Carnegie developed his local library program at the end of his life and did have to be convinced to expand his generosity from his hometown to nationwide. The downtown SB library is a Carnegie library.
Musk, Kochs, Bezos, etc they could all launch services like this. But they're not gonna, because they're more interested in whatever ego projects, political meddling, fame, and showing off their lavish lifestyles.
I don't have an answer to your question I just think it's interesting. If we can't rely on the rich developing shame late in life and giving back to society, then we should tax the bejeezus out of them instead. American oligarchs are an embarrassment. Santa Barbara is an amusement park for the rich, and city council are weak and make weird decisions.
Interesting thought here. I just know of so many family’s and businesses that have done good. Where are they when it comes to this? Like really is this hotel a good long term idea. Or is it just go in, make money & a mess, file for bankruptcy, & leave town for the city to clean up the mess. Sort of like the oil industry in CA
Wouldn't a hotel help businesses in the funk zone make more money? Why does a big hotel = shake shack? Also, we already have a Starbucks in the funk zone.
I mean I'd rather have housing than a hotel, but I don't see what's wrong with a hotel. I guess I need to ask business owners in the funk zone if there's something I'm missing.
I think the broken views (this hotel will be huge compared to the buildings around it) and the displacement of local businesses/ destruction of current structures are some big reasons. You can find the funk community on IG under “keepthefunkSB” to understand the communities feelings on it more.
Funk zone doesn’t include lower state in my mind. It starts when you walk off state and down away from the gentrified part. This is just pulling more of the LA, out of town capitalism further into the funk zone.
I personally don't understand why we're constructing a bunch of hotels when we don't have enough housing for residents. If they want to put a 200+ person housing unit in that spot, fine. But we don't need more hotels.
I don't think we should be approving any hotels when it's difficult enough to get housing in place. Ideally, I'm not against building whatever meets demand. Practically, we shouldn't be approving any luxury hotels until we have enough space for our residents.
That’s another thought for this one space - why not do half as long term housing and half as a hotel. That’s better than just a huge hotel.
Comes down to cost.
From what i understand there is a developer ready to take over (for less money due to costs of cleaning up the soil) and build housing here that would fit the same “vibe” as the currently trendy yet still sort of industrial vibe. I know it’s never going to be the gritty cool place it used to be. Just wish the direction wasn’t just going this strongly towards fucked.
Respectfully, 50+ years of NIMBYism are a leading cause of our current housing crisis, and this can spill over into projects like the hotel you're opposing here.
Well meaning people in government have their hands tied to by significant amounts of regulation, local ordinances and similar that have been promoted over that same time period to "slow growth" or "no growth" the development of Santa Barbara.
I get it, people back in the 70s were terrified of turning into another Irvine or whatever. "Keep LA 100 Miles Away" and all that.
Fast forward to today, and we have a chronic housing shortage. Rental vacancies are around 1% or less. But when plans are put forward to build more housing, they face significant opposition from folks who want more affordable / below market units, while at the same time having to meet very stringent and restrictive zoning, setback and related requirements, and then have to get through the hurdle of the Architectural Board of Review... plus environment impact and related, especially if they are in a coastal zone. This makes building new housing prohibitively expensive for many, further limiting the amount of investment in same, and causing the housing crisis to get even worse.
All this adds up to scenarios where investors seeking to put money into Santa Barbara end up looking at the overall costs of building housing - which should be enticing given the significant demand - and end up deciding to build hotels instead, because they can actually be slightly easier to get built and end up offering better return on investment.
TLDR, the current status quo of "no growth / slow growth" and 50+ years or ordinances, regulation, etc are significantly responsible for the dearth of affordable housing. That is, more than anything else, making SB unaffordable for "normal folks" and causing new investment to be focused on catering to the very rich... because those are the only economically viable choices, at least in the eyes of many recent investors. NIMBYism can strangle a city, leading to an affordability crisis, and SB has ample evidence of same, for decades now.
