For me, the owner of the longstanding State Street gift store Lewis & Clark and a genuine skeptic of the street’s current bike-centric configuration, the most meaningful moment at the June 30 City Council meeting came from Councilmember Eric Friedman. Speaking immediately following sharply divided public comments on whether to extend the street’s closure to cars, Councilmember Friedman described what has long been the proverbial elephant in the room: that the perspectives of many in this city, including plenty of established, locally owned downtown businesses, are being entirely ignored.
Based on some of the other councilmember’s comments, you wouldn’t think tensions about keeping the street closed have been at a boiling point for months. From Councilmember Sneddon, there was seemingly endless opining about the need to continue momentum toward the master plan (a plan with final contents that won’t be released for at least two months), but no mention of the shrinking bottom lines many of the businesses affected by the closure, particularly in the upper blocks, had just pleaded with her to take more seriously.
Councilmember Oscar Gutierrez’ response to the very real concerns before him was to, bafflingly, claim that the complaining small business owners just, “don’t like living in Santa Barbara.” What preceded this rhetorical gem? An uninspiring reflection on how business interests and public opinion are often at odds. I bristled at this, wondering how much of that logic he applied to the City Council’s recent decision to literally give away the land under Paseo Nuevo to Yardi, a large corporation currently facing a major antitrust lawsuit for artificially inflating rents.
I appreciated Councilmember Santamaria’s gestures of good will toward the visibility worries myself, and many of my small business neighbors have been asking the council to address for years, but found myself confused at her repeated mention of finding solutions to improve visibility that don’t involve cars. Increased public transit is something almost every downtown small business I know has been calling for since the closure began. Despite this, the council has continuously failed to enact any large-scale, or even just daily, public transit solutions. Perhaps this is what $528,000 should have been spent on, instead of fake wood pedlets along the 500 block?
Of course, as State Street Master Planner Tess Harris noted at the beginning of the meeting, tensions are high precisely because State Street matters so much to everyone in this town. I am clearly no exception. Since starting Lewis & Clark with my mother in 1981, I’ve worked myself to the bone for my shop, and the community it serves. But I’ve also been the recipient of unbelievable privilege and still, to this day, feel astounded that so many want to spend their precious time in my eclectic little corner of the world. There isn’t a second that I don’t feel grateful for what this town, and this street, has given me and my family.
This is why, when debates rage about our downtown, and the conversation among our elected leaders feels unfairly one-sided, I can’t help but get frustrated. I would even go so far as to argue that it is precisely because of this lack of leadership and honesty that proponents of the street closure appear so surprised when they encounter anyone who questions its success. What I like to tell them is that, unlike politicians, numbers don’t lie.
In September 2025 the Downtown Santa Barbara Business Improvement District (an outgrowth of what was formerly the Downtown Organization) released data from Placer AI, a location analytics company, showing an overall decline of over 600,000 visitors to the downtown core. This is despite increases in visitors to other parts of the city, including Milpas and Coast Village Road. Proponents of the street closure shouldn’t be surprised by this, however. The city’s own draft master plan appendices reveal that pre-closure, 7,000-9,400 cars drove on State Street every day, depending on the block. The number of bicyclists on State since the closure? On a good day, 2,400.
According to Mayor Rowse, who voted against extending the closure alongside Councilmember Friedman, State Street sales tax trends also fail to inspire optimism. Parking lot rates, a crucial source of funding for our increasingly cash-strapped city, are down 22 percent. Pro-closure groups have been boasting on social media that vacancies on State Street are now equivalent to 2019. Given the quick post-COVID rebounds our waterfront, the Funk Zone, upper State, and Montecito had, I can’t help but wonder how much faster this number would have been met were the city’s primary artery not entirely shut off to the most used mode of transportation in our state.
I know a lot of folks my age get flack for being nostalgic, but, boy, do I miss the Santa Barbara of years past and, no, it’s not because of cars. The Santa Barbara I miss is the one where large corporate interests were the ones met with suspicion, not hardworking locals operating the shops, bakeries, and restaurants they dreamed into reality. Back when, almost every day, visitors came into my store and told me how beautiful they think our downtown is, something I never hear anymore. And, of course, back when city leaders actually led by listening to the voices of the entire community, not just those who already agree with them.
