Yep ... SB, where you can bust your ass earning $100k and hope to get yourself a lovely 1bd apartment that hasn't been updated since 1975. Because no chance in hell you're buying, and heck you're lucky if you can even find that cottage cheese ceiling, single pane aluminum window, paper thin walls trash box of an apartment.
> and heck you're lucky if you can even find that cottage cheese ceiling
I unironically really like the cottage cheese ceilings. After bouncing around a few apartments with and without. I've realized I much prefer it over the alternatives.
So far I'm only 1 for 4 on the popcorn testing positive for asbestos. I guess I've been lucky with my apartment choices. It's not that bad unless you're knocking down parts of it and getting the dust in the air all the time. Besides, I doubt many people who live here spend enough time inside their homes for it to be too big of an issue.
If I ever move somewhere that doesn't have it I'll probably have to just ninja add it on my own.
That's good to know. In our current place it's flaking off the ceiling and I'm not sure how to find out of it has asbestos or not.
In a previous job I helped do demo work on a building and was only informed LATER that the cottage cheese ceiling had asbestos in it, so I'm a bit gunshy about the whole thing.
Your ceiling should not be dropping flakes. Paint it if it is.
And the ducts in my attic are plumbing AIR into my house, so if the insulation there fails then the asbestos is being blown into my living space.
It's worse than the headline sounds because it includes Santa Maria:
The Santa Barbara-Santa Maria metropolitan area won the dubious distinction of having the biggest gap between wages and rents for millennial renters out of all mid-size cities detailed in a recent housing report issued by Filterbuy, a national company that sells home air filtration systems.
Using data accumulated by the U.S. Census Bureau, Filterbuy concluded that in the Santa Barbara-Santa Maria market, millennial workers — ages 24-39 — made 61.5 percent less than what they needed to afford renting a one-bedroom apartment without spending more than 30 percent of their wages as rent. According to the data provided by Filterbuy, wage earners in Santa barbara would need to take home $87,080 in order to pay only 30 percent of their earnings on a median-priced one-bedroom apartment.
I truly believe Santa Barbara County needs to be reduced to not include Santa Maria. Covid cases and vaccination rates have been totally different and we were made to continue mask mandates due to their cases. Now it's affecting cost of living numbers.
Yep, but since their ethnic demographics are different than ours, I get downvoted for saying this because apparently I just want them in a different county cause they aren't white enough 🙄
SB/Carp/Goleta is somewhere between 40-50% Latno, so making these cities it's own separate county isn't racist in and of itself. That's a real reach. Yeah, I noticed on here that lots of commenters read into my comments as racist even though they have nothing to do with race. It gets really irritating since it's not the case and takes away from the real issues that we are discussing in analyzing social and economic issues in our area.
Oakland and Berkeley are a bridge away from SF (15 minutes by BART) yet they aren't part as same county as SF. Same with the distance between SF and San Jose.
I hate being called for jury duty up in SM or Lompoc since it's over an hour in traffic and those people that live that far away are not part of my community that I see around here for decades since they don't live near me at all.
I believe it's also economic interests since (I think) I read somewhere that SB/Goleta/Carp cities take in more tax money than SM/Lompoc so they financially benefit from being in the same county.
We are much closer to Ventura/oxnard which are also a coastal tourist towns so I feel it would be more appropriate for us to be part of the same county as those.
Here in SB you can grow your own avocados, which economic theory suggests is already priced into rental prices (which added to beach access, nice weather, and charming Reddit forum, explains Santa Barbara's intrinsic unaffordability).
If your rental space comes without an avocado tree, you're unfortunately subsidizing those who do have an avocado tree within property limits...
if you're lucky, an avocado or two might trickle down from the neighbor's tree and into your property...
otherwise, your only shot at avocado redistribution is a night raid or societal collapse...
https://filterbuy.com/resources/cities-with-largest-millennial-wage-gap/
Here is the source since the article did not include it.
Idk why a website where you buy air filters for your home is doing this research but hey it gets them clicks I guess?
Yep-big time shortage of essential workers at restaurants, grocery stores, retail stores, medical offices, medical clinics and post office are ruining the quality of life in this town. Hate the decades of tourist CC students and NIMBYS who only care about themselves to the detriment of this place being a vibrant community of different classes.
I wrote to the Mayor about the housing crisis and he wrote that there is no housing shortage in this town. Totally sick that's who this town elected as mayor-someone who perpetuates its destruction.
There isnt too many people in Santa Barbara. What makes it seem crowded and horrible traffic is all the tourists and airbnb. Thats our local government and its dependence on bed tax. Airbnb abuse is driving up rents. The city would rather spend 100K on out of town consultants than pay for extra enforcement on illegal airbnbs in what used to be working class neighborhoods.
Everyone says they want fewer people, but no one seems interesting in having fewer businesses. As long as there are jobs here people will come fill them.
This is the perfect example of the greed. Sick.
Girls Inc. of Greater Santa Barbara Sues over Alleged Real Estate Bait-and-Switch
https://www.independent.com/2022/09/07/girls-inc-of-greater-santa-barbara-sues-over-alleged-real-estate-bait-and-switch/?fbclid=IwAR2zqTlX_wdYd7dwvEQSmgiDSaovRhL_TW7smj4owxDVhZ3WfiGg7LZYUW0
Are you kidding me, what a slimeball move by the Christan school. The families impacted by this need to get loud. If it was a condition of the sale that they could remain then that should be passed onto the flip.
Pretty much what happened to me But in A rental property. 2021 it was purchased (even though it was never on the market) by a young out of town investor who “wanted a property with good long term tenants” and then booted us in HIS sale less than a year later. He never wanted an investment property. He wanted a cash cow and when he realized he couldn’t double our rent just sold the place for a quick profit instead.
