For the past 18 months, members of the Santa Barbara planning commission have been wrestling with various schemes to encourage high-density affordable housing in mixed-use developments built along existing transit lines and within a quarter of a mile jobs. The underlying notion is simple: By creating homes close to work, people might be reasonably able to walk, bicycle, or take the bus to work — anything but drive their cars.

In a rare display of political pulchritude, a group of tenants’ rights advocates gathered outside the County Administration Building early Tuesday afternoon demanding that supervisors stiffen the rules governing how much relocation assistance landlords have to provide displaced renters and under what circumstances.

Under the county’s eight-year-old ordinance, landlords must provide relocation assistance only when their tenants are forced out because their homes have been deemed uninhabitable. Advocates with the Rental Housing Roundtable—a coalition of tenants’ rights supporters—argued the ordinance should be expanded to include renters forced to seek new accommodations because of condo conversion, demolition, renovations, and rezoning. When families are evicted, they must often double up elsewhere, said Sharon Rose of Mobile Home Owners Coalition. “And that’s really hard on the children,” she said.

By comparison, the City of Santa Barbara has an ordinance requiring landlords to pay up to $5,000 to tenants forced to relocate because of condo conversions or habitability problems. City housing officials said they did not know how many times that ordinance has been used.

Rural Plan and Climate Strategy Set in Motion

By Chris Meagher

No one argues that the Gaviota Coast isn’t unique. Not only is the 50-some-mile stretch of pristine coastline one of the top biodiversity hotspots in the world, but it is one of the final California frontiers that developers haven’t gotten their hands — and houses — on.

Not that they aren’t close. Matt Osgood’s Naples project has been going through Santa Barbara County for the better half of a decade, and it seems far from a resolution. After years and years, what will eventually end up happening at Naples remains uncertain.

Furthermore, millions of taxpayer dollars have been spent as the Naples issue has inched through the county system. For these reasons and more, the usual advocates for the preservation of the Gaviota Coast — ranging from the Environmental Defense Center to the Naples Coalition and the Gaviota Coast Conservancy— came out to the Board of Supervisors meeting Tuesday, hoping the board would spring on a plan to outline policies and needs specific to that irreplaceable stretch of earth.

Board Calls for More Realistic Assessment of Water Resources

By Ben Preston  

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Height Initiative Wins Tactical Victory

By Nick Welsh

An obviously agonized Helene Schneider — Santa Barbara City councilmember and mayoral candidate — cast the key vote giving traditional slow-growthers active with Save El Pueblo Viejo a significant tactical victory in their battle to put an initiative limiting the maximum size of new buildings on the November election ballot.

 By Nick Welsh

Despite support from unlikely allies in Santa BarbaraCounty and beyond, the historic proposal to allow new oil production in state waters near Vandenberg Air Force Base was decisively shot down last Thursday by the State Lands Commission after a grueling five-and-a-half-hour meeting at the Mar Monte hotel. The proposal from Plains Exploration Petroleum (PXP) was denied despite unprecedented backing from more than 25 environmental organizations, many of which were founded in the wake of Santa Barbara’s notorious 1969 oil spill, whose 40th anniversary was last week. Led by Lieutenant Governor John Garamendi, the commission voted 2-1 to kill the new lease proposal, arguing that doing otherwise would open up the state’s 1,100-mile coast to the “drill, baby, drill” crowd and fly in the face of California’s 40-year tradition of denying new offshore oil drilling.