Santa Barbara Talks with Josh Molina
Santa Barbara Talks: StrongTowns SB Talks the future of State Street in Santa Barbara
Three members of StrongTowns SB join Josh Molina for a special episode of Santa Barbara Talks to discuss the future of State Street! Ian Baucke, Joanna Kaufman and Tristen Miller outline their vision for the State Street Promenade. The group would like to see no cars allowed between the 500 and 1300 blocks and they prefer the "flat and flexible" way. In this podcast, they explain what they actually believe about cars, electric bikes and pedestrians on the promenade. StrongTowns SB has emerged as a key player int he conversation about State Street's future as the State Street Advisory Committee meets to talk about the Master Plan. The SSAC plans to meet again on July 15 and eventually the council will take a vote. This is the place to learn about the plan, and StrongTowns' growing role and influence on Santa Barbara's transportation network. StrongTowns motto is "Let's make our city more livable, walkable, and fiscally resilient." Joshua Molina is an award-winning journalist who creates dynamic conversations on the topics of housing, education, transportation, business, culture and much more. Please share this podcast with a friend and please hit subscribe. Visit www.santabarbaratalks.com for more content.
- Duration:
- 1h 9m
- Broadcast on:
- 06 Jul 2024
- Audio Format:
- mp3
Welcome to Santa Barbara Talks with Josh Molina. This is a very special edition. I'm here today with three members of Strong Towns, Santa Barbara. And this is going to be a great conversation talking about State Street and a whole bunch of different topics. But first, if you're new to this podcast, please visit SantaBarberTalks.com. You're making a contribution to support my efforts and also subscribe on YouTube. I do a lot to share content with the community. Separate from my work as a journalist and a teacher at Santa Barbara City College and I really enjoy this effort. So I appreciate any support any of the viewers can have. So let's dive right in. I am so excited because I've been watching Tristan and Joanna and Ian at these meetings at city council meetings for quite a while now. And I'm kind of an old guy so like sometimes it's like, who are these new people? I don't know them, you know? And so I've been so impressed by the work they're doing in the community. And I finally got the nerve up to approach them and say, hey, let's talk. I'd love to have a conversation about Strong Towns. So that's why we're here. So Tristan Miller, Joanna Kaufman, Ian Bauke, thank you so much for this conversation. So let's dive right in. Let's talk about State Street. But first, what is Strong Towns, Santa Barbara? I see you on social media. I see you around in the community. Can you tell me what is Strong Towns? For sure. Strong Towns is a national organization. It's more of a movement than anything else. But basically a lot of people coming together and realizing our society is very structured around cars and our society is very structured around the suburbs. Is there a better way, can we do it differently? Can we make a people-oriented community? And Strong Towns, Santa Barbara is not a chapter of it, we're not a nonprofit of it. We are a local conversation of it. So essentially all of the different conversations, there's something like 500 now, most of which are spawned in the last two years, are very localized to their communities. They exist to respond to whatever needs their communities have, specifically around urbanism. So can we improve our public transit? Can we improve the walkability and bikeability of our communities? Things like that. Does anybody else want to jump in? Yeah, the only thing I'll add is I'm a newer member. I'm a stronger member of Strong Towns, Santa Barbara. And I learned actually from my dad that the organization's been around for many decades, right? I think since the '70s or something like that. So it's not just, I think it's gained a lot of steam, especially folks of all generations, but definitely a lot of folks on the younger side too. But this movement has been going about for a long time, even when post World War II, when America kind of took the car oriented, car dominant development style, people back then were objecting to it as it was happening. And so this movement is just a continuation of that, and a local context for Santa Barbara. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. One more thing to add to all of that is that we also are focused on a financially responsible city and making sure that what the city invests in doesn't go nowhere, that it directly is related to the community, and there is a correlation between car dominated environments and having that be a bad investment for the city. So having more sustainable city goes hand in hand with having a more financially solvent city. Great. So I want to talk to you about the topic of cars and who drives them and who needs them and where they belong in sort of our Santa Barbara and our system. But first, let's talk about State Street. All of you were at the State Street Advisory Committee meeting recently last week. Also there have been several meetings and we're