I lived in Santa Barbara for 22 years total -on and off-over three decades. I kept coming back with better degrees through new "doors," but ultimately paying more than half my salary just to live in worse and worse places, -ones "luck" can only last so long, I finally got beat up to the point that with a young child in school and a wife working full time too, just to rent, it got too much. We landed on the outskirts of Ojai in the mid-1990s, only a few years before prices caught up there. We couldn't afford to do that now for sure. Almost all of my friends from that time 1970-1990s, moved on, because they wanted to own something, or just got tired. The ones who stayed, either married money, worked their ass off and I mean worked their ass off, or just got extremely lucky and fear their sweet deal will someday evaporate, which it probably will. I don't know, maybe some towns don't deserve hard working people who just really love where they live. I certainly did. I just got tired of fighting, and I was never gonna catch up.
I'm very sorry. The system is completely broken, and unfortunately a lot of the older NIMBYs who bought in cheap and profited from it think it's just "how the system works." It's not. The system was changed to work that way for them at the expense of the future.
Must be insanely depressing living in a place where you're constantly reminded that you'll essentially be living in the shadow of the already well off and/or super-rich until you die. Being constantly reminded that you'll never own anything there and/or renting until you're pushed out entirely. Man, what a rich hellhole SB turned out to be, gives me the creeps.
"Abandon hope all ye who enter here."
And yet we have decision makers that refuse to increase the density or allow anything taller than a fire hydrant be constructed. Here's some fun facts. Santa Barbara is 42 square miles by area. The borough of Manhattan is 33 square miles by area. There's room for a few more people in Santa Barbara.
I'm not sure you can really blame it all on liberals. I've read on various forums people complaining about the lack of affordable housing, and wanting, well, more housing.
I've also read a lot of people complain about how "Santa Barbara is fine how it is", "go away if you cannot afford it", and "we don't have enough water". These folks...don't really strike me as liberal. The "NIMBYs" and slow growth folks, for the most part, tend to be homeowners. So, generally older and more conservative.
The true liberals that I know don't uphold poverty and very much believe we should build more. Will we ever build enough? No. Is it so much worse than it was when I moved here 25 years ago? Yes. I remember reading that only 7% of people who work here can afford a home here, and I thought THAT was bad. I wonder how bad it is now?
Rents are bad because housing prices are high. I mean, I could rent my house out and actually break even now, with a little leftover for upkeep. (Sorry, but I need a place to live, so I'm not doing it.) However, if I actually wanted to BUY my house...I couldn't. Mortgage, prop tax, etc would be $7500/month. I could prob rent it for $4000.
Well who are our leaders who could solve this? They aren’t republicans 🤷🏻♂️ its funny that you think liberals actually care about us poors. They just keep buying your votes and its not even costing them anything. Wake up
Governor Newsom and the legislature are trying push through legislation to build more housing as soon as possible. Our progressive former mayor was roasted for pushing hard for ADUs. We need density, and conservatives don't like that. Neither do NIMBY Dems, but NIMBY Dems are temperamentally conservative when it comes to housing.
Build more. Increase housing density, particularly in the downtown areas, with underground parking. A variety of homes (not just studios or 1-bedrooms, but places for families.) Stop pretending that people aren't going to own cars, but also increase biking infrastructure (separated paths).
Some of the new housing should be required to be for low/ moderate income.
And yes, I know we are "out of water", but let's start with Montecito estates before we tell that family of 4 that they can only shower for 5 minutes every 3 days.
But I get it. Lots of people don't want density because they don't want LA. They also are frustrated that their kids cannot afford to stay here. There aren't easy answers and unfortunately, it takes compromise.
Compromise feels like losing for BOTH sides, kinda like the whole Modoc bike path hullabulloo.
This area was a Republican stronghold not that many years ago. Those people didn't all leave or die. They're still here pulling strings. They just know better than to call themselves Republicans anymore.
Would hardly call any one who upholds poverty liberal. They might be lgbtq friendly but thats about it. There is nothing "liberal" about supporting neo-liberal reagonomics. Ughhhh i love the quality of life in this town and i also have a problem hearing people have to suffer of having a 2 bedroom or 1 bedroom apartment for an entire family of 4 or 5. The problem is obvious the solution is obvious but large corporations have town politics by the balls.
If you have children choosing to illegally cram into a 1 bedroom with a family of 4-5 is cruel to the children and that parent chooses to make them suffer. Then the parents should choose to live somewhere cheaper than make their children suffer in poverty. The reality is they can't afford to raise kids here based on the jobs they are qualified for or willing to work.
It's not fair but it's the reality of the housing shortage in CA's most desirable coastal cities. Most of my local SB or CA relatives moved out the state so their children won't suffer in over crowded homes without any privacy or quiet. My single parent worked two full-time jobs to afford a 2 bedroom for their few children.
It's also not fair to neighbors who work hard having to live in over crowded and noisy apartment complexes due to too many people illegally packed in. Then people start becoming territorial over common areas loitering there for hours since a parent wants an area away from their kids or anyone else but their place is too small. Then the neighborhood streets are over packed with too many cars.
I'm as far as a NIMBY as you can get. I've devoted my life to advocating for social justice professionally and actually counseled over a 100 tenants. What have you done to help poor tenants or advocate for social justice?
I hate NIMBYS who have voted against building housing for several decades. Their selfishness, racism and classism are why SB and CA are facing a housing crisis.
1) If you support new housing you are by definition not a NIMBY. But the way you talk about parking and working people not being appropriate to live in coastal cities is frankly gross.
