As a 50 year resident of Santa Barbara, I must denounce and condemn the idea of two projects slated for development.
The first, a high density housing complex to be built at 505 East Los Olivos Street. This is absolute insanity: It will completely compromise the traffic infrastructure and destroy historical and environmental context of our city. Most importantly, it will be a wildfire catastrophe should there be an evacuation in the Mission Canyon area — which is not an if but a when.
I went through the evacuation of the Tea Fire from the Riviera through Mission Canyon. I was stunned at the city’s complete inability to respond to evacuating that amount of people to safety. We were backed up from the fire station at Mission Canyon solid on Foothill all the way to where it becomes Mission Ridge. It took almost an hour to travel 2 miles. We were all lucky that fire ran into a previous burn scar. I cannot imagine that situation compounded with the additional proposed population and their cars.
The second proposal on Grand Avenue should absolutely not be permitted for the same reasons. In fact, the area traffic infrastructure is even more inappropriate for a development like this.
These are not appropriate developments for these locations. They only allude to the developers greed to capitalize on what’s left of our beautiful city and make themselves richer in the name of providing a paltry ratio of “affordable housing” and then calling the locals NIMBYs.
