This Land Is Your Land

When faced with a crisis, as we are with housing in our county, decision-makers are faced with many options. The easiest choice is to fall into the good vs. bad of the existing system that created the crisis. The approach I choose is to disrupt that system in order to prevent a bad situation from getting worse. And here’s how bad it is:

• Since the pandemic, rents and real estate have skyrocketed by over 30 percent, while wages have not kept up.
• The City of Santa Barbara is the most expensive small city in America for single-family-home rents.
• The County of Santa Barbara is the sixth most expensive county in the U.S.
• In the county, 42 percent of households fall below the real cost measure of what it actually takes to live here.

These stats are dire; we need to do something different, now. If we continue the same approach as we have in the past — relying on private developers to magically abandon their desire to make a profit and produce low-income housing — we risk making a horrible situation worse for the hard-working people who keep our community cohesive.

A silver bullet to change the dynamics of this crisis: Use publicly owned land — county land — for the most pressing public need: affordable housing.

Affordable housing is my driving force. Santa Barbara County must be a place where people can live where they work, rather than spend long commutes from less expensive areas. Supervisor Joan Hartmann and I partnered to come up with more innovative solutions. Together we worked to get 320 county units into the county’s housing plan. It’s a start, but it just scratches the surface of what our community needs.

On Monday, the state approved the county’s housing plan, a state-mandated process to ensure we have enough viable land to build housing to meet the needs of our community. It’s a plan I couldn’t support as it is now because I don’t believe it will solve our crisis. It places more than 3,000 new units (75 percent of the South County total) within a 3.5-mile radius in the Eastern Goleta Valley, impacting water, traffic, and quality of life. The bottom line is that the vast majority of this new housing will be well beyond what lower and moderate-income people can afford — the very people we need to help with housing. I am determined to make our housing plan better, beginning with adding more county-owned sites. I believe that the county has the power to do what’s right to meet our community’s pressing needs.

You may be as surprised to learn as I was that much of the 6,000-plus acres that the county owns are underutilized. Hundreds and hundreds of acres are either vacant or barely used — empty or single-level parking lots, buildings that have been shuttered for safety reasons, and plots of land that sit idle. In fact, the lot where I park every day for work takes up nearly a full city block in downtown Santa Barbara, perfect for affordable housing.

The smartest way we can meet our housing needs is for the county to pony up its own land. I agree with the League of Women Voters that all county parcels should be assessed for housing opportunities, and that’s what I’m working on.

Using county land to its full potential would do three things:

1. Prioritize affordability. If the price of land isn’t part of the equation because we already own it, building affordable housing is not only possible, it is exciting. Affordable housing means that food workers, school employees, young people, older people, families, everyone who makes our community run can live here.
2. Provide much-needed local workforce housing. Our local workforce needs housing and they need it now. The county has over 4,000 employees; a third of whom don’t live in the county because it’s too expensive. If we develop county land, we can help ensure the housing will go to local workers, not out-of-town investors. This approach has already been proven successful, demonstrated by the employee housing at Cottage Hospital and Westmont College. I commend their efforts.
3. Protect agricultural land and open spaces. The Eastern Goleta Valley is home to some of our most precious agricultural land and open spaces in South Santa Barbara County. Stripping away this land to make way for housing when there are plenty of other government spaces prime for development would drastically change the landscape of our community and alter our quality of life.

The use of government/public land is particularly necessary given that California did away with dedicated state-funded resources for low-income housing over a decade ago. I applaud other “system-disrupter” initiatives like the City of Santa Barbara’s leadership to leverage city, federal, and state dollars to build low-income housing. I also support a ballot measure that would bring in more public dollars as a force multiplier for existing grants.

The county is publicly owned land, funded by you — the taxpayers. Any housing development processes on county land would be transparent with opportunities for the public to weigh in. It’s imperative that the government lead by example and do our part in providing tangible solutions to the housing crisis we find ourselves in. I am proud to work for the county. Fundamentally, our county government has the ability and the responsibility to do more of what’s right for the community it serves.