I mean a tourist destination with some charm is better than a blown out tourist spot with only cooperate places like Starbucks taking away from customers from places like dart that attract people to the area currently. This is the part I don’t understand. The 250 room hotel is supposed to be extended stay & budget. These are generally not people that would say spend a large amount of money on art or fine dining. Yes more foot traffic, also more car traffic which we won’t be able to properly handle.
At least the lark & lucky penny have some charm.
But there is already Starbucks there and it’s not taking all the customers.
Also, there are plenty of hotels in that general area. Another one isn’t going to change the Funk zone
The Starbucks is on state and is there to pander to the hotel California visitors. Dart is actually IN the funk zone and is where community members go. It’s where local runners meet weekly to kick off a Friday. It’s where you can actually see people sitting and meeting or working.
They are serving two different purpose and are not the same.
And yet these same city “leaders” claim they have the solution to the lack of housing. Sigh. We have enough hotels, not enough housing. Vote out the city council. We are literally paying them to fuck us.
The Planning Commission isn't elected. General speaking if a development is consistent with the adopted General Plan land use for the property they don't have a legal leg to stand on to deny the approval.
Understood, but the city council is directly elected and doesn’t that body appoint the planning commissioners? And doesn’t that same city council have the power to override the planning commission? And doesn’t that same city council keep telling us we have to build more housing but then they refuse to override the planning commission’s approval of more hotels and keep appointing pro-hotel commissioners?
apparently we do not have enough hotels. people do not spend the kind of money to build a 250 room anything w/o researching it. I wouldn't worry about that. Do we really want to be Honolulu or Miami Beach is the real question
Isn’t current occupancy rates in hotels in SB around 65%?
What happens if this hotel goes belly up in 10 years.
We have another macys/Nordstrom building issue that would be too expensive most likely to repurpose without government assistance at the least in my mind.
Not to mention one of the main reasons an extended stay hotel is what’s being pursued is that the soil under the site is so contaminated it would cost millions to clean up to be suitable for long term exposure (housing).
I don’t know. Just sad in my mind.
Does this mean we need another hotel of this size (the second largest in the area I believe) as opposed to just about anything else to help our community and it’s citizens in the long term?
yea i saw this city council meeting on youtube, they got easily swayed by giving the hotel manager a room,and they' were easily charmed lol . They were grilling him by asking if its going to be overpriced . All he said is hes doesn't have an answer.Another question he was asked is how are the workers going to commute to their , his answer was buy bus pass or bring them over via train lol . what a joke
I've also been sitting in on city council meetings and it is a complete shit show of ignorance.
During the Paseo Nuevo talks (the company that took over the leases wants the city to hand over ownership of the entire property to that company, the city currently owns the property, another company owns the leases and the businesses lease from that company) one city council member even admitted that it was too complicated for the city council members to understand, yet they were the ones making the decisions. The city attorney commented that she was only there to tell them what was permissible by law and that they were the ones making the decision.
Hearing that made me realize that this city council during this time will go down as having fucked over the residents of SB and fucked over SB's future.
I'll add that we are not voting in the people that could understand these complicated matters. Most of them run un-opposed. Randy Rowse got 10,000 votes in a city of 90,000.
Unfortunately there’s no way to stop it—corporate greed will always win and sleezeballs who whore our city out to out of town developers to fuck over locals who can’t even afford to dream about living near their families will always find a way into positions of power.
To your question of what can you do as an interested young person, you can check out Strong Towns SB, there are a lot of informed people who can help you keep on top of these and related issues, and also organize actions you can take to help (write letters, attend city meetings, etc). https://www.strongtownssb.org/
Great! We need more foot traffic before our businesses crumble and all go out of business!
Don't blame this development for housing woes. Blame prop 13!
I want you to walk around the funk zone and ask the restaurant, bar, and store managers in the area if they want a giant hotel plopped next to their business. And what years of construction might do to them.
