There’s a kind of seeing that becomes possible when you live a nomadic life, staying in new places for a month or two at a time, without the familiarity that allows for autopilot. I call it Visitor Eyes — an open aperture of radical presence that lets a place speak for itself. I have no history with the places I visit, no relationships to soften my perception, and no stake in what I find. My view of a place is limited, but in many ways more honest. I can’t see the underbelly: the local politics, the housing pressures, the tensions that lurk beneath every community’s public face. But what Visitor Eyes have let me see is the texture on the surface of places, which I’ve discovered is remarkably consistent within a place and markedly different between them. I’ve come to believe that this texture is a community’s truest self-portrait.
In Santa Barbara, what I encountered was unlike anything I had seen on my journey thus far, and my vocabulary reflected that fact. It was the first time in my life I had occasion to use the word decorum, something this place and its residents embodied and upheld to a high standard. It was as if Santa Barbara were intentionally designed to bring out the best in people, using beauty as the means.
In The Symposium, Plato contends that beauty is a vital, driving force that fills the observer with pleasure and love, compelling the creation of more beauty. Santa Barbara is living proof that beauty begets beauty.
I’ve since learned that Pearl Chase was the civic soul-builder behind Santa Barbara’s unique culture, bringing her “Crusade for Civic Beauty” to fruition after the 1925 earthquake that devastated the city. She viewed beauty as a basic right and a refuge essential for humans to flourish. To ensure Santa Barbara remained beautiful for future generations, she built the infrastructure to preserve its aesthetic and instilled a culture of stewardship and civic activism.
It was the custom font on the street signs that first caught my eye. I learned that it’s called “Mission” and was designed to harmonize with the city’s Spanish Colonial Revival architecture. And it doesn’t stop there. Street signs typically use 12-inch uppercase letters, but Santa Barbara’s signs use a 10-inch font for the first letter of the street name and an 8-inch font for the rest. Suffixes like “St” or “Rd” are one-third the height of the street name.
I have no credentials to support what I’m about to say, but I’m willing to die on a hill for it: People behave differently in a place that cares this much about its street signs. When a physical environment signals that it has been this deeply cared for, people unconsciously raise their behavior to meet the standard. It’s the opposite of “The Broken Windows Effect,” which posits that visible signs of disorder, such as broken windows, graffiti, or litter, create an environment that encourages crime and antisocial behavior.
I had many experiences in Santa Barbara that support this theory — like my Uber driver returning my phone to me across town after his shift, and my Airbnb host giving me homemade bread and cookies for my journey back to the East Coast. But one experience stands out. I arrived early for my dinner reservation, and as I waited outside for the restaurant to open, I noticed a melting scoop of ice cream on the spotlessly clean sidewalk. I was surprised by how much it bothered me. I had been in Santa Barbara for less than a week and already knew this mint-chocolate-chip abomination violated the cultural norm. Just then, a UPS truck pulled up, and the driver got out holding a large package. He, too, was drawn to the crime scene on the sidewalk. He held up his index finger, signaling he’d be back in a minute, then returned with rolled-up paper towels, wiped up the melty mess, got back in his truck, and drove off.
To my Visitor Eyes, Santa Barbara appeared to have crossed a threshold where this kind of behavior was the norm rather than the exception. It’s taken me a while to name what I experienced, but I’m calling it a Dignity Economy — a culturally transmitted, self-reinforcing social agreement that elevates the behavior and self-conception of those who live and work within it. Seeing it in action gives me hope, because it’s proof that culture can be built and a reminder that we have the power to shape our world. Lucky for us, Pearl Chase left a blueprint for how to do it.
Chase recognized that beautiful, safe, livable communities require an unwavering commitment to set aside differences to serve the public good. In an era of entrenched social hierarchies and competing interests, she worked across differences in class, background, and political persuasion by focusing on shared stakes. Her goal was not to get people to agree on everything, but to get them to care about something together — the place they called home. The result endures in Santa Barbara’s Dignity Economy, still visible through Visitor Eyes.