getting close to the end where the committee is going to make some recommendations based off of the architectural, all the staff planning, and then eventually we'll go to the city council. They presented kind of a block by block sort of outline vision for what they want these blocks between the 400 to 1300 block to look like. And so let's talk about that. What do you all want to see for these blocks? I believe the proposal was sort of from the 900 block to the 1300 block, it starts with one weight vehicular travel and then two below that it's mostly bikes and pedestrians separated. And there's obviously nuances on each block, but what is your vision for what those blocks of State Street should look at and go ahead, anyone who wants to jump in? Yeah, I'm happy to jump in there. Just for some context, I grew up in Santa Barbara, so I've seen State Street every year, multiple times from the past 25 years. So I've seen a lot of change and I'm very familiar with how it was and kind of the different iterations we've had during COVID. And I'm really excited that we're even doing this process, I think we should just start with the acknowledgement that very few communities in this country would even embark on a process like this. And so that's really encouraging to see and I think it's a continuation of that spirit of community driven crafting of a beautiful, vibrant Santa Barbara that we know and love. I think the strong towns perspective and we published this in our bed and in our letters to the committee is the grand paseo vision that they're proposing, the flat and flexible, inclusive arrangement that currently they're just proposing for, I think, the five to nine hundred block. Why not do that for the whole thing? Why not have a really confident, coherent, consistent expression of, you know, this grand paseo, this Santa Barbara homegrown idea and, you know, personally, I just, I don't think cutting it off at Korea makes much sense. We can talk about like the really specific mobility conversations on each block, but that's, I think, for me, the grand vision is something like behind me, right? A community oriented space that's accessible for everybody and inclusive and a destination for visitors and locals alike. Now, Ian, is that your AI generated trolley that I've heard so much about? Is that what that is? Yeah, it is. And I'll just say I'm agnostic on the exact, the exact form of like trolley or transit or micro transit rails or no rails, I'm sure lots of people have opinions about that. I just think, you know, state street is, right, it's the spine of our, our city and our downtown and it's going to continue to have some sort of mobility purpose, right? And I think public transportation bikes in a pedestrian friendly environment kind of like behind me is, is the way to go. Definitely. I want to add that we, we've been saying we would love to see that flatten flexible applied to the whole corridor just because we think the waterfront is kind of the entrance to our city, the new underpass, and then the 400 blocks kind of been neglected a bit. It's you've seen it now, it's to a traffic and pedestrian walking from the waterfront up to state street. It's kind of this gap. So we are hoping to see at least something better done for the 400 block, at least maybe like a one way traffic towards the waterfront, which the fire department might need. They've said that they don't need it two ways. But then for all of those other blocks, can we make it cohesive, right? There's some plans out there that some people have said like, oh, maybe just a few blocks, just the 600 and 700 block. What if it was just all one cohesive stretch and you can do different treatments on it, like you can make the center of it the first place that we make better as part of the daily garab Plaza project, like make that whole the first element of it. But what we don't understand is why do we need to return cars to it at all on any parts of it? If you're doing it in pieces, you could do the middle and then still have the other two sections of it, which are very vibrant. The two most vibrant sections, I think, are about the 600 block and the 1100 block. I love going to the 1100 block. I really don't want to see it return to pre pandemic in front of the museum there. It's so lively. People dance their satellite, like it's incredible. And so can we apply this whole treatment to the entire thing and like what can we connect to too? Because if we have an entrance at the waterfront for like tourists more, and then we have an entrance at Korea for people who live over on that side, can the top of it be an entrance for Santa Barbara's, like the Granada, the Arlington, can we connect it to Alameda Park? Can we connect it to the courthouse? Can we connect it and make it one cohesive? This is our downtown core. This is our pedestrian space. This is our bike space. All right, we lost Joanna to know maybe one of you want a text or see that was intentional or not. But I'd love to have her back. Yeah, and so Tristan, let me just riff off of that while Ian, because of the contact or one of you does. So we spent a lot of time on State Street. What kind of things do you do on State Street? You mentioned