The “Master Plan” for State Street has been adopted by City Council after six years of indecision and stagnation. Property values and commercial rents have fallen, emergency response times are impeded, and traditional cultural activities have been displaced for seven summers now. The “Plan,” which is yet to be technically engineered, is estimated to cost nearly $100 million that the city doesn’t currently have. All of this to adopt a concept that has been tried and that has failed all over the country for many decades. It is a road to the past, not the future for our downtown business corridor and that is the primary reason I have opposed it.
The positive developments, i.e., the redevelopment of the Paseo Nuevo mall into offices and housing, the Santa Barbara International Film Festival Theater Complex on State, and the Music Academy of the West are fortunately happening — not because of the current condition of State Street but in spite of it. Santa Barbara remains a renowned international destination and an incredible city in which to live. We should be mindful of that as we plan to permanently modify what we have, instead of maintaining the core beauty and value of the city and architecture we all love.
So where does $100 million come from? Perhaps there might be some grant funding out there, and we could issue more debt or assess more in taxes. In any case, it will involve the diversion of Measure C money, a one percent sales tax that was passed in 2017 to improve our roads, build a new police station, re-do Dwight Murphy Park, and replace Fire Station 7 in the high-fire district. Until now, that measure has been utilized to perform the initial tasks as promised, but State Street’s closure and makeover were never on the menu. The re-shuffling of fiscal priorities in a time of an already precarious budget is unwise.
The plan’s renderings, while attractive and fanciful, provide no strategy for economic improvement, outside of the hope that 2,000-4,000 more people will reside downtown in housing units that don’t yet exist. At the current city-wide pace of housing development, that is many decades away at best. The constricted circulation has been on display since the road closed in 2020, and it has not helped business vitality and has hampered public safety. One of my colleagues recently stated that “diminishing rents and property values were not her problem.” That, my friends, is the proverbial “canary in the coal mine.” The shrinking value of private assets is not a healthy sign for an economy that, when robust, serves everyone.
The simple solution is to re-open our Main Street, add pedestrian lighting, and do some deep cleaning. We need business and property values to recover, and we need to pay heed to those who have invested in the downtown corridor. We live in one of the most amazing cities in the world. Let’s maintain and celebrate it. Let’s choose a successful future and not repeat the planning mistakes of the past.
