Housing Element and Civil Rights Meet Up in Goleta

City of Goleta officials met for a second time on July 25 to attempt to hammer out the issues of adding lower-income zoning to a city made largely of single-family residential tracts that grew during the post-war boom. That and the separation of the city by Highway 101 created segregated areas, Planning Commissioner Jennifer Smith pointed out as the commission and City Council discussed one parcel in particular. It is set amid single-family homes to the north of the highway, a situation that is a historical relic of a time before Civil Rights and the Fair Housing Act, Smith observed.

The issue before the decision-makers was not all that different from the concepts embodied in those social-equality laws — trying to find spaces in the city that could hold housing for people on the lower economic rungs, pursuant to state laws passed largely to remove NIMBY-ism from local residential planning — or the irresistible Not In My Backyard instinct. Some in California political circles wonder about developer influence in those new laws, too.

For the benefits at the Dara Road neighborhood in question — such as walkable schools, library, and parks — were downsides such as no public bus service or shops within walking distance. The 10 members of the two groups debated this at length, hearing from a number of neighbors as well, all of which pushed this meeting, like the one before it on Thursday, July 20, toward 11 p.m., a good hour past some of the participants’ exhaustion level.