Empty S.B. Buildings to Mixed-Use?

Santa Barbara is a hub of technology, tourism, and agriculture, yet there appears to be no cross communication and support between the three. We don’t think about the prevalence and need of each, as far as I can tell from articles in the Independent (and the bankrupt Santa Barbara News-Press), but these are our community’s strengths. Santa Barbara can’t continue to prosper as it has without all three of these legs of the stool.

The high-paying jobs that come from the tech sector support broad swaths of the economy. The infrared community alone brings over $2 billion, as do tourism and agriculture. The underlying element behind each of these is the lack of housing. And, if you haven’t paid attention to articles in the Independent, Santa Barbara is more than 20,000 homes short of the need for families that have at least one member employed within one of these sectors.

One look at downtown Santa Barbara would give the watchful eye a clear picture that retail is near its end, if not ended. There are endless store fronts empty and much of State Street is abandoned.

I think that we as a community should rally around the idea of converting our empty commercial real estate into mixed use. Mixed use, combining household rental/ownership, retail storefronts, job-related centers, and community gathering facilities have been embraced by cities from Boston and Los Angeles, to Pittsburgh and Alexandria, Virginia, to name a few. Mixed-use has been so successful in revitalizing atrophying cities that billions of dollars have been spent on these conversions in the last five years alone. Past examples of such revitalization projects have been so overwhelmingly successful that many cities are in the act of developing it.

Santa Barbara continues to grow out and to create an environment of isolation between people who support our economic pillars. It also continues to create more and more traffic as workers commute farther and farther away to find a home to live in.

I do realize that commercial space is not that easy to convert to multi-use, but the Biden administration has launched a multi-billion-dollar effort to reform the nation’s housing practices and has sent a national message that new housing ideas can be funded. This is a new housing idea for the working people that make Santa Barbara such a fantastic place to live and visit. Why can’t we consider mixed-use for empty buildings in Santa Barbara?