a satellite in the museum at 1100 block and sort of that energy and that vibrancy. Give me like sort of a glimpse of your life, you know, and what would bring you to State Street? Definitely. And this is a very personal question for everyone. It's very different, but I go to State Street probably every other day at least. I either walk there or I bike there or I walk there and then take the cycle because then I don't have to deal with like walking my bike or anything. I go to the restaurants, I go shopping, the Adirondack chairs are just really nice to go and sit and go there. Night Lizard has a weekly game night that I go to every week, which is always fun because there's the farmer's market there. So I sometimes stop, get produce, bring produce to game night. It's just a very vibrant place to be. Even at 10 o'clock at night when I leave game night, there's still people out and about on Tuesdays. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I know about you, Ian. Yeah, it's a when I'm when I'm in downtown, will to go, you know, we do the 1100 block. We might go see a movie, we might eat 500 block kind of thing and you know, you are right. There's certainly a great energy, you know, and fun kind of just being around with whoever you're with and just kind of being outdoors and obviously if there are cars there, you'd have to put up with, you know, not getting hit or the loud noise or the music or the exhaust, you know, all that stuff that comes with cars going at slow paces. Glad to have you back. Joanna, did you want to add anything to what Ian and Tristan said about sort of your vision for State Street and what you would like to see for those, you know, nine, eight, nine blocks? Yeah. I come from kind of a baby, a different like perspective, I moved to Santa Barbara in about 2004 from the Inland Empire. So I come from a very auto oriented place and I also come from a place where people who can't afford to live in coastal California, I moved to and that's how my family ended up in the Inland Empire. I think part of this bold vision is making sure that State Street is the locus of housing and the future of State Street will most certainly include more people. So we need to make sure that whatever vision we move forward with is acknowledging that this will be, you know, really different place where as right now we don't have that high residential population right on State Street, we are going to most definitely see that in the future and that's not something to be afraid of. So the form and function of the Grand Paseo should really follow that. So State Street isn't just a place you visit, but State Street is a great, it's going to be like a neighborhood, it's going to be a great place to live. So right now it's still in transition and if you add cars back it will really affect the future of that space serving that function. Let's talk a little bit about cars, okay, because I think that I recently did a podcast with a member of the State Street Advisory Committee and in my head was convinced that he was pro car and was going to say reopen it and he actually didn't, you know, he said that he used to be a bicyclist, he does not want to see cars on the promenade. I think he is an advocate for cars from the 900 block on, but he isn't sort of like a Randy Rouse who's just like let's bring him back and do it that way. So talk to me, like is it fair, are you anti car, do any of you own cars, I mean do you, what is the role of people having vehicles in Santa Barbara, because I think that there could be a perception among some people that, oh, they hate cars and they think everyone should be riding a bike all over the place. So can you talk to talk to me a little bit about your like views on the car? Yeah, I want to be clear, we are not anti car. We explicitly are saying that we are pro choice. We want there to be options, right? So most streets, we have what 500 plus miles of paved streets in Santa Barbara. Every single block is made for the car. There's places to park on the sides of those streets, like so much of our built environment is centered around driving places. And so we're saying that's okay, can we also include these other things? Can we also make it safe for people to bike places? Can we also make it safe for people to cross the street being a pedestrian? And so for State Street, particularly it's cars have the entirety of the rest of the city. Can we have one place where they aren't? Right, and I want to add that I have a child and I totally get why someone would need a car right now because our community, like much of America is built to prioritize and make it easier and convenient to get somewhere by car. But there are externalities and costs of that. So this, for example, city council just had a hearing about the climate action plan and since sustainability goals. And so there's a collective understanding we need to do things differently and transportation is one of the largest sources of emissions for this area. So I think we need to be moving more in that direction. We're not saying we want to socially engineer a community and ban people from driving cars. I think what we're saying is we need to start incorporating more of this