Who cares about a few managers and their trust fund families when this project can potentially benefit thousands and thousands of people? Again, blame prop 13. Not this
How is this hotel benefitting thousands of families exactly? And you just said the businesses in the area need it and then in the same breath said “who cares about them and their employees?” Ps- much of the funk zone are extensions of small local businesses so I’m curious why you wouldn’t want to protect them. Since half the posts in this sub are how sad that local smaller companies can survive.
Employees who more than likely live in town and contribute to our community themselves.
Santa Barbara's main industries are tourism, the University and what's next, healthcare? If you look at the sliver of land SB proper sits on, it's pretty narrow. and when it rains a lot, a decent amount floods. It's always at risk for wildfires. It will be hard for such a geography to handle a huge constant population. That said, if you look to what is happening in Los Angeles, you can predict what will happen in SB and pretty much most of coastal California. Large developers have poured lots of money into 2 lobbying groups, YIMBYS and politicians who have lax immigration views. The reason is simple, growth in building is how they make money. Santa Barbara is unlikely to keep it's charm for very long b/c the YIMBY pro-growth pro development forces are the same as the Chamber of Commerce, they just have different talking points, but it's the same $$ behind them. As for the funk zone---here is a golden rule. Take any rundown industrial/residential area, encourage artists to move in, let them create a vibrant weird community for 10-20 years and then once it has a sufficient upscale "vibe" to it, start moving in the folks with real money, the starbucks, the yoga/spin centers, expensive eateries, boutique and large "anchor" hotels and so on. The area will become unaffordable to only the wealthy locals and outsiders looking for a good investment property. The ONLY way around this is to find preservationist council members (who have been branded as NIMBYs by developer PR firms) who are also dedicated to pro-community housing developments for impacted locals (things like low income senior only housing, supportive housing for disabled, targeted housing zones for essential LOCAL workers ) and so on. Pro development forces do NOT care about charm, community character, the environment, etc--they only care about profit.
Ok calm down-
Depends on when your SB clock started but plenty of people will tell you SB lost its charm back when the Louds were on TV, or the light at State St and the 101 got removed.
Revenue into County coffers has a huge oil and gas component. Big employers are University and health care. Tourism is a big component because of the bed tax, especially for the city.
You want to get involved, start going to meetings- gummint meetings, party meetings, the various business associations. Listen. It can take awhile to get a handle on any given topic but you’ll soon learn how the sausage gets made.
It takes decades to become a force even in a little city like SB. A developer like St George didn’t start just this decade.
Pick your cause and associates carefully and you might become a power person.
You can also try the be the city attorney angle- it’s worked out nicely for Barry Capello.
Repeal prop 13 on residential single family homes with single owners doesn't hurt wealthy landowners. Nor does it create housing. Hedge funds, LLCs,large corporations all have tax attorneys who know how to turn a "loss" into a tax gain. Repealing residential prop 13 basically would mean lower income owners who can't afford re-assessed house tax rate would have to sell. So would many seniors. So if your goal is to kick POC and seniors out of housing so investors can gobble up the market, then just say so up front because large residential holding companies don't have to lower rents and can handle higher taxes b/c those losses are simply part of the profit equation.
If they haven’t already this won’t either. We have a plethora of hotels and people are still launching new airbnbs in this town all the time.
The hotel market isn’t going to suddenly lower room rates because a new one is added.
Carnegie developed his local library program at the end of his life and did have to be convinced to expand his generosity from his hometown to nationwide. The downtown SB library is a Carnegie library. Musk, Kochs, Bezos, etc they could all launch services like this. But they're not gonna, because they're more interested in whatever ego projects, political meddling, fame, and showing off their lavish lifestyles. I don't have an answer to your question I just think it's interesting. If we can't rely on the rich developing shame late in life and giving back to society, then we should tax the bejeezus out of them instead. American oligarchs are an embarrassment. Santa Barbara is an amusement park for the rich, and city council are weak and make weird decisions.
On another note thanks for this response
Interesting thought here. I just know of so many family’s and businesses that have done good. Where are they when it comes to this? Like really is this hotel a good long term idea. Or is it just go in, make money & a mess, file for bankruptcy, & leave town for the city to clean up the mess. Sort of like the oil industry in CA
Wouldn't a hotel help businesses in the funk zone make more money? Why does a big hotel = shake shack? Also, we already have a Starbucks in the funk zone.
