A Grand Vision: The People Shaping Santa Barbara’s State Street 

A Grand Vision:
The People Shaping
Santa Barbara’s State Street 

Meet the Dreamers and Planners Leading Downtown into the Future

by Ryan P. Cruz and Margaux Lovely | Photos by Ingrid Bostrom
October 3, 2024

For all the polarizing debate surrounding the closure of State Street, it’s hard to deny its charm. On an early Thursday evening, as we gathered a group of policymakers, planners, architects, and community organizers downtown for a photo to accompany this story, the energy in the air was palpable ​— ​bikes buzzed by (not at dangerous speeds), a live band started up on one side of the curb, and the clink of wine glasses rang out from the other side of the street at Satellite S.B.

Sure, the temporary look and feel of downtown isn’t an ideal solution. The $800,000 consultants didn’t produce much for the city to call it a success, and the endless back-and-forth over whether the street should be open to cars seemingly stalled any semblance of progress.

Public Works Director Cliff Maurer even noted that in the past couple of years, the actual on-the-ground changes on State Street have amounted to a few pilot programs and fixes ​— ​painting neon-green bike lanes, removing those lanes, then repainting them; closing and reopening the first block of Victoria Street; and trying out a one-way lane for vehicles in front of The Granada Theatre. “That’s about it,” Maurer said.

City Administrator Kelly McAdoo was thrown into the chaos of the State Street planning process late in the game when she started her position in May, but within the first few weeks of her tenure, it was clear that she wanted to free up the logjam and get a master plan moving forward.

She called State Street the “cherished heart of Santa Barbara,” and said that the Grand Paseo design ​— ​the latest version of the plan presented to City Council on September 17, calling for a “flat and flexible” curb-less street along eight blocks ​— ​isn’t been heard over the last three years of public meetings.”

McAdoo, Maurer, Community Development Director Eli Isaacson, Downtown Team Manager Sarah Clark, and State Street Master Planner Tess Harris worked on the city’s end, juggling the comments from the 17 members of the State Street Advisory Committee ​— ​a motley crew of designers, architects, planners, historians, and experts that held 15 public meetings since 2021 ​— ​with the flood of community input collected from 80 community events, 6,000 survey engagements, and countless letters sent by concerned citizens, business owners, and nonprofit organizations.

But turning that input into something tangible that people could envision in Santa Barbara required some heavy lifting and creative thinking, and the collaboration of dozens of individuals who all shared a vision of a vibrant and economically viable downtown.

Santa Barbara’s Dream Team

In the Harrison Design offices just off State Street on Haley Street, architect Anthony Grumbine assembled an Avengers-style assortment of architects, landscape architects, and designers to turn the master plan into something the public could visualize. The team included experienced professionals from Harrison Design, Appleton Architects, and Arcadia Studio representing decades’ worth of practicing architecture and studying urban planning in cities across the world. The crew of artists ​— ​half of them graduates from the University of Notre Dame’s School of Architecture — is also full of young, forward-thinking talent who aren’t afraid of embracing the future.

It started more than four years ago, with the American Institute of Architects “Design Charrette” in 2020, a group event where architects and designers sketched out their early ideas for what a future downtown could look like. After the city contracted MIG consultants, and “it seemed like they weren’t getting that Santa Barbara flavor,” Grumbine said, the city asked if he would be willing to help. 

The design team ​— ​including Nehal Albialy, Nicholas Altiere, Marc Appleton, Henry Lenny, John Margolis, and Alexis Stypa, among others ​— ​all worked pro bono starting last December, throwing every idea at the wall and seeing what worked for Santa Barbara. “From very early on, we wanted to make sure to listen to any and all ideas. Let’s get them on the table and flesh them out,” Grumbine said.

This took a great deal of patience, and taking into account the many factors, including economic potential, public safety, creating a central space, and making downtown into something like a traditional city with mixed-use buildings. Balancing the many opinions over State Street was important, but the design team was focused on creating something that would ultimately make a more vibrant city that everybody could enjoy.

“I think we all kept in mind that everybody wants the same thing,” said Qing Xue, another architect on the design team. “We want a beautiful, lively, economically booming downtown. It’s just that what that is looks different to different people.”

