The Housing Canard Exposed

One of the most often repeated and enduring rationales for increased housing in Santa Barbara, and the rest of the South Coast, is a purported need to provide local housing for workers who must commute long distances to work here.

However, that rationale makes unsubstantiated assumptions as to why people commute, how many, how far, and who they are.

A recently completed study by the Santa Barbara County Association of Governments, a regional agency focusing on housing, transportation, and long-term planning, has revealed data that undermines many of those assumptions.

The study found that over 80 percent of work commutes are within the immediate South Coast. Meaning that the vast majority of people who work here also reside here and are less than 10 miles from where they work.

Of the 15,000 longer distance commuters, over 70 percent come from Ventura and more than half of these are higher wage earners, not the lower paid service industry workers whom affordable housing advocates complain must endure long commutes because of a lack of local housing.

Why people have homes that are a long commute from where they work is not necessarily an affordability or availability issue. There are other reasons, among them are children’s schools, extended families, environment, friends, and community.

Regardless of where workers reside, the study also found that an increasing number of them work from home and need not commute every day, if at all.

The clamor for building more housing in Santa Barbara, and elsewhere in California, comes from the usual suspects — the people-packer monied interests, the desire-equals-deserve wanna-be residents, and the pandering politicians imposing myopic, misguided, build-baby-build housing mandates on local communities that will forever diminish and destroy the ambience and character of those communities and their neighborhoods.

Indeed, the state’s political overlords have overridden and usurped local zoning and building regulations and have essentially outlawed single-family home neighborhoods, as well as height, density, and parking allowance restrictions, while glossing over water supply concerns — except to continually demand further reductions in water use by Californians.

And for what? So selfish people-packers can shoe-horn ever more population into places that will exceed or already have exceeded the safe carrying capacity for human population.

Currently, nearly 15,000 new housing units are proposed for the South Coast. Does anyone want to bet it will stop there? Fifteen-thousand units will increase the local population by 20,000 to 30,000 residents. Stuffing more and more people into this singularly beautiful place will only make it less and less singularly beautiful.

The real housing crisis in California is that there is too much housing. The state’s safe carrying capacity — water, public infrastructure, preservation of nature — is already exceeded. The prudent resolution of the crisis is population reduction.

Mercifully, that trend has begun. More people are leaving the state, and fewer are coming in. Since 2019, California’s population has dropped by about 800,000. People who want a house they can afford are finding it in other states.

A reduction in demand rather than an increase in supply is how California’s “housing crisis” is responsibly resolved.

If you want to preserve this beautiful place, please consider supporting a ballot initiative by Our Neighborhood Voices (ourneighborhoodvoices.com) that reverses the state’s bullying, reckless, housing mandates.

Randy Alcorn wrote opinion columns regularly for several Central Coast newspapers from 2000-2022; he can be contacted at randyaalcorn@gmail.com.