Santa Barbara City Hall Throws in Towel on Charter Height Limit for La Cumbre Plaza Housing Project

Santa Barbara City Hall quietly threw in the towel on the primacy of its 60-foot building height limit — approved by city voters in in 1972 — over just-submitted plans to build 642 units of rental housing at the site of La Cumbre Plaza. In a conspicuously understated press release issued Tuesday morning, city public information officer Bryan Latchford acknowledged that state laws recently passed to promote the development of new housing legally trumped the city’s height limit. 

The developers, led by the father-son team of Jim and Matthew Taylor, have proposed building the rental units on an 8.7-acre chunk of the La Cumbre mall. Because 54 of those units are slated for very-low- to moderate-income tenants, state housing mandates give the Taylors the discretion to waive at least one local land-use restriction of their choosing. In this case, the Taylors have chosen to waive the city’s height limit. 

According to plans they have submitted, the Taylors are proposing to exceed the city’s height limit by 16.5 feet. When the Taylors first unveiled preliminary renderings of their proposal — then weighing it as 700 units — in late 2022, high-ranking city planners and then city attorney Sarah Knecht (now interim city administrator) insisted that the city’s voted-in height limitation superseded those state mandates. The charter, they noted, functions as the municipal equivalent of the constitution. The Taylors always insisted otherwise and late last year, they revealed City Hall had sent them a letter acknowledging they were correct. 

It’s worth noting that Knecht is now leading City Hall’s charge to work a deal with the real estate investment firm AB Commercial to transform most of downtown Santa Barbara’s Paseo Nuevo shopping center into 500 units of rental housing. While no details of the negotiations have yet been officially divulged, it’s all but certain that the city’s existing height limits will be portrayed as a deal-killer that would render the proposed housing development economically infeasible. 

Getting back to the Taylors’ development at La Cumbre — which bears the somewhat cumbersome handle, “The Neighborhood at State & Hope” — City Hall and the Taylors will be hosting the first community open house for the proposal on Wednesday, January 17, 5-7 p.m., at the Grace Fisher Foundation Inclusive Arts Clubhouse right across from Williams-Sonoma in the mall.