S.B. Needs Homes not Hotel Rooms

On Tuesday, November 19, the Santa Barbara City Council will decide whether to approve, deny, or require an environmental impact report for the second biggest hotel in the city, a 250-room hotel on the east side of the Funk Zone.

The city needs housing, not a massive new hotel in the Funk Zone. The city’s 1983 Specific Plan for the property authorized development for either housing, recreation, and open space, or a hotel. In a stroke of foresight, the Specific Plan required developers to prepare a housing impact study and include programs to minimize housing impacts.

The developer submitted a deeply flawed study, which justified including only six employee apartments for 60 hotel employees. The housing study assumptions conflict with local demographics and seek only to perpetuate current housing conditions, with 70 percent of the hotel staff expected to commute from outside of Santa Barbara. Even with their employee units and housing fund payments, the hotel will demonstrably worsen housing conditions in Santa Barbara. Housing constructed on this site could be subsidized by Funk Zone businesses for their employee housing and support the struggling artists and craftspeople that give the Funk Zone its flair.

The tiny four-acre site has a history of soil contamination, and contaminated groundwater is almost certainly present under the site. The hotel requires a two-acre underground parking garage, despite being in a FEMA-designated flood zone and highly vulnerable to sea level rise and tsunami. Putting a hotel parking garage underground in a designated flood zone is nothing short of harebrained. The building code flatly prohibits it, but city staff absurdly claims a loophole allows it if they designate the hotel a “mixed use” project. Pity the hotel guests who will need to wade through a toxic soup to reach their cars as floodwaters rise.

Marc Chytilo is attorney for Keep the Funk, which is appealing the project.