because actually the more people that we have biking, taking transit and walking in our community, it's a net benefit for everyone. Even people who say they never want to ride a bicycle, they never want to set foot on a bus, they benefit already from the segment of our population that choose to do so. Specifically because if 20% of the population chooses to bike or walk or take public transit, that's less cars on the road, which means less traffic. It's a win-win-win situation for everybody. I'll just add that I grew up in a house with two planners, and so I've heard a lot of this from an academic perspective, but only until recently, because I just moved back to Santa Barbara after a long stint in D.C. where I didn't need a car. And I grew up on the Riviera, though, where if I wanted to go to the park less than a mile from my house, I had to walk on roads with no sidewalks and high speeds. And if you're a kid and you're, this is pre-e-bike and e-scooter, if you're a kid and that's your only way of doing it, and I didn't do that, it definitely discourages you from connecting more to your community and just being more mobile and having access to the rest of your community. So I think it doesn't have to be that way, right? Or we're not anti-car, or anti-car-dependency, or can't anti-car dominance, right? It shouldn't be forced by the government to, you know, it's a choice. It's a policy choice. You have a street. Are you going to have sidewalks or not? Are you going to have bike lanes or not? Are you going to make it so that there's an equal, legitimate choice? And, you know, I think we're long past the point of having the conversations about what Santa Barbara wants to include. Like, we've made that decision politically to have to move towards a pedestrian-friendly bike-friendly community, and that's our vision statement, it's about realizing that. And, obviously, people are still going to drive downtown from all over, right? And we have, and I don't think any of us are saying to, you know, get rid of all the parking garages or anything like that. You're still going to have people taking public transit with MTD, people biking down there, people driving down there. It's about, on State Street specifically, it's the destination, right? Like, what's the place that people are going to want to go to and enjoy more, and what's more accessible, what's more sustainable, and beneficial for the businesses? And also, what's like, what fits Santa Barbara, what's enhancing the El Pueblo Baco and that special character we have? And I really do strongly believe that most Santa Barbara's would think the cars aren't really adding anything to that experience on State Street specifically. Yeah. But one more thing that I thought was really fascinating. So you probably heard of us be CAD, obtaining data from replica, which is a company which talks like cell phone data, so getting like a real snapshot of how people are moving around. And I was surprised to see that of commutes coming to Santa Barbara, that actually there's a pretty decent share, I want to say over 30%, there were four miles of less, four miles or less, and then about 30% were like two miles or less of a commute. So imagine if those people had safe, convenient alternatives to driving in a car that would free up, again, more space, but you know, I think there's a myth that people need to drive because they have to travel long distances. I think there's a lot of people who might ride a bike, they're on the fence about it or might walk or might take transit. It's just that it's either not safe enough or convenient enough for them to decide to use that option. So instead they drive. Yeah, I'll just give more quick, for example, that like playing out. So my folks moved to Hidden Valley like six or seven years ago, and that's where I am now. And before, you know, Hidden Valley is really close to like both the Cooper Plaza and then Henry's beach and feelings. And before they just redid Las Pacidis and Modog, you know, there wasn't a sidewalk, you'd have to walk in the bike lane with cars going 40, 50 miles per hour past you. And you know, I even once shamed me to cross the pipe there across to the open space, right? Because it's just like you're not going to spend, you know, 40 more minutes walking down this basically mini highway when, you know, you're kidding, you just want to go to the beach. You're going to maybe take risks that aren't ideal from like a public policy perspective or a community perspective. But now we have this beautiful multi-use path shared by dog walkers, pedestrians, joggers, bicyclists, and it works great. And it's really, it's made the streets safer and it makes it so that, you know, we don't have to get in a car if we want to take our dog down to Henry's. We can walk 30 or 40 minutes if that's kind of how we filled that day, or we can drive still if we want to go faster. So I think it's, yeah, it's about creating those choices. And I think Santa Barbans have already seen the benefits of that. Right. That makes a lot of sense. Let's talk a little bit about senior citizens, people with mobility issues. We've seen this come up. They say things like, not everyone can ride a bike