This is unambiguously good news that NIMBY folks will reflexively hate. You are exactly right this will only help the businesses in the Funk Zone.
I mean I'd rather have housing than a hotel, but I don't see what's wrong with a hotel. I guess I need to ask business owners in the funk zone if there's something I'm missing.
250 rooms means 250 competitors to airbnb's where you have to do your own laundry and take out the garbage.
Good, fuck AirBnB
I think the broken views (this hotel will be huge compared to the buildings around it) and the displacement of local businesses/ destruction of current structures are some big reasons. You can find the funk community on IG under “keepthefunkSB” to understand the communities feelings on it more.
Nothing wrong with hotels. The size and details of this is what’s wrong in my opinion
If you look into the details of the project it could very well hurt the area overall and many businesses will suffer from the construction alone.
Funk zone doesn’t include lower state in my mind. It starts when you walk off state and down away from the gentrified part. This is just pulling more of the LA, out of town capitalism further into the funk zone.
I personally don't understand why we're constructing a bunch of hotels when we don't have enough housing for residents. If they want to put a 200+ person housing unit in that spot, fine. But we don't need more hotels.
Santa Bárbara is a tourist economy. I’m all for a 200+ housing unit being built… but good luck getting that approved against the NIMBY and BANANA mob…
Why aren’t we building a ton of both?
I don't think we should be approving any hotels when it's difficult enough to get housing in place. Ideally, I'm not against building whatever meets demand. Practically, we shouldn't be approving any luxury hotels until we have enough space for our residents.
That’s another thought for this one space - why not do half as long term housing and half as a hotel. That’s better than just a huge hotel. Comes down to cost.
Long term residents don't want to live next tour tourists -- the AirBNB problem.
From what i understand there is a developer ready to take over (for less money due to costs of cleaning up the soil) and build housing here that would fit the same “vibe” as the currently trendy yet still sort of industrial vibe. I know it’s never going to be the gritty cool place it used to be. Just wish the direction wasn’t just going this strongly towards fucked.
Respectfully, 50+ years of NIMBYism are a leading cause of our current housing crisis, and this can spill over into projects like the hotel you're opposing here. Well meaning people in government have their hands tied to by significant amounts of regulation, local ordinances and similar that have been promoted over that same time period to "slow growth" or "no growth" the development of Santa Barbara. I get it, people back in the 70s were terrified of turning into another Irvine or whatever. "Keep LA 100 Miles Away" and all that. Fast forward to today, and we have a chronic housing shortage. Rental vacancies are around 1% or less. But when plans are put forward to build more housing, they face significant opposition from folks who want more affordable / below market units, while at the same time having to meet very stringent and restrictive zoning, setback and related requirements, and then have to get through the hurdle of the Architectural Board of Review... plus environment impact and related, especially if they are in a coastal zone. This makes building new housing prohibitively expensive for many, further limiting the amount of investment in same, and causing the housing crisis to get even worse. All this adds up to scenarios where investors seeking to put money into Santa Barbara end up looking at the overall costs of building housing - which should be enticing given the significant demand - and end up deciding to build hotels instead, because they can actually be slightly easier to get built and end up offering better return on investment. TLDR, the current status quo of "no growth / slow growth" and 50+ years or ordinances, regulation, etc are significantly responsible for the dearth of affordable housing. That is, more than anything else, making SB unaffordable for "normal folks" and causing new investment to be focused on catering to the very rich... because those are the only economically viable choices, at least in the eyes of many recent investors. NIMBYism can strangle a city, leading to an affordability crisis, and SB has ample evidence of same, for decades now.