From the start, landscape architect Justin Manuel saw the potential for connecting paseos throughout the downtown in a way that directed traffic and created a sense of a central space. “There’s already a system of paseos,” Manuel said, “though it’s a bit fragmented.” 

Manuel also had the idea of planting a row of palm trees along State Street that visitors could see from miles away, another way of visually drawing people downtown. The design, called the “Grand Paseo,” would also include landmark gateways and paseo entrances, which designer Thomas Sekula said would help people navigate the city and give that trademark photo location that says, “I’m in Santa Barbara.”

“These places help you navigate the city,” Sekula said. “Our favorite places in Santa Barbara are landmarks — the courthouse, the mission — so the more of those types of art and architecture we get downtown, the happier people are going to be.”

Some of the most visually appealing AI-assisted renderings of these gateways and paseos were created by Sekula, who prides himself in traditional hand-drafting and watercolor but has kept at the forefront of the “wave of technology” moving toward digitally enhanced renderings.

“For about a year now, I’ve honed this skill set,” Sekula said. “I start with hand drawing and digital painting, and then I feed it into the machine. We can use AI creatively and make it do what we want. You can change the materials; you can do variations — but it’s pretty complicated, and also it goes pretty wild sometimes.”

Sekula said this new technology, while still developing, allows him to “step away from the design,” and makes adjusting to community input just a few clicks away.

Grumbine praised Sekula’s innovative work, and said that AI can be a “really good, powerful tool in the hands of a master chef.”

Some of the other renderings were a mix of hand-painted images spliced together with digital editing, thanks to Isabella Botello and Kyle Dellenbaugh, who spent weeks working on watercolor trees, trolley cars, and other elements before combining them together in the final product. This unique mix of hand-drawn artwork with digital editing marked one of the first large-scale projects in the city to use this new technology.

You’ve Got a Friend

But the design team wasn’t the only crew working overtime toward making this master plan a reality. The Friends of State Street came together in 2020 with the shared goal of “reimagining the future of State Street,” according to president Sharon Rich, and this group of dedicated volunteers has been working to find a common, neutral plan for the city.

“We’re neutral to the design,” Rich said, “We want the community involved.”

The so-called “band of friends” started out small, simply asking the city: “How can we help?”

Their first foray into the State Street effort was enlisting a group of local college students to help measure out the parklets ​— ​all 9,000 square feet of them ​— ​to help the businesses get into compliance with the city’s code. 

Then the “Friends” set their sights on the mismatching and inconsistent look of the parklets. The group coordinated with the city, downtown businesses, and Benjamin Moore paint company to donate city-approved palettes to repaint the parklets, at no cost to business owners. They completed 11 parklets in one day.

“That’s a collaborative community event that I’ll never forget, and I don’t think they will either,” Rich said. “It’s one of those moments that’s beautiful to see. Everybody, the people and the city working together.”

Recently the group has ramped up its involvement, hosting a six-week series of community conversations to get input from businesses, nonprofits, Realtors, the arts, and the mobility community, all at separate times “so they could share their ideas freely,” Rich said.

When they heard the city was working with the design team toward visual renderings of the State Street Master Plan, the Friends of State Street jumped at the chance to help by commissioning watercolor artist Jon Messer to paint two bird’s-eye views of downtown, showing what the city would look like if it went forward with the plan for a more dense, mixed-use central area.

“Anthony Grumbine and the city have done a good job,” Rich said. “What could really elevate that, we thought, is to commission those last two renderings. We’re trying to create a shared vision for State Street and Santa Barbara.”

The group will be busy in the upcoming year, now with a full-time office at the CEC Hub downtown and plans for another six-week event starting in April, which will serve as a “Love Letter to Santa Barbara,” Rich says, featuring a dozen iconic destinations, including, of course, State Street.

“We really believe State Street is world-class,” she said. “We’re not going anywhere. This is our love.” 

Captain Dave Davis

While the dreamers, artists, and community organizers were able to merge many ideas into an aesthetically pleasing shared vision, it was the hours and hours of planning conversations with the State Street Advisory Committee that provided the foundation for the plan. And the man tasked with steering this ship was longtime planner and policy wonk Dave Davis.

Davis, now the chair of the board with MTD, essentially came out of retirement to chair the State Street committee ​— ​and there might not have been anybody more prepared for the job. Davis has a wealth of historical context and knowledge dating back to the ’70s and ’80s when he was a city planner and community development director, and he readily recalls the many ages of downtown.