downtown, obviously many senior citizens can. We're not making, saying absolutes about anything, but for people who may not be able to ride a bike downtown, or want to enjoy stage street, but can't ride a bike, you know, and they don't want to maybe walk. They want to see the whole promenade, but don't want to walk several blocks, or maybe they physically can't. They just can only do a couple of blocks or something, you know, maybe you use a wheelchair. What is your view on sort of solutions for those individuals? Because I know I feel sometimes when I hear the bike perspective, I feel like it's everything you say makes total sense, but for certain people in a certain stage of their life, right? And so obviously we live in a community with a lot of aging people, a lot of senior citizens. And so, so can you talk a little bit about that? You obviously, you know, are good people, and you have concerns about them too. So can you articulate sort of, you know, your views on people who share those perspectives? Yeah, I think it's a mix of alternate mobility options, right? First of all, the garages are right off of state, right? They're not a block, has a garage that's half a block off of state. Most of the garages are a very short walk. And so you could go to a garage, park your car there, and go that little extra. It's not ideal for some people. So on the cross streets, they definitely need to make loading and unloading zones for pedestrians that should have high turnover of cars for drop off for people who need that access. And then transit is definitely the other piece of that puzzle, right? We need some sort of transit that specifically caters to everyone, but also these particular use cases of people with disabilities and elderly people who can't walk as far. The new downtown waterfront shuttle is a great example. It goes on the side streets and brings people around, doesn't run frequently enough for it to be a great viable solution yet. So bringing back something like that and potentially running it at least partially on state street, like they suggested, would definitely solve that partially. Other options could be micro transit or one other person that I've had discussions with Dennis Allen always brings up electric pedicabs. And you can have electric pedicabs where a wheelchair can slot into them. And then the person biking can bring them around. There's a million different creative solutions for this. I remember in the early 2000s, we had the people powered pedicabs for a little while. So you could just hop on a pedicab and they would take you or they would deliver food and that sort of thing. So bring them back. Where'd they go? Yeah. I just wanted to add, so the city has a vision zero policy that's focused on just traffic safety in general. So it's not, or it's not specific to just bicycles or pedestrians. It also looks at vehicular collisions, but I think safety is paramount. And I do want to point out for mobility limited residents and visitors that having a car free street is actually the safest option. And there's already a history, unfortunately, of pedestrian fatalities in particular on state street that involves senior residents. And they're also more recent cases in Galita of seniors being hit and killed by cars. So I just always, you know, it's unfortunate that I have to point that out. But I think it's easy for that to get lost in these conversations because I see the elimination of cars from this space as a more inclusive environment for all. It's not just, you know, having a preference for those of us that are fortunate enough to have the ability to walk or bike. It's really for everyone. Yeah. And I'll just add, I agree with everything that welcome to said, but I think in this discourse, when it relates to state street in particular in the long term vision and what cars add or don't add to particular areas, I've been a little frustrated by kind of the presumption that some people have that the car on the street is a panacea for accessibility when a lot of people, it's actually a barrier to accessibility. You know, every person's mobility and accessibility needs are different. That's an individual case and we need to create a space long term that's inclusive of everybody. And I'm not going to say that what we have right now is or and what we had before the pandemic certainly wasn't either. I think, you know, there's a lot of solutions like Tristan talked about. You know, we have a plan right now and currently and going forward to have delivery vehicles on blocks, every block, right, early in the mornings before a lot of people are using it. And, you know, I hear a lot of talk about patron drop off it specific venues like the Arlington or the Granada. If we did the flat and flexible treatment, we could put those bollards down and let people drop off during the time that we need to, if they really do need a car right in front of their venue, there's a lot of other ways we can get there, I think, for a lot of people of transit on the street. Other services around. But I think if we did the flat and flexible grant to say a framework through the whole thing, it gives us the greatest opportunity, especially as technology continues to develop