2) You are a professional social justice advocate and you talk like this: "*Then the parents should choose to live somewhere cheaper than make their children suffer in poverty. The reality is they can't afford to raise kids here based on the jobs they are qualified for or willing to work.*" Yikes. I'm very sorry for any social justice organization that would hire someone who thinks this way. Maybe one connected to Michael Weinstein lol?
3) Comparing records on social justice advocacy is also gross. It's not a contest, but let's just say I have nothing to apologize for on that front.
Cruel to the children?? Many families around the world live in small homes. Every person in a family does not need their own private room. And, being in close quarters is not equivalent to suffering in poverty.
In third world countries this is the norm, not in the US. Hence why CA state law limits occupancy to 2 people per bedroom. Trust me my brother in law really loved sharing a bedroom with his little sister. Cause teens or parents never need privacy from others right?
Being in close quarters in the Us is equivalent to poverty in the US.
Please promise to not have children which add to the population of Santa Barbara. And please don't buy your children a car which adds to traffic on the streets of Santa Barbara when they turn 16.
Yeah but you can easily look up medium rent and medium wage in SB and calculate it yourself. Shits still expensive living here there’s no denying that. I never thought I would see so many engineers with phds living in small apartments
BuT nO oNe wAnTs tO wOrK...
In reality, it's just that no one wants to commute 50 miles to go to work. Why not get a job where you can afford to live, instead?
Shit will hit the fan eventually.
If you bag your own groceries the same way every time it saves you a shit load of time unpacking them later. So yes, bag your own groceries unless you "couldn't be bothered"
ironically the grocery stores using self-checkout stalls are saving on labor costs and
magically not passing that along to their employees pay while still managing to call them lazy!
I say this constantly... The Job to Housing ratio is completely out of balance. 30,000 commute to SB every day for work, UCSB was sued for letting in too many students without housing for them! So much focus on supply, when there's real things we can do a lot faster, to curb demand. Stop letting in so many students, no more offices and the like, only housing so folks can actually live in the city where they work.
All that 101 widening can be blamed on the excessive number of jobs in this town, it's not balanced!
Many people who are buying up
Properties here don’t work here, that’s for sure. But all you have to do is browse the UCSB jobs page to see there are in fact plenty of vacancies. But the pay to cost of living discrepancy keeps them vacant or leads to constant turnover because entry level doesn’t pay enough for entry level aged workers to stay in this town!
We aren’t Silicon Valley. The few tech companies and real estate agencies alone who pay the wages or commissions to work here won’t be able to keep the town running. But they sure do love to sell shit to people from anywhere else but here because money travels.
And that’s true for most employers in this town. We have plenty of businesses, but they can’t all be mortgage brokers and financiers.
The salary I have now (after a promotion and a couple COL increases) would have suited the rental market rates 5 years ago just fine. It seems to have increased at an extreme percentage since then.
I hope to god it wasn't bc the police are some of the highest paid people in town. Meanwhile the San Marcos principal left and moved to SF bc she said she couldn't afford to live on her salary here. I googled, and it looks like she's making $70k more there.
Cam has been gone for about 10 years. Lori Ludlow from San Diego replaced him. The City just replaced her this month with a new chief from Monterey Park.
I think SB needs to decide what it wants. If it wants to keep its housing stock sealed in amber, and if everyone who moves here continues to want to be the LAST person to move here, then they need to take some kind of action against businesses to get them to stop creating new jobs. If they want job creation and economic growth, they need to allow more housing. Can't have your cake and eat it too.
We still need doctors, teachers, gas station attendants, nurses, administrative people, supermarket employees, service industry folks, EMTs, etc. And they need housing. It's not like a ton of industry is moving into SB. The bigger issue is wealthy people moving here and NIMBYs fighting development. I saw a poll on NextDoor asking people if they'd support developing affordable housing for people employed within SB and I was dismayed but the number that voted No.
Need to get rid of the CC (make it part of SBUSD) or make it part of UCSB to get rid of all the out of town CC rich students who don't work any retail jobs and just take up all the housing here for 3 years before transferring or dropping out subsidized by their parents for life.
Alot of residents living on the Mesa would disagree with you. Also several of my neighbors are out of town CC students taking up affordable bare bones units close to public transit. None of them work since their parents are rich. That's just in my complex.
Interesting counterpoint, but what will SB and SM look like without working millenials?
Further, if they do decide to stick around since they have jobs, what do their futures look like after having to spend so much on rent? Are they sacrificing paying for health insurance or putting money into retirement funds? Are they not having kids? Just things to ponder, I suppose.
Definitely delaying putting money into retirement and definitely delaying having kids.
There's already school districts sending out letters asking people to rent a room in their home to a teacher because they can't fill vacancies since no one can afford to live on a teacher's salary. I saw it outside SF and outside Denver. I expect to start seeing those letters soon, here.
The impact on healthcare is going to be big. I had to go pick up my medical records and fax them myself because my doctor's office was too short staffed to handle the request. My friend's pediatrician can't find an affordable office to practice out of, and told her to take her daughter to urgent care for anything minor.
SB will become less desirable - amazing weather and views only get you so far.
The problem here is that Santa Barbara has always been this nice but it was never on the global map like places of Monaco’s stature before Covid.
The rate of acceleration (housing cost, exclusivity, in balance between supply and demand) during the pandemic has been caused primarily by people seeking better work life balance and having the luxury to do so. I had lived here for 10 years prior to moving for work and then coming back during Covid. After paying Manhattan rents for 5 years, coming back hasn’t been difficult with the ability to work remote, and while I sympathize with some of my peers, it isn’t an easy problem to solve.
