Equilibrium. Balance. Equity.
These are the things that 2nd District Santa Barbara County Supervisor Laura Capps is very concerned about when it comes to housing.
“How do we achieve an equilibrium of balance for these impacts?” Capps asked county Planning and Development Director Lisa Plowman during her Feb. 14 presentation on the 2023-31 Housing Element.
Capps isn’t so much concerned that the housing development in the county match the jobs situation—where those jobs are versus where new housing is built. Or that affordable housing gets built where it should get built so the county’s low-income residents aren’t commuting an inordinate amount to get to work. What she’s extremely concerned about is all the housing the state wants built in South County. And all the “pain” it’s going to cause.
“Some areas are inexplicably having no new housing,” she said. “It just feels Eastern Goleta Valley is absorbing out-of-proportion impacts.”
Yeesh! That is going to be painful. Building housing close to jobs is the absolute worst!
“I hope we can make it better and balanced and not so concentrated and preserve agriculture,” Capps said.
But only preserve ag in South County, you know?
The 5,600-plus housing units the county needs built in the unincorporated areas is going to be concentrated no matter where it gets built. The fact of the matter is that housing needs to be concentrated to be affordable—not spread out on 5-acre ranchettes—and Santa Barbara County has done a terrible job of keeping up with development that matches its population.
As Plowman explained, historically, the county hasn’t identified areas for housing development in South County during past housing element cycles (Shocker!)—so the equilibrium the county needs to achieve is righting the wrongs of past policymaking snafus. The main snafu being that North County absorbed housing development impacts. And the areas that absorbed the past “pain” of development now hold residents who have to drive to South County for work.
Doesn’t sound very equitable to me. So let’s even that up. Even Steven, baby.
And then South County and North County residents can meet in the middle if they need to, say, someplace like Buellton?
That city recently debated the importance of a $25,000 meeting room partition in what could be Buellton’s future library—a $1.4 million project that would retrofit a historic house into a public space.
“That meeting room will be key, I think, to making this a great building,” Friends of the Buellton Library president Judith Dale told City Council members on Feb. 9.
This accordion door (which is what I’m envisioning) could really put Buellton on the map, according to Dale.
“Let’s make Buellton the place to meet,” she exclaimed.
But the meeting room divider seems like the least of the City Council’s concerns when it comes to the cost of the project. As Mayor David King pointed out: “We’re trying to hodgepodge a library into a house that was not designed for a library.”
So the council opted to look at what it would cost to build a new library building. Perhaps Dale could advocate for several meeting room dividers. Now that would really be the “key” to making Buellton “a place to meet.”
The Canary’s next meeting is at Pea Soup Andersen’s. Send keys to canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Feb 16-23, 2023.