https://dignitymoves.org/santa-barbara/
From what I can tell, the it city and county just went for using emergency rules and bypassed most planning rules (it is on county land).
Will be interested to see how it works out.
> Each room will have a bed, a desk and chair, heating and air conditioning, a window, and most importantly a door that locks.
This is a very special purpose shelter apparently. It's not something I've ever heard of before, but seems to be simply a building full of what most middle class homeowners might describe as "walk-in closets" -- big enough for someone who is otherwise homeless to crash in for the night.
And as you say, by bypassing basically every possible regulation that might have applied to a typical "residence", the baseline construction cost of these 31 "walk-in closets" is indeed fairly low.
> The 1951 sci-fi classic “The Day the Earth Stood Still” inadvertently shows us how. Klaatu, a level-headed extra-terrestrial emissary, escapes captivity at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He wanders down Georgia Avenue, away from not-yet-nuclear-weapon-free Takoma Park, and attempts to disappear into everyday DC.
> To do so, Klaatu checks into a boarding house at 14th and Harvard in Columbia Heights. Each room houses one or two people, and as such there’s scant privacy to be had: everyone overhears everything.
> This is convenient for Klaatu, who knows little of Earthlings’ simple ways, but probably annoying for the Earthlings. Conditions like these were common in DC homes at the time.
Source: https://ggwash.org/view/31818/an-alien-notion-800000-dc-resi...
A single room with your own bed and a door that locks is miles above sleeping on the street, even if it means shared bathroom and kitchen facilities. We need to legalize these options once again.
It was a lot cheaper a few years ago at least, a 3-4BD SFR was less than 1BD condo in SB when I moved.
I bought the place sight unseen while I was in another state because I knew exactly what the property is and its history. It is also easy to see in this very popular beach area that the prices have appreciated over time.
The people selling the place... well... I googled them and it seemed like they needed the cash. I lowballed the offer (counter to my agents wishes) and they accepted. Business is business.
Apologies if it came off as arrogant, but like I said, I got lucky. The stars aligned into something I knew would be a good investment if I could get it and I did.
One semi interesting side note is that I was originally looking for a place to rent, not buy. One of the other owners in the same building wanted some crazy $6k a month for a 1 bedroom because it is all profitable short term rentals. Because of everything in the area being short term rentals, there is literally nothing to rent. I then saw this place come up for sale and figured I might as well buy. Again, lucky, but also understood very well what I was getting into.
Easy to predict: more over-crowding, more pollution, more traffic, lower quality of living for everyone
It's hemmed in by steep hills and the Pacific ocean and a lot of the available area has already been developed. https://www.google.com/maps/@34.4127513,-119.7096148,12z/dat...
On the other hand, despite great zoning in the core parts of Santa Barbara that outlaws the typical strip mall construction pattern, leaving a relatively dense-feeling downtown, it's extremely car centric. There's noticeable traffic both on the 101 and downtown, especially on weekends.
Spending time in Santa Barbara, you can't help but feel that a) there isn't a lot more room to spread out for more development, but b) there is definitely a lot more "room" for Santa Barbara to improve in terms of sustainably improving density. Santa Barbara makes a lot of concessions to cars, which is not going to scale at all if the population grows. If you take car dependence as a given, Santa Barbara probably cannot afford to grow much more.
On the other hand, Santa Barbara is famed for its nearly perfect weather year-round. Good weather and and its small size means that almost all trips within Santa Barbara proper can be made easily via E-bike, if only there were more bike lanes, but there are too many 2 lane roads with cars that move too quickly driven by drivers who are not used to sharing the road. But I suspect that Santa Barbara may be too dependent on famously car-centric Los Angeles to ever consider de-prioritizing cars..
It's all moot point, though, because I think most people who actually own homes in Santa Barbara are older and quite wealthy and do not really care too much about abstract things like "sustainable growth" and would quite prefer if Santa Barbara could just stay "the same" for the next 20 years until they die.
The city also has an e-bike program that I can informally say is used quite heavily. In addition many youths ride e-bikes and I will be interested to see if that reduces car dependence for that generation.
Water availability is an important factor limiting growth (though we do have a desal plant). Wildfires are another problem to pay attention to.
But, after living in San Francisco for a couple of years and becoming used to riding my bike everywhere, I had a realization that while on paper Santa Barbara should be much more inviting than SF for bikes, in practice it's weirdly almost less inviting because drivers do not seem interested in sharing the road at all and there are very, very few bike lanes. Most of the main one-way "through streets" that run north-south in Santa Barbara like De La Vina, Santa Barbara, Anacapa, etc. are decidedly bike hostile because people drive very fast on them and there is no bike lane.