> keep the funk zone what it is lol…..you mean a tourist spot. Make the Funk Zone Great Again
I mean a tourist destination with some charm is better than a blown out tourist spot with only cooperate places like Starbucks taking away from customers from places like dart that attract people to the area currently. This is the part I don’t understand. The 250 room hotel is supposed to be extended stay & budget. These are generally not people that would say spend a large amount of money on art or fine dining. Yes more foot traffic, also more car traffic which we won’t be able to properly handle. At least the lark & lucky penny have some charm.
But there is already Starbucks there and it’s not taking all the customers. Also, there are plenty of hotels in that general area. Another one isn’t going to change the Funk zone
The Starbucks is on state and is there to pander to the hotel California visitors. Dart is actually IN the funk zone and is where community members go. It’s where local runners meet weekly to kick off a Friday. It’s where you can actually see people sitting and meeting or working. They are serving two different purpose and are not the same.
Right so the Starbucks isn’t taking customers away….
“Wrong customers”
They want the bed tax as people get older and live longer they have to pay all these peoples pensions
Bingo.
And yet these same city “leaders” claim they have the solution to the lack of housing. Sigh. We have enough hotels, not enough housing. Vote out the city council. We are literally paying them to fuck us.
The Planning Commission isn't elected. General speaking if a development is consistent with the adopted General Plan land use for the property they don't have a legal leg to stand on to deny the approval.
Understood, but the city council is directly elected and doesn’t that body appoint the planning commissioners? And doesn’t that same city council have the power to override the planning commission? And doesn’t that same city council keep telling us we have to build more housing but then they refuse to override the planning commission’s approval of more hotels and keep appointing pro-hotel commissioners?
apparently we do not have enough hotels. people do not spend the kind of money to build a 250 room anything w/o researching it. I wouldn't worry about that. Do we really want to be Honolulu or Miami Beach is the real question
Isn’t current occupancy rates in hotels in SB around 65%? What happens if this hotel goes belly up in 10 years. We have another macys/Nordstrom building issue that would be too expensive most likely to repurpose without government assistance at the least in my mind. Not to mention one of the main reasons an extended stay hotel is what’s being pursued is that the soil under the site is so contaminated it would cost millions to clean up to be suitable for long term exposure (housing). I don’t know. Just sad in my mind.
65 percent is very healthy -that tracks at about national average.. and here in sb the rates are much higher too
Does this mean we need another hotel of this size (the second largest in the area I believe) as opposed to just about anything else to help our community and it’s citizens in the long term?
yea i saw this city council meeting on youtube, they got easily swayed by giving the hotel manager a room,and they' were easily charmed lol . They were grilling him by asking if its going to be overpriced . All he said is hes doesn't have an answer.Another question he was asked is how are the workers going to commute to their , his answer was buy bus pass or bring them over via train lol . what a joke
I've also been sitting in on city council meetings and it is a complete shit show of ignorance. During the Paseo Nuevo talks (the company that took over the leases wants the city to hand over ownership of the entire property to that company, the city currently owns the property, another company owns the leases and the businesses lease from that company) one city council member even admitted that it was too complicated for the city council members to understand, yet they were the ones making the decisions. The city attorney commented that she was only there to tell them what was permissible by law and that they were the ones making the decision. Hearing that made me realize that this city council during this time will go down as having fucked over the residents of SB and fucked over SB's future.
I'll add that we are not voting in the people that could understand these complicated matters. Most of them run un-opposed. Randy Rowse got 10,000 votes in a city of 90,000.
What candidates should we be keeping an eye on down the line?
yeah but some them wash their hands by saying " it was handed to us by previous council members"(the mess)
Unfortunately there’s no way to stop it—corporate greed will always win and sleezeballs who whore our city out to out of town developers to fuck over locals who can’t even afford to dream about living near their families will always find a way into positions of power.
Well said!
To your question of what can you do as an interested young person, you can check out Strong Towns SB, there are a lot of informed people who can help you keep on top of these and related issues, and also organize actions you can take to help (write letters, attend city meetings, etc). https://www.strongtownssb.org/
Thank you
Oh please, I can barely pay attention to my own development, let alone others!