In the ’70s, downtown was in a transition with the landing of big department stores and free parking. In the ’80s, the city was seriously thinking about joining the big indoor mall craze. Eventually, Davis said, they decided to keep it “Santa Barbara,” and do an outdoor mall, Paseo Nuevo, which opened up in 1990. 

Since the turn of the century, it’s been the return of “big-box stores,” the “Amazon effect,” the rise of the Funk Zone as a premier location, and the pandemic, which all contributed to State Street’s current era ​— ​a sort-of limbo with plenty of challenges but even more potential.

The compass by which Davis directed the committee were the words of the late former mayor Hal Conklin, who always said that downtown Santa Barbara should “invoke a sense of place, a sense of history, and a sense of celebration.”

Davis was among the first to bring the phrase “flat, flexible, and fun” into the conversation. He looked to what made old cities successful ​— ​what the Greeks called agora, or a gathering place ​— ​and similar plaza-centered city layouts that were used by the Spanish in Europe, Mexico, and, yes, early Santa Barbara. 

“The whole point of downtown is the civic and cultural center,” Davis said. “It’s always going to be that. So how do you advance that?”

Navigating the many opinions of the advisory committee and the public, he said, was by far the most challenging part of the process.

“Was it difficult? It was impossible to balance those things,” he said. “How many times have we gone to council and asked if we are going to keep it closed or not? So, what you have to do is sit, listen, and work through it.”

When the dust finally settled, though, it became clearer from the meetings that more people in the city were in favor of the “timeless” idea of walkable paseos and a more bike-friendly future, he said.

This wave of community input ​— ​not only from business owners and planners, but also from a group of young and civically engaged citizens ​— ​is something that stood out to Davis as an important factor in this plan.

“It was rewarding for us,” Davis said. “You engage the community, and the community itself wants to take part. The amount of engagement and excitement with young people, Strong Towns included, is encouraging. There weren’t just gray hairs.”

New Kids on the Block

Enter the new kids on the block ​— ​Strong Towns Santa Barbara ​— ​a fiery group of young guns who are ready to sustainably revitalize the downtown area, one pedestrian at a time. They’ve crafted the rallying cry of why State Street should remain car-free and have avoided latching onto the sense of impending e-bike doom that has consumed so many Santa Barbarans.

Strong Towns Santa Barbara emerged from the woodwork two years ago with the help of Laguna Blanca graduate Sullivan Israel. While studying for his master’s degree in city and regional planning and civil engineering at Cal Poly, he stumbled across the book Strong Towns by Charles L. Marohn Jr. and couldn’t put it down. The book tackles the question of how to sustainably develop and maintain a bustling downtown from an “engineering and economic perspective that’s hard to argue with,” Israel said. 

The 2019 book had started a movement well before Israel got his hands on it, and hundreds of Strong Towns subsidiaries now exist across the country, each with the goal of creating financially sustainable and lively downtown areas. The national arm of Strong Towns stresses the importance of uniquely fitting each chapter (called “conversations” to emphasize this point) into the community it’s part of as opposed to directly mirroring the national organization’s broader goals.

And the Santa Barbara conversation revolves around State Street.

A healthy mix of graduate students and retirees, parents of young children and long-time business owners, Strong Towns Santa Barbara has grown from a mere 18 initial members in 2022 to more than 350 now contently on the email list. The group transcends generations, income levels, and most other heavily divisive factors, pushing even the most civically hesitant to get involved in the State Street discussion.

“We’re not just a bunch of planners sitting around a table,” Israel said. “Well, we do have a couple of planners,” he added with a chuckle, explaining how the group is a healthy mix of community members who aren’t normally at the forefront of local politics.

The big catalyst for this myriad of civically minded individuals, Israel said, is their push to keep State Street car-free. The 10 blocks from Gutierrez to East Sola have been closed to cars since the COVID pandemic spurred development of restaurant parklets on State Street, and Strong Towns makes the case to not fix what ain’t broke.

“It was radical to close the street in 2020, and it’s even more radical now to undo it,” said Ian Baucke, a longtime Santa Barbara resident and active Strong Towns member. “I see people walking, biking, dancing in the middle of the street ​— ​it’s energetic. Why would we want to lose that?”

