Correcting the record on lessons from Santa Barbara: Density is good
April 2, 2009
An unintentionally semi-astute (if grammatically inept) headline was appended to an ill-informed and misleading op-ed column by T.R. Fehrenbach in the March 22 edition of a San Antonio newspaper.
The headline: “If only every city and burg was planned and run like Santa Barbara.”
In his column, Fehrenbach paraphrased and misleadingly embellished an article in The Economist that noted the economic stability of Santa Barbara, Calif., amid the residential foreclosures and commercial vacancies that have recently afflicted many other areas of California.
The Economist attributed the stability of Santa Barbara to an age distribution that skews upward and to slow-growth policies. By contrast, California’s Central Valley achieved a development boom by accommodating new industry and a younger, poorer population in search of affordable housing, but last year the boom went bust.
Fehrenbach’s embellishments, alas, included an unthinking and counterfactual slam against “density,” and he shared The Economist’s disdain for productive enterprise.
The disinformation came in these statements:
“Being built up of old, [Santa Barbara] has neither room nor toleration for new development. A most pleasant place to live, or visit, it takes a dim view of density and traffic, those two paramount spoilers of residential paradise.... In short, Santa Barbara never succumbed to the Phoenix Syndrome nor the Seattle Syndrome, Las Vegas Syndrome, or the Florida-California Complex, all of which share a common symptom: the belief that growth, like greed, is good.
Unlike many if not most Sunbelt burgs, Santa Barbarans did not go in for subdivisional development, nor try to attract the 30-40ish bunch.”
Near the end of his column, speaking of San Antonio’s suburban cities,
Fehrenbach writes: “The best of them do not lust for growth (which can only be up, that is, physically piled on) and, like Santa Barbara, oppose the degradation that comes with some forms of modernity.”
Reality check:
• Fehrenbach does not specify the time frame, but by the phrase “of old” he evidently means 1975, when Santa Barbara enacted a general plan intended to limit growth. For a century and a quarter following its incorporation as a city, Santa Barbara accommodated and actively sought growth. The street grid laid out in 1851 anticipated huge growth. During three of the first seven decades of the 20th century, Santa Barbara’s growth rate equalled or exceeded San Antonio’s.
• Santa Barbara greatly exceeds Phoenix, Seattle and Las Vegas -- and San Antonio, as well -- in both population density and housing density. In the 2000 census, Santa Barbara’s housing density was nearly twice that of Phoenix. Within the original street grid, which was fully developed prior to World War II, blocks are divided into six or seven lots per net acre, a density similar to the Lavaca and Five Points neighborhoods in San Antonio. (Because Santa Barbara’s blocks are larger and zoning allows two units on many of the lots, gross housing density is higher.) Density shades down in subdivisions built after World War II. Regarding San Antonio's suburban cities, the ones that are most like Santa Barbara in character, Alamo Heights and Olmos Park, have population densities above 3,800 per square mile, about 36 percent denser than post-World War II sprawlburbs Windcrest and Leon Valley -- or San Antonio as a whole. Santa Barbara is denser still, at about 4,800 per square mile.
• Fehrenbach’s claim that growth “can only be up” is poppycock. Santa Barbara does not have tall buildings, but land is used very efficiently in the pre-World War II core of the city. In the central business district, most of the street frontage is occupied by storefronts rather than parking lots, which are generally small. Combined with a well developed and continuous pedestrian environment, density makes walking an efficient and pleasant mode of transportation for a wide range of daily trips. Thus, traffic congestion is minimized.
• It is not clear what, if anything, Fehrenbach means when he writes that “Santa Barbarans did not go in for subdivisional development.” In fact, in the three decades after World War II the city’s developed area quadrupled through the addition of residential subdivisions, whose street layouts and densities are typical of their respective eras (or, in the hilly fringes, lower in density), and commercial sprawl, including a large regional mall.
The very low residential densities (one or two units per acre) at the edges of Santa Barbara, and enforced by the 1975 growth limits, produce no benefits for the community, unless you’re a fan of long drives, excessive fuel consumption, asphalt wastelands, environmental degradation and high costs for city services.
• Although it is true that Santa Barbara’s age distribution skews upward, the city has no paucity of people under 40, or of retailers geared to their desires. The retail mix in downtown Santa Barbara’s Paseo Nuevo shopping center includes such young-leaning retailers as Gap, Abercrombie & Fitch, Pacific Sunwear, American Eagle Outfitters, Bebe and GameStop.
Santa Barbara’s low foreclosure rate and general stability probably have less to do with the age of its population than the age of the community itself. The reason is obvious and trivial: Newly built areas necessarily have no residents of long standing and few, if any, who own their houses outright. A mature community usually includes many people who have lived there for decades and who have already paid their mortgages in full.
Moreover, Santa Barbara shares with other old towns an urban core that is compact, diverse and walkable -- all qualities that promote mutual responsibility and a positive sense of community. Also like many old towns, Santa Barbara has long sought to protect (perhaps to overprotect) its physical character through historic preservation requirements and architectural design standards. Some such measures may be excessive -- places with architectural design standards, or socialized aesthetics, give me the creeps -- but they do generally uphold a community’s desirability (for conservatively minded people with money), and, thus, its real estate values.
Santa Barbara is an object lesson in the virtues of urban density and diversity. It is a counterexample to the vices of suburban sprawl and insularity. Its success does not argue against growth, or commerce, or housing for a transient, young or economically diverse population. (More than one in eight of Santa Barbara’s people live below the poverty line, even though the median price for a house recently exceeded $1 million.)
If Santa Barbara holds a lesson for San Antonio’s post-World War II sprawlburbia, the lesson is not that growth should be stifled or discouraged, but that it should be actively pursued -- in a sustainable, compact, well-ordered form. We should seek to convert unproductive or underproductive commercial sprawl into dense, diverse, mixed-use neighborhoods that can accommodate many thousands of new residents -- providing a market and a work force for new commerce. Santa Barbara’s 1975 growth limits allowed 12 residential units per acre in most of the pre-World War II core. We should strive to match or exceed that density along commercial corridors such as Walzem Road and Bandera Road.
The story in The Economist ends with this colossally stupid and morally bankrupt statement:
“In the past ten years, obedient to the findings of urban sociologists, American cities have tripped over themselves vying for young, creative people. They have revitalised downtowns and sponsored gay-pride parades. They might have been better off building retirement homes.”
Excuse me, but people living in retirement homes don’t produce anything, beyond the occasional misshapen potholder. Without people who produce, there can be no retirement homes. Retirees who depend on Social Security benefits or investment income also depend on the working people, many of them young, who pay into the system and produce profits. People of any age who don’t produce their own food, clothing, furniture, automobiles, houses or entertainment depend absolutely on other people, many of them young, who do produce those things and the ideas that underlie them. The people who produce have to live somewhere. The factories and offices and warehouses and docks and trucking depots have to exist somewhere -- preferably within a short commuting distance of the people who work in them.
It is the height of both arrogance and ignorance to suggest that any community should reject productive enterprise, creativity, diversity and youth, or that productive, creative, diverse and young communities are doomed to failure. But one shouldn’t expect anything but arrogance and ignorance from The Economist’s anonymous authors, who doubtless dash off their prose between sips of Pimm’s and Champagne at Ascot
Mike
Greenberg