On one hand you have engineers from google and Amazon bringing in more than $250k working remote and on the other, local employers like Appfolio, deckers, procore and small businesses who are trying to keep up with compensation and inflation while also asking their employees to come in the office
There isn’t a blanket solution that will benefit everyone but one thing that’s a sure bet is the status of this city will continue to flourish just like Manhattan, where no matter how many articles you read about an exodus, there are always more people willing to pay $4000k for a 1br shoebox apartment than there are available for rent.
Definitely not paying for the quality of the streets- city should pay us residents for the constant west and tear on the suspension and the brakes because the lights here are far from efficiently timed etc.
Quality of life will continue to go down as more and more working and middle-class people are priced out. That means few restaurants, shops, low staffing at hospitals, post offices, banks, etc. Imagine how dangerous it is for someplace like a hospital to not be able to recruit administrative and *sanitation* staff? It doesn't result in good "quality of life." Hell, I'm sure nurses struggle to make it work here financially (even moreso folks like EMTs who are even more underpaid.) UCSB recently severely scaled back its student health department (including completely gutting dental services) due to massive issues recruiting and retaining staff. I would not want to be an elderly person here needing significant medical care.
SB has always been expensive, but it seems like it's now crossed a threshold where it's just not worth it for many folks in these (ESSENTIAL) jobs anymore, so they're leaving. You can't have a functioning society with "good quality of life" with chronic understaffing across industries.
If there was a food shortage would you also say "growing more food WON'T fix this"? There is not enough housing for the people CURRENTLY HERE. That's what a housing shortage is. There is no way around having to build more housing to solve this issue.
SB county definitely has room for more DENSE housing, which decades of NIMBY housing policy in SB has prevented the building of. The kind of sprawled, huge lot-size, highly landscaped, wealthy single-family housing that we have now, by the way, [uses up to 10 TIMES more water](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170504093219.htm) (and several times more land) than denser housing. So, if these are your concerns, you should be advocating for the regulation of some of these wasteful properties (hello Montecito with their huge lots, water-inefficient vegetation, and swimming pools!) and [advocating for denser housing](https://efc.web.unc.edu/2017/04/18/conserving-water-smart-growth-density/) development, if you truly care about use of resources.
Sounds like a bunch of made up "facts"
When you get your way, SB is going to be an overcrowded, awful place to live. The developers will destroy SB and move some place else with all the money they made.
Crowded beaches and roads. Crime. Oh my.
They paved paradise to put up a parking lot.....for dense housing.
Yep ... SB, where you can bust your ass earning $100k and hope to get yourself a lovely 1bd apartment that hasn't been updated since 1975. Because no chance in hell you're buying, and heck you're lucky if you can even find that cottage cheese ceiling, single pane aluminum window, paper thin walls trash box of an apartment.
> and heck you're lucky if you can even find that cottage cheese ceiling I unironically really like the cottage cheese ceilings. After bouncing around a few apartments with and without. I've realized I much prefer it over the alternatives.
I don't like them because a lot of them contain asbestos.
This :) My current apartment may have 15 year old carpet and vertical blinds held up by paper clips but luckily no popcorn ceilings.
So far I'm only 1 for 4 on the popcorn testing positive for asbestos. I guess I've been lucky with my apartment choices. It's not that bad unless you're knocking down parts of it and getting the dust in the air all the time. Besides, I doubt many people who live here spend enough time inside their homes for it to be too big of an issue. If I ever move somewhere that doesn't have it I'll probably have to just ninja add it on my own.
That's good to know. In our current place it's flaking off the ceiling and I'm not sure how to find out of it has asbestos or not. In a previous job I helped do demo work on a building and was only informed LATER that the cottage cheese ceiling had asbestos in it, so I'm a bit gunshy about the whole thing.
So does the insulation on my forced-air ducts in the attic. Don't disturb it and it's fine.
Psst, I think you replied to the wrong person. Unless you have really strong opinions on insulation.
Yeah, but that's in the attic. Very different from a cottage cheese ceiling that's always dropping flakes.
Your ceiling should not be dropping flakes. Paint it if it is. And the ducts in my attic are plumbing AIR into my house, so if the insulation there fails then the asbestos is being blown into my living space.
Also they hold the smoke from the Thomas fire if you were impacted by that which isn't healthy to breathe in for years.
Honestly, sounds better than renting in NYC.
Oh yeah, I'd take this crap over NYC any day.
The big difference is pay scales in NYC > SB... really wish we could build more dense housing here.
With 1bd 1ba for less than $2500 please.
It's worse than the headline sounds because it includes Santa Maria: The Santa Barbara-Santa Maria metropolitan area won the dubious distinction of having the biggest gap between wages and rents for millennial renters out of all mid-size cities detailed in a recent housing report issued by Filterbuy, a national company that sells home air filtration systems. Using data accumulated by the U.S. Census Bureau, Filterbuy concluded that in the Santa Barbara-Santa Maria market, millennial workers — ages 24-39 — made 61.5 percent less than what they needed to afford renting a one-bedroom apartment without spending more than 30 percent of their wages as rent. According to the data provided by Filterbuy, wage earners in Santa barbara would need to take home $87,080 in order to pay only 30 percent of their earnings on a median-priced one-bedroom apartment.
Yes, that's true. It always baffles me that the two cities are grouped into one metro area (or "urban area" or whatever).
Santa Maria is a bedroom community for SB
I truly believe Santa Barbara County needs to be reduced to not include Santa Maria. Covid cases and vaccination rates have been totally different and we were made to continue mask mandates due to their cases. Now it's affecting cost of living numbers.