While the liveliness radiating from State Street on any given night might be reason enough to keep cars away, Strong Towns has made a pointed effort to collect data from business owners, residents, and shoppers to figure out if downtown frequenters feel the same way.

State Street business owners, for one, were overwhelmingly in favor of keeping cars away. While the members of Strong Towns were quick to admit that their surveying tactics weren’t entirely up to scientific standards, they maintained that 75 percent of those surveyed opposed the return of cars.

Many owners brushed them off with some quip of indifference, and only one store owner felt strongly that cars should be allowed back. Strong Towns purposefully left restaurants out of the survey, concerned that it would have skewed the data in car-free favor. Restaurant parklets have given the businesses a revenue bump nationwide due to the increased popularity of outdoor dining, especially during the peak of the pandemic.

Outside of their small-scale surveys, Strong Towns references a plethora of national and international peer-reviewed data on their website, with study after study concluding that a car-free downtown is the key to a vibrant, prosperous, and economically sustainable main drag.

Without cars comes the magic question of our car-dependent society: How else are you supposed to putter around State Street?

When four members of Strong Towns rode up to their chat with the Independent on e-bikes, it was clear what their preferred mode was. 

“We’re not anti-car, but we are anti–car dependence,” said Israel. “We just want people to have the choice.” Having the choice between driving, riding the bus or a bike, or walking is the key to maintaining homeostasis between them all, he added.

“One more biker or bus-rider means one less car on the street, which means less traffic or one less phase of the light to wait for,” said Anita Stahl, a member of Strong Towns who has lived in some of Europe’s most walkable cities. “It’s a win-win for everyone.” 

Magic question number two: How can a “flat-and-flexible” Grand Paseo framework, the proposal that City Council is hedging its bets on, account for people with mobility concerns?

“My mom is disabled, so I understand firsthand the concerns that people bring up,” said Israel. Without cars, mobility scooters have more space on the road than they do on a sidewalk, and State Street is “more inviting now more than ever” because of this, he stated matter-of-factly.

And the most magic of Santa Barbara questions: What about those darn kids on e-bikes?

“We’re not denying that kids flying down State Street is a problem,” said Lily Heidger, a PhD student at UCSB whose research focuses on bicycle infrastructure in urban areas. “But there are creative solutions to slow kids down.” Cobblestones or physical barriers like planters on either side of bike lanes cause bikers’ lines of vision to appear smaller to the brain. This “visual narrowing” has been shown to reduce bike speeds, she said.

“This is really just a pro-people approach,” said Baucke.

For many of the younger Strong Towns members looking to put down roots in Santa Barbara and eventually start a family, it has become a discussion of, “I want to, but can I?”

Can I walk or ride my bike on State Street with my kids safely? Can we go out to family dinner without having to pack everyone into the car? Can I actively choose how I want to get to work or school, or will I always be forced to drive? Strong Towns members mulled over each of these questions carefully, looking toward the future with the hope that they can. 

The Mayor’s Dissent

Not everybody is on board with the car-free future of State Street. While the majority of the council came to a consensus on the new plan, Mayor Randy Rowse and Councilmember Alejandra Gutierrez have been vocal about their opposition to pandemic-era closure of State Street, which has gone on for nearly five years now.

“Not much has changed,” Rowse wrote in an open letter published earlier this month. “Someday, perhaps, the utopian notion of a ‘car-free’ city center may come to fruition, but there are many factors to consider. The present state of State is the result of a temporary declaration, and not a calculated plan.”

Rowse said that the lengthy meetings and countless presentations expended in this effort have cost the taxpayers, and that the short-term configuration has affected property values and hampered the ability for public safety to provide service in the area. In his opinion, the street could be reopened and improved independently of the long-term master plan.

“The continued closure of State Street and the ongoing planning process are unrelated,” he said. “Reopening, cleaning, and improving the lighting on those downtown blocks does not preclude the Master Plan’s eventual completion and might just help spur economic recovery. Let’s get to work on the street, ditch the K-rail barriers, and invite everyone back downtown.”

For now, city planners will continue moving toward the “flat and flexible” plan, a compromise that would allow for the street to be cleared for special events, including parades (though the horse-heavy Fiesta parade is unlikely to return due to public safety issues raised by the Police Department).