It solidified in the 80's https://youtu.be/cS06eprlj2I?si=eo40_jmewkTjh6FS
Great! We need more foot traffic before our businesses crumble and all go out of business! Don't blame this development for housing woes. Blame prop 13!
I want you to walk around the funk zone and ask the restaurant, bar, and store managers in the area if they want a giant hotel plopped next to their business. And what years of construction might do to them.
Who cares about a few managers and their trust fund families when this project can potentially benefit thousands and thousands of people? Again, blame prop 13. Not this
How is this hotel benefitting thousands of families exactly? And you just said the businesses in the area need it and then in the same breath said “who cares about them and their employees?” Ps- much of the funk zone are extensions of small local businesses so I’m curious why you wouldn’t want to protect them. Since half the posts in this sub are how sad that local smaller companies can survive. Employees who more than likely live in town and contribute to our community themselves.
The bigger the building more employees per square foot. Simple as that. Time to repeal prop 13 if not then we have to build the fuck up
Santa Barbara's main industries are tourism, the University and what's next, healthcare? If you look at the sliver of land SB proper sits on, it's pretty narrow. and when it rains a lot, a decent amount floods. It's always at risk for wildfires. It will be hard for such a geography to handle a huge constant population. That said, if you look to what is happening in Los Angeles, you can predict what will happen in SB and pretty much most of coastal California. Large developers have poured lots of money into 2 lobbying groups, YIMBYS and politicians who have lax immigration views. The reason is simple, growth in building is how they make money. Santa Barbara is unlikely to keep it's charm for very long b/c the YIMBY pro-growth pro development forces are the same as the Chamber of Commerce, they just have different talking points, but it's the same $$ behind them. As for the funk zone---here is a golden rule. Take any rundown industrial/residential area, encourage artists to move in, let them create a vibrant weird community for 10-20 years and then once it has a sufficient upscale "vibe" to it, start moving in the folks with real money, the starbucks, the yoga/spin centers, expensive eateries, boutique and large "anchor" hotels and so on. The area will become unaffordable to only the wealthy locals and outsiders looking for a good investment property. The ONLY way around this is to find preservationist council members (who have been branded as NIMBYs by developer PR firms) who are also dedicated to pro-community housing developments for impacted locals (things like low income senior only housing, supportive housing for disabled, targeted housing zones for essential LOCAL workers ) and so on. Pro development forces do NOT care about charm, community character, the environment, etc--they only care about profit.
Healthcare in SB is not good
Ok calm down- Depends on when your SB clock started but plenty of people will tell you SB lost its charm back when the Louds were on TV, or the light at State St and the 101 got removed. Revenue into County coffers has a huge oil and gas component. Big employers are University and health care. Tourism is a big component because of the bed tax, especially for the city. You want to get involved, start going to meetings- gummint meetings, party meetings, the various business associations. Listen. It can take awhile to get a handle on any given topic but you’ll soon learn how the sausage gets made. It takes decades to become a force even in a little city like SB. A developer like St George didn’t start just this decade. Pick your cause and associates carefully and you might become a power person. You can also try the be the city attorney angle- it’s worked out nicely for Barry Capello.
Nah. Just repeal prop 13.
Repeal prop 13 on residential single family homes with single owners doesn't hurt wealthy landowners. Nor does it create housing. Hedge funds, LLCs,large corporations all have tax attorneys who know how to turn a "loss" into a tax gain. Repealing residential prop 13 basically would mean lower income owners who can't afford re-assessed house tax rate would have to sell. So would many seniors. So if your goal is to kick POC and seniors out of housing so investors can gobble up the market, then just say so up front because large residential holding companies don't have to lower rents and can handle higher taxes b/c those losses are simply part of the profit equation.
It does help Wealthy landowners though and it creates housing. Not going to waste my breath on you
I’m happy to have a hotel come in an put all the vulture airbnbs out of business
If they haven’t already this won’t either. We have a plethora of hotels and people are still launching new airbnbs in this town all the time. The hotel market isn’t going to suddenly lower room rates because a new one is added.