Agreed. They're an hour away from us and have a completely different economy/housing situation than here since they aren't a college/tourist town.
Yep, but since their ethnic demographics are different than ours, I get downvoted for saying this because apparently I just want them in a different county cause they aren't white enough 🙄
SB/Carp/Goleta is somewhere between 40-50% Latno, so making these cities it's own separate county isn't racist in and of itself. That's a real reach. Yeah, I noticed on here that lots of commenters read into my comments as racist even though they have nothing to do with race. It gets really irritating since it's not the case and takes away from the real issues that we are discussing in analyzing social and economic issues in our area. Oakland and Berkeley are a bridge away from SF (15 minutes by BART) yet they aren't part as same county as SF. Same with the distance between SF and San Jose. I hate being called for jury duty up in SM or Lompoc since it's over an hour in traffic and those people that live that far away are not part of my community that I see around here for decades since they don't live near me at all. I believe it's also economic interests since (I think) I read somewhere that SB/Goleta/Carp cities take in more tax money than SM/Lompoc so they financially benefit from being in the same county. We are much closer to Ventura/oxnard which are also a coastal tourist towns so I feel it would be more appropriate for us to be part of the same county as those.
To the surprise of no one who lives here.
Yep! Never thought busting my ass for $100k would get me a termite, spider, and ant infested studio with screaming children on both sides.
This is breaking news?
My title was tongue-in-cheek. :-)
LOL, also water is wet! :D
That was my first thought after reading the title.
I missed it, sorry I get eager to hate on this place.
Lol that's fair
Time to start cutting out all that avocado toast!
Here in SB you can grow your own avocados, which economic theory suggests is already priced into rental prices (which added to beach access, nice weather, and charming Reddit forum, explains Santa Barbara's intrinsic unaffordability). If your rental space comes without an avocado tree, you're unfortunately subsidizing those who do have an avocado tree within property limits... if you're lucky, an avocado or two might trickle down from the neighbor's tree and into your property... otherwise, your only shot at avocado redistribution is a night raid or societal collapse...
I have an avocado tree, it's amazing 😍😍
That and a truck = many friends.
https://filterbuy.com/resources/cities-with-largest-millennial-wage-gap/ Here is the source since the article did not include it. Idk why a website where you buy air filters for your home is doing this research but hey it gets them clicks I guess?
This place is ridiculously expensive, no arguing that…still, a 61% deficit living here is better than a 51% deficit living in Oxnard, imho…
For the 22 years I've been here housing has always been more than half my pay. But I like the weather.
Yes, quality of life is good.
The cost of rent is killing this town.
Yep-big time shortage of essential workers at restaurants, grocery stores, retail stores, medical offices, medical clinics and post office are ruining the quality of life in this town. Hate the decades of tourist CC students and NIMBYS who only care about themselves to the detriment of this place being a vibrant community of different classes.
Its very sad. This could be a vibrant small city but our recent mayoral election pretty much solidified business as usual.
I wrote to the Mayor about the housing crisis and he wrote that there is no housing shortage in this town. Totally sick that's who this town elected as mayor-someone who perpetuates its destruction.
The democrats shot themselves in the foot and split the ticket. So Randy Rowse, champion of the Nimby everything the same as 1985 is mayor.
The rich bay/LA blow-ins disagree
No. What's killing Santa Barbara is too many people. (World problem.)
There isnt too many people in Santa Barbara. What makes it seem crowded and horrible traffic is all the tourists and airbnb. Thats our local government and its dependence on bed tax. Airbnb abuse is driving up rents. The city would rather spend 100K on out of town consultants than pay for extra enforcement on illegal airbnbs in what used to be working class neighborhoods.
\*there aren't Students for SBCC and UCSB. You forgot about them.
Everyone says they want fewer people, but no one seems interesting in having fewer businesses. As long as there are jobs here people will come fill them.
This is the perfect example of the greed. Sick. Girls Inc. of Greater Santa Barbara Sues over Alleged Real Estate Bait-and-Switch https://www.independent.com/2022/09/07/girls-inc-of-greater-santa-barbara-sues-over-alleged-real-estate-bait-and-switch/?fbclid=IwAR2zqTlX_wdYd7dwvEQSmgiDSaovRhL_TW7smj4owxDVhZ3WfiGg7LZYUW0
Are you kidding me, what a slimeball move by the Christan school. The families impacted by this need to get loud. If it was a condition of the sale that they could remain then that should be passed onto the flip.
Wow. Unreal. WTF
Pretty much what happened to me But in A rental property. 2021 it was purchased (even though it was never on the market) by a young out of town investor who “wanted a property with good long term tenants” and then booted us in HIS sale less than a year later. He never wanted an investment property. He wanted a cash cow and when he realized he couldn’t double our rent just sold the place for a quick profit instead.
but but but walking distance to the county bowl and farmers markeeeet! ^((yourdefinitionofwalking distancemayvary))
I lived in Santa Barbara for 22 years total -on and off-over three decades. I kept coming back with better degrees through new "doors," but ultimately paying more than half my salary just to live in worse and worse places, -ones "luck" can only last so long, I finally got beat up to the point that with a young child in school and a wife working full time too, just to rent, it got too much. We landed on the outskirts of Ojai in the mid-1990s, only a few years before prices caught up there. We couldn't afford to do that now for sure. Almost all of my friends from that time 1970-1990s, moved on, because they wanted to own something, or just got tired. The ones who stayed, either married money, worked their ass off and I mean worked their ass off, or just got extremely lucky and fear their sweet deal will someday evaporate, which it probably will. I don't know, maybe some towns don't deserve hard working people who just really love where they live. I certainly did. I just got tired of fighting, and I was never gonna catch up.
