It’s 2023. And with that big bad announcement, I’ve got another thing in store for you: Santa Barbara County needs to facilitate the building of more than 5,000 housing units by 2031. And that’s just in the unincorporated areas of the county.
Santa Maria needs to coax developers to erect more than 5,400. Santa Barbara: 8,000. In total, the county needs to see more than 24,000 housing units constructed in the next eight years, according to the state’s Regional Housing Needs Allocation—that’s more than twice that of the last assessment cycle of 11,000 units.
But we’ve got a problem. People in single-family zoned neighborhoods don’t like dense housing to move in as their neighbors. Let’s take a current example: The Richards Ranch Annexation Project, which is asking the city of Santa Maria to annex county land so it can build 400 apartments and 95 townhomes. That’s 495 housing units.
Right now, the county would only allow 118 units to be built on the project site.
“It’s more dense than anything in the area,” said one neighboring resident, who called the project “an exploitation of the neighborhood.”
What she seems to not understand is that all signs point to more density in her future. Whether she likes it or not, there are more neighbors on the way because people who aren’t already her neighbors need a place to live, and there are currently no options—therefore it needs to be built.
But she makes a good point about the enhancements needed to match the surrounding areas—trails, green space, and parks. Apparently this project doesn’t call for it. And, as Laurie Tamura from Urban Planning Concepts knows all too well, housing developments also require recreational amenities, especially if they’re in Santa Maria.
The city just upped the recreational requirement ante on developers, too. Prior to Dec. 20, developers needed to make room for or pay the city for 3 acres of parkland per 1,000 future residents. Now, it’s 5 acres. So, if Richards Ranch is building 495 units with the state average of 3.7 residents per household, then it needs between 9 and 10 acres of park acreage within 10 minutes of the townhomes and apartments it’s building.
I guess the developer can either do that or pay the city a subdivision in-lieu fee of $2,764 per unit—$1.37 million for the development. Tamura was complaining about the fee at Santa Maria’s Dec. 20 City Council meeting, when council members increased the fee from $2,379 per acre to $2,764. She also complained about all of the other development fees charged to build out city infrastructure that can serve the residents who are either buying or renting all of those new housing units. I guess if it was up to her, residents would pay for everything and developers would pay for nothing—which is what ends up happening anyway!
Tamura was also complaining that the city didn’t include Los Flores Ranch Park in its parks numbers—the 1,800-acre park is 12 miles from the city. So if you don’t have a car, which a lot of folks in Santa Maria don’t, it would take all day to walk to, and Tamura is just fine with that! And I wouldn’t bet on public transit.
Comments like hers are exactly why we have regulations.
The Canary is fed up with complainers. Send yours to canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jan 5-12, 2023.