decorated his Lambert Road estate with an elephant’s-foot trash can and a tiger-skin table. For a while, Fleischmann owned a piece of the Cincinnati Reds; others in his family would bankroll the creation of The New Yorker magazine. 

If Fleischmann was all about living large, he was equally extravagant about giving large. He founded the Foundation in 1928, and now, 95 years later, when the Foundation whispers, people listen.

Right now, the Foundation is talking. Maybe even shouting. Not doing anything is no longer an option. It wants to fund advocacy organizations — existing and new — to help to shatter our paralytic fatalism when it comes to housing. The time has come to not not do anything anymore. 

They’re not crazy. And it doesn’t take an Einstein to figure that out.