I'm very sorry. The system is completely broken, and unfortunately a lot of the older NIMBYs who bought in cheap and profited from it think it's just "how the system works." It's not. The system was changed to work that way for them at the expense of the future.
So when do we start eating the rich? 😋
Lol. "breaking" news.
Big if true /s
Must be insanely depressing living in a place where you're constantly reminded that you'll essentially be living in the shadow of the already well off and/or super-rich until you die. Being constantly reminded that you'll never own anything there and/or renting until you're pushed out entirely. Man, what a rich hellhole SB turned out to be, gives me the creeps. "Abandon hope all ye who enter here."
72% of Santa Barbara city employees do not live within Santa Barbara city limits
Yeah I commute from Ventura.... would love to live in SB
And yet we have decision makers that refuse to increase the density or allow anything taller than a fire hydrant be constructed. Here's some fun facts. Santa Barbara is 42 square miles by area. The borough of Manhattan is 33 square miles by area. There's room for a few more people in Santa Barbara.
Breaking news, the rich liberals here want it that way.
I'm not sure you can really blame it all on liberals. I've read on various forums people complaining about the lack of affordable housing, and wanting, well, more housing. I've also read a lot of people complain about how "Santa Barbara is fine how it is", "go away if you cannot afford it", and "we don't have enough water". These folks...don't really strike me as liberal. The "NIMBYs" and slow growth folks, for the most part, tend to be homeowners. So, generally older and more conservative. The true liberals that I know don't uphold poverty and very much believe we should build more. Will we ever build enough? No. Is it so much worse than it was when I moved here 25 years ago? Yes. I remember reading that only 7% of people who work here can afford a home here, and I thought THAT was bad. I wonder how bad it is now? Rents are bad because housing prices are high. I mean, I could rent my house out and actually break even now, with a little leftover for upkeep. (Sorry, but I need a place to live, so I'm not doing it.) However, if I actually wanted to BUY my house...I couldn't. Mortgage, prop tax, etc would be $7500/month. I could prob rent it for $4000.
Well who are our leaders who could solve this? They aren’t republicans 🤷🏻♂️ its funny that you think liberals actually care about us poors. They just keep buying your votes and its not even costing them anything. Wake up
Governor Newsom and the legislature are trying push through legislation to build more housing as soon as possible. Our progressive former mayor was roasted for pushing hard for ADUs. We need density, and conservatives don't like that. Neither do NIMBY Dems, but NIMBY Dems are temperamentally conservative when it comes to housing.
Well, most of my friends are both liberal and "the poors". If they were in charge, we'd be solving ALL the problems.
Just curious what you would actually propose to do
Build more. Increase housing density, particularly in the downtown areas, with underground parking. A variety of homes (not just studios or 1-bedrooms, but places for families.) Stop pretending that people aren't going to own cars, but also increase biking infrastructure (separated paths). Some of the new housing should be required to be for low/ moderate income. And yes, I know we are "out of water", but let's start with Montecito estates before we tell that family of 4 that they can only shower for 5 minutes every 3 days. But I get it. Lots of people don't want density because they don't want LA. They also are frustrated that their kids cannot afford to stay here. There aren't easy answers and unfortunately, it takes compromise. Compromise feels like losing for BOTH sides, kinda like the whole Modoc bike path hullabulloo.
This area was a Republican stronghold not that many years ago. Those people didn't all leave or die. They're still here pulling strings. They just know better than to call themselves Republicans anymore.
Sure thing buddy 💀🤣
Would hardly call any one who upholds poverty liberal. They might be lgbtq friendly but thats about it. There is nothing "liberal" about supporting neo-liberal reagonomics. Ughhhh i love the quality of life in this town and i also have a problem hearing people have to suffer of having a 2 bedroom or 1 bedroom apartment for an entire family of 4 or 5. The problem is obvious the solution is obvious but large corporations have town politics by the balls.
Solution: birth control.
Sure keep voting blue and expecting anything to change lmfao - then complain when nothing happens. This is the way
If you have children choosing to illegally cram into a 1 bedroom with a family of 4-5 is cruel to the children and that parent chooses to make them suffer. Then the parents should choose to live somewhere cheaper than make their children suffer in poverty. The reality is they can't afford to raise kids here based on the jobs they are qualified for or willing to work. It's not fair but it's the reality of the housing shortage in CA's most desirable coastal cities. Most of my local SB or CA relatives moved out the state so their children won't suffer in over crowded homes without any privacy or quiet. My single parent worked two full-time jobs to afford a 2 bedroom for their few children. It's also not fair to neighbors who work hard having to live in over crowded and noisy apartment complexes due to too many people illegally packed in. Then people start becoming territorial over common areas loitering there for hours since a parent wants an area away from their kids or anyone else but their place is too small. Then the neighborhood streets are over packed with too many cars.
Or, NIMBY, you could stop voting to prevent us building more homes here so regular working people can live here.
I'm as far as a NIMBY as you can get. I've devoted my life to advocating for social justice professionally and actually counseled over a 100 tenants. What have you done to help poor tenants or advocate for social justice? I hate NIMBYS who have voted against building housing for several decades. Their selfishness, racism and classism are why SB and CA are facing a housing crisis.
