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Santa Barbara, CA– Habitat for Humanity of Southern Santa Barbara County (Habitat Santa Barbara), was approved to receive a grant from the City of Santa Barbara’s Local Housing Trust Fund during a meeting of the City Council on Tuesday, June 30. The unanimous vote approved the recommended amount of $400,000 which was allocated from existing funds in the Local Housing Trust Fund (LHTF).
The funds will support the final phase of the Cota Street Affordable Homes project, an affordable homeownership development that will create five permanently affordable homes. One home was sold in July 2025, and two additional homes are scheduled to be sold later this year. The City of Santa Barbara’s LHTF grant will help complete the project’s third and final phase, bringing the total number of affordable homeownership opportunities to five.
Local funds from the City of Santa Barbara compliment a comprehensive fundraising strategy that is nearing the finish line, which includes a generous gift of land, thousands of hours of volunteer and sweat equity, private philanthropic donations, and recycled home improvement items.
Habitat Santa Barbara CEO Jessica Wishan de L’Arbre shared that the funds from the LHTF will support a number of housing innovations, including selling an ADU as homeownership. “Through state law AB 345, we’re proud to be the first organization in the City to create and sell a permanently deed-restricted affordable ADU for homeownership—demonstrating how existing neighborhoods can help address our housing shortage in a practical and scalable way.”
The for-sale ADU is part of a model that Habitat calls “Preservation Plus”: rehabbing an existing home, preserving it and keeping it in the character of the surrounding neighborhood, and adding an ADU to the back of the parcel to add gentle density. Then, after going through a careful selection process, selling both homes to local low-income families at an affordable mortgage as part of a fractional tenants-in-comment structure.
The project also has environmental benefits through preserving what already exists, thereby reducing construction demolition waste, as well as creatively re-purposing donated home improvement items from local community members.
“This investment is helping turn innovative housing policy into real homes,” de L’Arbre continued. “By putting new approaches into action, we’re creating a total of five new affordable homeownership opportunities while piloting a model designed to be replicated on other similar parcels in our community.”
Habitat Santa Barbara led an effort over nearly two years, conducting research and holding community gatherings to tackle the question of how to innovate approaches to building affordable ownership housing, and the resulting report included a number of models, including the Preservation Plus approach.
“We are so grateful to members of City Council and City staff for investing in affordable ownership housing,” Wishan de L’Arbre continued. “In a community where homeownership is increasingly out of reach, affordable ownership creates something renting alone cannot: long-term housing stability, the opportunity to build equity and generational wealth, and a permanent pathway for local families to remain part of the community they serve.”
Habitat’s homeownership model is a unique program in which homeowners build alongside volunteers and pay an affordable mortgage. Habitat Santa Barbara has built or rehabilitated 23 homes for 86 people, 50 percent of whom are children, as well as helped rebuild and repair more than 230 homes on the South Coast and contributed to nearly 500 homes developed internationally through partnerships. Habitat Santa Barbara is completing its fifth affordable housing development in Santa Barbara.
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