The Great Earthquake: The City 100 Years Later

At a recent City Council meeting, some of the city's elected representatives finally gave voice to the community assets and inspirations that have resulted from the closure of State Street Park, which has been in the works for more than five years.

Rejecting requests from downtown property owners and some businesses to reopen State Street to cars, council members expressed the following:

Sneddon: In relation to the DSBIA [Downtown Santa Barbara Improvement Association] Petition to open State Street in part, “We have no business making decisions about whether to open or close State Street, one-way or not one-way.” If it weren't for Covid, “we wouldn't have had the courage to dream so big, so we could close the street.”

Santamaria: The public good trumps private interests. Property values ​​are not important.

Jordan: “State Street is no longer a street.” We should change the name to something else. “It's not a street. It's a 'park' or 'space'.”

Jordan: The brick-and-mortar retail business is no longer viable. Investors who own downtown commercial properties need to realize that their real estate “portfolios” are based on an “outdated business model.”

Friedman: “Eventually, our city will close some parts of State Street to cars.”

See where this is headed?

After more than five years of feigning concern about all the “stakeholders” in downtown Santa Barbara, the City Council has pulled back the curtain on the ideology that has always been behind the closure of State Street.

In this ideology, collectivism always trumps individual rights. always.

The majority of our city's elected leaders largely support these concepts. Most of them, of course, have never worked in a customer-facing company, owned a business, or managed a commercial property.

Unlike many of us, they have never built one thing. You never improve a single property. Never created a single job.

In 1925, a 6.3 magnitude earthquake struck downtown Santa Barbara, destroying most of downtown. In the aftermath, city leaders and property owners filled in and rebuilt downtown in the current Spanish Renaissance style—within twelve years; Almost overnight in the life of the city; It is paid for largely by private property owners and private/corporate donations and is led by civic-minded Pearl Chase and others.

The creation of an almost spontaneous Andalusian “city” was imposed on the community after the earthquake. It was meant to emulate popular Southern California design trends, and was a very successful redesign of the small downtown.

Ironically, now, a century later, an earthquake of a different kind has once again put downtown Santa Barbara on the path to potential destruction.

City leaders, staff and much of the community seem committed to the idea of ​​a “car-free” State Street. In fact, they are even hostile to continuing to call it “the street.”

This is despite decades of failed downtown “pedestrian malls.” Since the 1950s, approximately 90% of these experiments have failed. No “major streets” were successfully closed. This history and data have been well documented. https://www.independent.com/2022/07/28/back-to-the-future/

If private property owners and businesses are harmed in the process, their property rights will be violated, and this will be called the price of “progress.” The destroyer this time will be man, not nature.

The driving forces behind this devastation are a mix of young millennial idealists keen to reject the past and older so-called boomers who imagine themselves as sophisticated and sophisticated. Unfortunately, they both value self-indulgence and communal ideals at the expense of the city's history and traditions.

They will find it much easier to destroy a city than to rebuild it.

The process of decay has already begun: blight. Homelessness is widespread. The smell of urine and hashish in the streets.

Restricted and confusing trading. A bitter struggle between bicycles and pedestrians. Late night chaos of illegal vendors and drunken parties in the lower buildings. Empty and dark streets elsewhere.

The decline in property values ​​and the private divestment that follows. Banks offering loans on properties in the city center will be tested. https://www.city-journal.org/article/a-renaissance-runs-through-it

Ample evidence that city leaders and staff are ill-equipped to manage even “temporary” operations of a closed State Street does not bode well for their abilities to design, finance and manage a complex project.

To assume that politicians, city clerks, and serial consultants can impose a vision of beauty and order on any city is an exercise in arrogance.

After five years and a few million dollars, they still haven't settled on a “master plan.” They have not yet begun to quantify the potential costs of implementing and maintaining the non-existent plan. They also did not share any insight on how to finance a major infrastructure project worth more than $100 million.

The City Council closed State Street and downtown without a plan. They have now chosen to flout the primary tax base of city funds by rejecting the advice of private property owners. The city is acting without the consent of the people who will inevitably pay the bills for their delusions.

These are irresponsible and not serious people. We are at their mercy.

May God help us. Pearl Chase left the building.

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