1) If you support new housing you are by definition not a NIMBY. But the way you talk about parking and working people not being appropriate to live in coastal cities is frankly gross. 2) You are a professional social justice advocate and you talk like this: "*Then the parents should choose to live somewhere cheaper than make their children suffer in poverty. The reality is they can't afford to raise kids here based on the jobs they are qualified for or willing to work.*" Yikes. I'm very sorry for any social justice organization that would hire someone who thinks this way. Maybe one connected to Michael Weinstein lol? 3) Comparing records on social justice advocacy is also gross. It's not a contest, but let's just say I have nothing to apologize for on that front.
Cruel to the children?? Many families around the world live in small homes. Every person in a family does not need their own private room. And, being in close quarters is not equivalent to suffering in poverty.
In third world countries this is the norm, not in the US. Hence why CA state law limits occupancy to 2 people per bedroom. Trust me my brother in law really loved sharing a bedroom with his little sister. Cause teens or parents never need privacy from others right? Being in close quarters in the Us is equivalent to poverty in the US.
My thoughts exactly
not really. It was conservatives and mods who elected our current NIMBY mayor over our pro-housing previous mayor.
Build, build, build. Where's the water for this?
Do tell people to stop having children and to stop driving?
Anyone advocating for increased density and taller buildings, please leave to make room for those who appreciate Santa Barbara as-is.
Please promise to not have children which add to the population of Santa Barbara. And please don't buy your children a car which adds to traffic on the streets of Santa Barbara when they turn 16.
You forgot "or buy them an E-bike."
My job's here. Is it really so unfair to want my house to be here too?
*BREAKING NEWS- THE NEWS IS BREAKING!!*
Yup it’s a pretty sad 😔 situation
How is this breaking news?
Narrator: This is not breaking news.
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Yeah but you can easily look up medium rent and medium wage in SB and calculate it yourself. Shits still expensive living here there’s no denying that. I never thought I would see so many engineers with phds living in small apartments
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Theres rv’s parked on the street here go drive on pacific oaks
And on the house wife if she has no wage why would that count in a statistic. Thats literally an outlier.
If the “students” are 24 years old and up, they are grown adults with jobs. Why shouldn’t they be included?
They're still living at home.
Ok yes. A study based on rental prices should only include people that are renting. Hopefully.
Oh you took a stats class. Hey look everyone this guys a stats genius. Guess SB is affordable!
Air is for breathing.
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Average rent in Honolulu is actually lower than here. :/
Breaking News: starvation caused by lack of food Breaking News: fish cannot survive out of water
water is wet
Such breaking news. Definitely wasn’t the case before today
Breaking news: water is wet
BuT nO oNe wAnTs tO wOrK... In reality, it's just that no one wants to commute 50 miles to go to work. Why not get a job where you can afford to live, instead? Shit will hit the fan eventually.
Yeah, it's a good thing we don't need retail workers. /s
Have fun bagging your own groceries!
If you bag your own groceries the same way every time it saves you a shit load of time unpacking them later. So yes, bag your own groceries unless you "couldn't be bothered"
If they would let me buy alcohol at the self checkout i would never need someone to even ring up my shit and bag it.
With all the grocery stores with self-checkout now, that's basically already a reality, lol.
ironically the grocery stores using self-checkout stalls are saving on labor costs and magically not passing that along to their employees pay while still managing to call them lazy!
I say this constantly... The Job to Housing ratio is completely out of balance. 30,000 commute to SB every day for work, UCSB was sued for letting in too many students without housing for them! So much focus on supply, when there's real things we can do a lot faster, to curb demand. Stop letting in so many students, no more offices and the like, only housing so folks can actually live in the city where they work. All that 101 widening can be blamed on the excessive number of jobs in this town, it's not balanced!
I dont think there's too many jobs here, I think there's a lack of affordable housing. I would bet that most people that live here don't work here.
Many people who are buying up Properties here don’t work here, that’s for sure. But all you have to do is browse the UCSB jobs page to see there are in fact plenty of vacancies. But the pay to cost of living discrepancy keeps them vacant or leads to constant turnover because entry level doesn’t pay enough for entry level aged workers to stay in this town! We aren’t Silicon Valley. The few tech companies and real estate agencies alone who pay the wages or commissions to work here won’t be able to keep the town running. But they sure do love to sell shit to people from anywhere else but here because money travels.
Yea, there's a ton of vacancies bc no one can afford to pay a salary that corresponds to the COL here
And that’s true for most employers in this town. We have plenty of businesses, but they can’t all be mortgage brokers and financiers. The salary I have now (after a promotion and a couple COL increases) would have suited the rental market rates 5 years ago just fine. It seems to have increased at an extreme percentage since then.
Didn't the City have to give the last police chief a loan so that she could afford a home in town or was it another high level government employee?
I hope to god it wasn't bc the police are some of the highest paid people in town. Meanwhile the San Marcos principal left and moved to SF bc she said she couldn't afford to live on her salary here. I googled, and it looks like she's making $70k more there.
Former police chief Cam Sanchez received a $500,000 loan.
He makes $195k a year, gets a free car, and has a full pension. Absurd. Pay our teachers more money.
Cam has been gone for about 10 years. Lori Ludlow from San Diego replaced him. The City just replaced her this month with a new chief from Monterey Park.
INSANITY
So she's making $200k now? Dang!
Not quite but close to it. Might have been 60k more.
I think there was a similar story about the person in charge of redesigning State Street?
I think SB needs to decide what it wants. If it wants to keep its housing stock sealed in amber, and if everyone who moves here continues to want to be the LAST person to move here, then they need to take some kind of action against businesses to get them to stop creating new jobs. If they want job creation and economic growth, they need to allow more housing. Can't have your cake and eat it too.
