Residing on the Riviera, I spend a lot of my time in Santa Barbara’s diverse District 1, stretching east and west of Milpas Street down to the beach. There, early 20th-century bungalows vie for space with pricey new four-story apartment blocks; businesses thrive from storefront Patco to giant MarBorg; NGOs serve the city’s unhoused, while the cognoscenti come for Chapala Market’s fajitas de pollo and goodies from Tacos Pipeye, Deux Bakery, Bossie’s Kitchen, and Buena Onda.
Anchored by Our Lady of Guadalupe Parish and Ortega Park, this traditional Latino neighborhood comprises 65 percent residential rental housing and a largely modest-income voting population facing a rapidly accelerating pace of development and gentrification. Milpas Street denizens wishing for years for a locally owned coffee roaster are deeply disappointed that Starbuck’s is taking a lease on a large building across the street from CVS. A neighbor just off Milpas considers herself lucky to find a 850-square-foot, two bedroom/one bath on one-seventh of an acre last year for $1.3 million. A couple’s rent for a two-bedroom duplex jumped 27 percent in the past two-and-a-half years to almost $4,000 a month, even as one of them lost their job. “No one likes to talk about it but there is a lot of greed out there,” notes another residential renter.
Reflecting voters’ twin concerns of rising costs and rapid redevelopment, District 1 chose the slow-growth and rent control-favoring challenger Wendy Santamaria (with 2,042 votes) over incumbent Alejandra Gutierrez (with 1,809 votes) in this month’s Santa Barbara City Council race. Clearly, they were disappointed that Councilmember Gutierrez had moved away from the pocketbook and working-class concerns on their minds. She voted during her single term with developers, landlords, real estate agents, and construction trade unions — who subsequently financed a $40,000 campaign that featured a lot of mud-slinging against the challenger.
Santamaria talked only about local issues, advocating not only for rent control, but also for programs to encourage more small Latino-owned businesses on Milpas, construction of public workforce housing, dealing more effectively with the unhoused, and working with the Public Works department on strategies like cleaning up creek debris to mitigate flooding on Gutierrez Street and the Eastside.
With no money to hire a professional political campaign manager, Santamaria daily marched around the district canvassing door-to-door. She sought and received mentorship by one of the city’s most principled politicians, SBCC geology professor Kristen Sneddon (who represents my Riviera neighborhood.) The Santa Barbara Democratic Party and the Young Democrats endorsed her, though the Democratic Women went with Gutierrez.
Meeting Santamaria, we connected on the slow-growth front, since the Riviera and nearby neighborhoods — the Upper East Side and Mission Canyon — are also facing the possibility of huge, inappropriate development projects the city might be unable to stop, as they were filed under the state’s “builder’s remedy” law. We also perceived wise political instincts far beyond her 27 years, including her steely refusal to respond when Gutierrez called her a “carpetbagger” and proclaimed repeatedly that 400 of her campaign’s yard signs were “stolen.” When we described Santamaria’s campaign to her as bare-bones, she corrected us: “It’s grassroots.”
In taking the high road, listening closely to her constituents, and emphasizing the issues District 1 voters (and, to be frank, many other Santa Barbarans) care about, Santamaria seemed to us to resemble a bit a young Helene Schneider, the former mayor who won her first seat on the City Council at 33.
Santamaria did address Gutierrez’s dozens of meeting absences during her term that — at the time at least — were not explained. (More recently, Gutierrez has said she suffered from a serious illness over a long period of time during her term of office.) I learned through sources in county government that county employees ended up receiving and answering many constituent calls and requests that simply went unaddressed by the District 1 council office. Clearly, the councilmember’s office could have prudently handled her illness by augmenting the office with experienced advisors or volunteers and perhaps sensitively letting constituents know that there was a health issue. No one wants to penalize Councilmember Gutierrez for illness in office, but it’s truly unfortunate that the fallout from how the illness was handled by her office created a campaign issue.
Thanks largely to the outcome of the District 1 race, Santa Barbarans concerned about the pace of development can look forward to a 2025 City Council majority finally willing to take a “we’re all in this together” look at planning for a livable cityscape and city skyline. Santamaria will join just-reelected Oscar Gutierrez, Sneddon, and Meagan Harmon — each of whom has expressed the need for a more balanced approach to “growth” than wielding a rubber stamp and wringing one’s hands after the fact.
Eileen White Read, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and nonprofit CEO, and her spouse, attorney Charles C. Read, were donors to Wendy Santamaria’s campaign for Santa Barbara City Council.