At a recent City Council meeting, some of the city’s elected representatives finally gave voice to the communitarian origins and inspirations of the, now five-plus year, State Street “promenade” closure. Rejecting requests from downtown property owners and some businesses to re-open State Street to automobiles, councilmembers voiced the following: Sneddon: Regarding the DSBIA [Downtown Santa Barbara Improvement Association] “petition” to partly open State Street, “We have no business making decisions about State Street being open or closed, or one-way or not one-way.” Without COVID, “We would never have had the courage to dream so big, that we could close the street.” Santamaria: The Public Good outweighs Private Interests. Property values are not important. Jordan: “State Street is no longer a ‘street’.” We should change the name to something else. “It is not a street. It is a ‘park’ or a ‘space’. Investors who own downtown commercial property need to realize their real estate “portfolios” are based on an “antiquated business model.” Friedman: “Ultimately our city is going to have some portions of State Street closed to cars.” You see where this is going? After over five years of pretending to be concerned about all downtown Santa Barbara “stakeholders,” the City Council pulled back the curtain on the ideology that was always behind the State Street closure. In this ideology the Collective always outweighs Individual Rights. Always. The majority of our elected city leaders largely . Most, of course, have never worked in a customer-facing business, or owned a business, or managed a commercial property. Unlike many of us, they have never built a single thing. Never improved a single property. Never created a single job. In 1925 a 6. 3 magnitude earthquake hit downtown Santa Barbara, destroying most of the city center. In the aftermath, city leaders and property owners mobilized and rebuilt the downtown in its current Spanish Revival style within a dozen years; almost overnight in the life span of a city; largely paid for by private property owners and private/corporate donations and led by the civic minded Pearl Chase and others. The nearly spontaneous creation of an ersatz Andalusian “city” was imposed on the community post-earthquake. Meant to mimic the then popular Southern California design trends, it was a very successful re-design of a small downtown. Now, ironically, exactly a century later, a different kind of earthquake has put downtown Santa Barbara again on a path of probable destruction. City leaders, city staff, and much of the community seem committed to the notion of a “car free” State Street. In fact, they are hostile to even continuing to designate it as a “street.” This, despite decades of failures of downtown “pedestrian malls.” Since the 1950s, close to 90 percent of these experiments have failed. No “main streets” have been successfully closed. This history and data are well documented. If private property owners and businesses are harmed in this process, their property rights violated, that will be called the price of “progress.” The destructor this time will be Man not Nature. The driving forces behind this destruction are a combination of younger Millennial idealists anxious to reject the past and elder entitled Boomers who imagine themselves sophisticated and hip. Unfortunately, both prize their self-indulgence and communitarian ideals at the expense of the history and traditions of the city. They will find that destroying a city is much easier than re-building one. The process of decay has already begun: Blight. Widespread vagrancy. The smell of urine and cannabis in the streets. Restricted and confusing circulation. Anxious conflict between bikes and pedestrians. Late night chaos of illegal vendors and drunken partiers in the lower blocks. Empty, dark streets elsewhere. Declining property values and the private divestment that follows. Banks holding loans on downtown properties will be tested. The ample evidence that city leaders and city staff are ill equipped to manage even the “interim” operations of a closed State Street does not bode well for their abilities to design, fund, and manage a complex project. The assumption that politicians, city employees, and serial consultants can impose a vision of beauty and order on any city is an exercise in hubris. After five years and a few million dollars, they have still not settled on a “Master Plan.” They have not begun to identify the probable costs of implementation and maintenance of the non-existent plan. Nor have they shared any idea how they will fund a $100 million-plus major infrastructure project. The City Council closed State Street and downtown without a plan. They have now chosen to disparage a primary tax base of the city’s finances by rejecting private property owners’ advice. The city is acting without the consent of the people who will inevitably pay the bills for their fantasies. These are irresponsible and unserious people. We are at their mercy. God help us. Pearl Chase has left the building.
https://www.independent.com/2025/11/25/the-great-earthquake-the-city-100-years-later/
The Great Earthquake: The City 100 Years Later
