She met me in the driveway we share and asked me to put a letter in my mailbox to be picked up by the postman. Sure, I said. Be happy to. I’ll put the little flag up.
She explained that the postman never stops at their mailbox these days. But I already knew that. No one has had their mail delivered there for several years. A lot of people have stayed there, but no one has lived there.
Although we’re next-door neighbors, I don’t know her name, though she has stayed there a week or so. I expect she and her friend will be gone soon.
Their downtown place is more like lodging than housing these days. At the beginning of the pandemic, the house was sold to an investor from San Jose. Since then, it has been sold again to another investor from Colorado. They paid a lot for it. No one working in Santa Barbara would buy it to live in. It’s too much. And no one working in Santa Barbara can afford to rent it either. Tourists rent it by the month, sometimes a little less.
There is a lot of discussion these days about building more housing. Housing that people could live in. It is hard to be against something like that when every young person you know has no opportunity to buy anything.
Even folks who make a nice living can’t buy here. My dermatology office can’t keep doctors. They come for a while, get tired of living in a small apartment, then move away.
Over the past several years, multiple houses have been listed for sale in our neighborhood, and most have ultimately sold. But never to someone who has moved in and actually goes to work here. None that I know of. For many of the houses, no one has ever moved in at all.
They have become short term or monthly rentals or second homes. They are owned by people or LLCs that hold them as investments to be maximized or set aside for a future wonderful get away. They are no longer part of the neighborhood. They are in fact no longer housing. They are lodging at best. More likely, they are items on a balance sheet.
A few months ago, I read that the richest one percent of Americans now have a combined net worth more than the total value of all residential property in the United States. A few people could in fact own everything.
So, if we build more market-rate places for people to stay, we’re not necessarily building more homes. Santa Barbara is a desirable destination for wealthy folks and investors from all over the world. And that’s a lot of people.
Until the house prices of Santa Barbara come more in alignment with the salaries of Santa Barbara, we will not be building homes but rather lodging or investments. Absent any other government or taxation policy change, it will be interesting, probably terrifying to see how many houses will need to be built to cause that realignment.
