Council Votes to Tweak Highly Debated Housing Program
Proposed Rules Would Make More Units More Affordable
The best line of the night came from the man who wasn’t even there. From a black speaker box perched discreetly on the Santa Barbara City Council dais came the disembodied voice of Councilmember Jason Dominguez, beamed from a hotel room somewhere in South Africa, where he was staying as part of an educational excursion. “This is like going to the store and coming home with 60 bottles of milk and one box of cereal,” said Dominguez, talking about one of his pet peeves, the city’s much-argued-about Average Unit-size Density (AUD) housing program.
This program was hatched eight years ago to motivate private developers to build new and unsubsidized rental housing, something they hadn’t done in meaningful numbers for close to 40 years. By any reckoning, the AUD program has been spectacularly successful, lighting a short fuse under the collective posteriors of Santa Barbara’s development community. The $64 million question confronting the City Council and all of City Hall, however, is whether it’s the right kind of rental housing. A growing chorus of voices is objecting that the program has created housing catering to renters on the higher end of the income spectrum, households making anywhere from $80,000 to $140,000 a year. During a four-hour discussion this Tuesday, they argued the program needs to be seriously tweaked to target working families who make up “the missing middle” of Santa Barbara’s economic strata instead. In the lingo of the debate, that’s the so-called “sweet spot.”
The council discussion took place at the instigation of city planners hoping to take the political pulse of the council on what’s been a divisive and thorny policy. Was there enough consensus on the council to justify the exhaustive community outreach such tweakage will entail? The answer was emphatically yes. By a six-to-one vote, the council embraced a handful of small but significant alterations. Councilmember Gregg Hart cast the only dissenting vote, after delivering an impassioned soliloquy extolling the virtues of leaving well enough alone and not messing with success.