One way to solve this is to make State St, Bath St, and Garden St dedicated north-south bike thoroughfares, and give all of the east-west streets that cross State St. bike lanes. Biking through Santa Barbara would then be a matter of biking north or south on a dedicated, safe thoroughfare before turning off east or west until you arrive where you need.
As it stands, not really very inviting to bike in, _especially_ if you don't know the city by heart..
https://archive.ph/20130221230638/http://www.news10.net/news...
https://cal.streetsblog.org/2016/06/07/fresno-pedestrian-mal...
It’s physics. There is no other way around this.
Severely restricting cars is the only way to have viable local businesses tailored to non-car shoppers and political support for advancing non-car infrastructure (i.e. sufficient density for sufficient people to live without cars and support businesses in walking/bicycling distance).
The second a road more than 4 small car lanes across gets constructed (or 40ft), you make walking too cumbersome and risky.
i would imagine these local small shops cannot have the economy of scale that would allow a big retailer like costco to have cheap items. Which means the cost of living is going to be higher - it may or may not offset the savings of not having to pay for a car.
I could even add kids not being able to play outside freely. Could maybe even more stratified societies and less communal atmospheres due to cars allowing people to be spread out.
But also, once you have and permit cars, there's more that can be done with a car, and other characteristics tend to support them:
- Large car parks and less walkable space.
- Businesses distributed more broadly across the city or town.
- Lack of services for pedestrians (e.g., deliveries for purchases, bus service or transit, etc.)
- Greater risk for pedestrians and cyclists (more and faster traffic).
Et cetera.
So the initial imbalance grows with time.
That might look different post-Covid, but that was a recipe for an affordability disaster even without growing faster than the US as a whole.
(I think the high-asset crowd is overall at least as responsible as just the high-income crowd, though. Billionaires gentrify the millionaire neighborhoods, the millionaires displace some of the 500kinaires, etc, etc.)
Instead of having people buy up the property and jack the prices to shit, just have some notion of "Californian citizenship".
* If you were born there, you're grandfathered in by birthright.
* If you move out, we'll pay you some money or whatever.
* If you want to move in, either pay a big sum of money or convince the government you're helpful.
Then they could use the money from these sales to invest in the community, rather than it going to property speculators.
> In the exercise of its taxing power, a state may not discriminate substantially between residents and nonresidents. In Ward v. Maryland the Court set aside a state law that imposed specific taxes upon nonresidents for the privilege of selling within the state goods that were produced in other states. Also found to be incompatible with the comity clause was a Tennessee license tax, the amount of which was dependent upon whether the person taxed had his chief office within or without the state. In Travis v. Yale & Towne Mfg. Co., the Court, although sustaining the right of a state to tax income accruing within its borders to nonresidents, held the particular tax void because it denied to nonresidents exemptions which were allowed to residents. The "terms 'resident' and 'citizen' are not synonymous," wrote Justice Pitney, "... but a general taxing scheme ... if it discriminates against all non-residents, has the necessary effect of including in the discrimination those who are citizens of other States ...." Where there were no discriminations between citizens and noncitizens, a state statute taxing the business of hiring persons within the state for labor outside the state was sustained.
[0]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-4/sec...
e.g. if you go don't go through immigration, you can physically live there, but you'll have to pay 105% of your income in tax
Otherwise, it sounds like a distinction without a difference. How do you imagine a "going through immigration" process that doesn't effectively produce "resident"/"non-resident" status?
Prop 13: Mission accomplished.
I think there are other potential solutions, however. Finding ways to create incentives for not speculating on property, huge taxes for vacation homes, etc. may work. Though it’s dangerous because you might get something that sounded good at the time but turned out to be a disaster like Prop 13.
By keeping people out, this will actually increase the scarcity and drive up "prices" even more. Your "big sum of money" acknowledges as much.
So this is a terrible, unfair idea. And if we were to ever implement such a scheme, the only way to make it remotely fair would to heavily heavily tax this wealth, perhaps by charging existing residents a highly monthly rent to stay, and for those that get a grandfathered-in prize, they should have to pay a large amount of capital gains.
It's a recipe for even more massive inequality.
I think it's important to remember that California's wealth comes not from internally, but from externally. By exporting the goods from labor in the state, labor that is largely the result of immigrants into the state, California is leading the way to a more environmentally friendly path, with greater wealth, for all of humanity.
Wishing to cut that off because of a few conservative "native born" Californians don't want to see apartment buildings is the height of foolishness and greed.
Water supply issues notwithstanding, which could easily change California’s intrinsic desirability.