Background of the Affordable Housing Issue in Santa Barbara County alone
We believe that for Santa Barbara to not be hollowed out as a community and be a nice place in name and look only, we must have a solid and sustained small business community - not just national chain operation locations. The basis for an enhanced locally-owned business community is strong home building and remodeling construction activity. Having the strongest banks in the country, because people here put their money into savings since 95% of them can't buy real estate, doesn't make for a strong economy - it just makes the banks healthy - until the savings accounts move out of town.
The local real estate market has been tilted by government by design, through neglect and the inability to find many developers willing to work to create many homes for the middle class. What ends up happening is that policies have been designed so the result is benefiting certain developer-builders and classes of resident. Many developers prefer to build and sell for as much money as they can, rather than work to have homes for the middle class. In fact, through indifference, Santa Barbara has decimated its middle class. They are moving out of town in droves. I don't say this has happened with malice, or contrived for a classist ideology, but it has happened, because of non-cooperation and self-interest of the parties who have benefited.
It is the effort of this organization to demand of ourselves as a community to work to restore balance that is needed to create and maintain a healthy and vibrant society and business community. To that end, we seek to build a membership which will work actively to change government policies, zoning, planning and development rules and regulations where it will effect that change. We seek also to construct homes, communities, businesses for a stronger middle class. For these purposes our goals are to create a large and effective membership with working committees and development plans we can fulfill. It is not just government where the problem exists. It is also in the patterns of our business activity. To fix that, we propose more multi-use buildings, a mix of commercial in many neighborhoods. This is good for many reasons discussed within these pages.
We seek to purchase land and structure deals, as detailed herein, that benefit many kinds of working residents, and then others as we grow. We shall work to effect change through business-driven economic development policies. We will be entrepreneurial. We will seek charitable donations of land to be zoned or traded for properly zoned land, for production of homes and communities for the middle and lower income class.
"The credit
belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust
and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again
and again .... who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends
himself for a worthy cause; who, at best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high
achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring
greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who
knew neither victory nor defeat". - Theodore Roosevelt