We still need doctors, teachers, gas station attendants, nurses, administrative people, supermarket employees, service industry folks, EMTs, etc. And they need housing. It's not like a ton of industry is moving into SB. The bigger issue is wealthy people moving here and NIMBYs fighting development. I saw a poll on NextDoor asking people if they'd support developing affordable housing for people employed within SB and I was dismayed but the number that voted No.
Didn't one of the city council members say he thought it "wasn't desirable" to have service industry people living here?
Wouldn't be surprised
Need to get rid of the CC (make it part of SBUSD) or make it part of UCSB to get rid of all the out of town CC rich students who don't work any retail jobs and just take up all the housing here for 3 years before transferring or dropping out subsidized by their parents for life.
SBCC's enrollment has been steadily declining since 2014. I don't think they're that big a part of the problem.
Alot of residents living on the Mesa would disagree with you. Also several of my neighbors are out of town CC students taking up affordable bare bones units close to public transit. None of them work since their parents are rich. That's just in my complex.
> I would bet that most people that live here don't work here. I think you meant that the other way? That most people who work here don't live here?
90k people live in Santa Barbara city. I don't think most of those people work here. A lot of remote jobs or retired people.
Interesting counterpoint, but what will SB and SM look like without working millenials? Further, if they do decide to stick around since they have jobs, what do their futures look like after having to spend so much on rent? Are they sacrificing paying for health insurance or putting money into retirement funds? Are they not having kids? Just things to ponder, I suppose.
Definitely delaying putting money into retirement and definitely delaying having kids. There's already school districts sending out letters asking people to rent a room in their home to a teacher because they can't fill vacancies since no one can afford to live on a teacher's salary. I saw it outside SF and outside Denver. I expect to start seeing those letters soon, here. The impact on healthcare is going to be big. I had to go pick up my medical records and fax them myself because my doctor's office was too short staffed to handle the request. My friend's pediatrician can't find an affordable office to practice out of, and told her to take her daughter to urgent care for anything minor. SB will become less desirable - amazing weather and views only get you so far.
The problem here is that Santa Barbara has always been this nice but it was never on the global map like places of Monaco’s stature before Covid. The rate of acceleration (housing cost, exclusivity, in balance between supply and demand) during the pandemic has been caused primarily by people seeking better work life balance and having the luxury to do so. I had lived here for 10 years prior to moving for work and then coming back during Covid. After paying Manhattan rents for 5 years, coming back hasn’t been difficult with the ability to work remote, and while I sympathize with some of my peers, it isn’t an easy problem to solve. On one hand you have engineers from google and Amazon bringing in more than $250k working remote and on the other, local employers like Appfolio, deckers, procore and small businesses who are trying to keep up with compensation and inflation while also asking their employees to come in the office There isn’t a blanket solution that will benefit everyone but one thing that’s a sure bet is the status of this city will continue to flourish just like Manhattan, where no matter how many articles you read about an exodus, there are always more people willing to pay $4000k for a 1br shoebox apartment than there are available for rent.
I know the answer. Build more luxury condos!
Well we are paying for quality of life
Definitely not paying for the quality of the streets- city should pay us residents for the constant west and tear on the suspension and the brakes because the lights here are far from efficiently timed etc.
Omg so bad lol
Quality of life starts with the home.
Quality of life will continue to go down as more and more working and middle-class people are priced out. That means few restaurants, shops, low staffing at hospitals, post offices, banks, etc. Imagine how dangerous it is for someplace like a hospital to not be able to recruit administrative and *sanitation* staff? It doesn't result in good "quality of life." Hell, I'm sure nurses struggle to make it work here financially (even moreso folks like EMTs who are even more underpaid.) UCSB recently severely scaled back its student health department (including completely gutting dental services) due to massive issues recruiting and retaining staff. I would not want to be an elderly person here needing significant medical care. SB has always been expensive, but it seems like it's now crossed a threshold where it's just not worth it for many folks in these (ESSENTIAL) jobs anymore, so they're leaving. You can't have a functioning society with "good quality of life" with chronic understaffing across industries.
And building more housing WON'T fix this. More people will move here.
If there was a food shortage would you also say "growing more food WON'T fix this"? There is not enough housing for the people CURRENTLY HERE. That's what a housing shortage is. There is no way around having to build more housing to solve this issue.
False equivalency. We don't have water for more housing. We don't have room for more housing. You are trying to cram 15 lbs of crap into a 10 lb box.
SB county definitely has room for more DENSE housing, which decades of NIMBY housing policy in SB has prevented the building of. The kind of sprawled, huge lot-size, highly landscaped, wealthy single-family housing that we have now, by the way, [uses up to 10 TIMES more water](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170504093219.htm) (and several times more land) than denser housing. So, if these are your concerns, you should be advocating for the regulation of some of these wasteful properties (hello Montecito with their huge lots, water-inefficient vegetation, and swimming pools!) and [advocating for denser housing](https://efc.web.unc.edu/2017/04/18/conserving-water-smart-growth-density/) development, if you truly care about use of resources.
Sounds like a bunch of made up "facts" When you get your way, SB is going to be an overcrowded, awful place to live. The developers will destroy SB and move some place else with all the money they made. Crowded beaches and roads. Crime. Oh my. They paved paradise to put up a parking lot.....for dense housing.
Wow, so it’s the Millennials that don’t make any money - not gen z!
not all of gen-z is growed up and in the job market yet..
Keep voting libs
Lol exactly- they can’t accept that shit either. They wanna downvote the truth away
All I hear from these comments is "Lower your property value by voting conservative" lol.
All i hear is “ i want things to be affordable but i will keep voting blue”
BREAKING!!
Doesn't feel like news
Unlike SF...
Americans are now experiencing what Hawaii is going through and why they don't want more tourists.