and, you know, right now we have e-bikes and that has actually been a great enhancement of accessibility for a lot of people. And I've seen people use their, you know, electric scooters on the state street right now, like mobility scooters down the bike lane where they wouldn't probably be comfortable doing that with a car right next to them or on a crowded sidewalk. So I think, you know, it's really important that we center this in the master plan and the conversation, but we definitely need to acknowledge that a car on the street is not going to solve the problems. Yeah. Let's, let's talk about two things, transit and bike. So let's start with transit. The shuttle, they're doing it, I guess, for the summer with the grant money, it's not running a lot. We used to have a waterfront, downtown waterfront shuttle, the city pulled its funding. I think it went away on MTD side before the pandemic. What is your take? And I know you all know people at MTD and your nice people's, you're not going to bad mouth anyone here, but like, what is your take on our transit system in Santa Barbara? I hear people say needs improvement. I grew up here too, and, you know, I think the lines from IV to city college are obviously packed. Students, a lot of students ride the bus, but I don't think we're a community where a lot of people, at least when I ride the bus, you know, are using it as an option. I think that more people could be using it as an option. What's your take on our transit system here? What, you know, how is it running? How can we make it better? So, I've lived all over California. I lived in San Luis Obispo, I lived in San Francisco, I lived in Long Beach, and here, and everyone has their own unique transit systems, right? And for our size, I would say that Santa Barbara's transit system is actually quite good. We have a lot of great lines. We have relatively decent frequency, but it was a lot better pre-pandemic. And that was partially due to Santa Barbara growing, and we lost a lot of funding opportunities from being a small city from the federal government. So, MTD has less funding now than they did before the pandemic, and also the city stopped funding the shuttle system. They used to put in a couple million dollars a year towards that. So, the frequencies on the bus aren't as high as they should be, and that makes it really hard to rely on, because if you have a bus that comes every five or ten minutes, if you miss one bus, or if it's a little bit late, it's not a big deal. But if it comes every 30 minutes or every hour and you miss it, you're completely screwed, and you call an Uber or something if you can afford it. So, it's all about frequency, but to get frequency, you have to find funding. But the bones are in place, for sure, and I think it definitely become a world-class transit system. Do you want to bite the bus? Do you all take MTD, or do you prefer to take a bike if you're not in a car? I do take MTD a good amount. Even here in Hidden Valley, where we have the five lines, it's only once an hour. It's still a million times better than not having it at all. I do think everything Tristan said, it was correct. There's a feedback loop in a lot of places. If you have the housing and the density to support the public transportation, it becomes a lot more efficient to run that public transportation, which supports more development of that less car-dependent environment. So, it's definitely something we need to continue to invest in, county-wide, and in the city, I do think we're quite lucky for an area of our size to have the public transportation system that we do, but obviously, it could get a lot better, and I think it has gone a lot better. I remember when you couldn't tap to pay on the bus, and you had to go to the transit center to get a ticket, and then how are you going to get to the transit center if you don't have a ticket, and you're reliant on public transportation, which a lot of people in Santa Barbara are, and I think their stories often aren't as highlighted because they may not be showing up to these government meetings at 2pm on a workday, but there's a lot of people, hundreds, maybe thousands of people in the south coast who don't have a car because they can't afford a car, any other reason they can't drive, and they're really reliant on that system, so we need to make sure that we're improving that as much as we can going forward. We definitely need it for state streets specifically, we definitely need that downtown waterfront circulated to be permanent, and hopefully, every day, instead of just the weekends in the summer. We did one analysis, I just want to highlight, in North County, half of all the population lives within half a mile of just the 6th and 11th line, which effectively is one line, so that's the line that goes up state street, up for state street, Hollister, and Tivy. Half of everyone lives within a half mile walk of that one line, so we could easily buff up that Coraline and serve a lot more people, and that could run on state street too, why not? Yeah, those are the lines I take when I take it, because it's like the spine of Hollister to stay. Joanna, are you going to say something? Oh, yeah, no, I just want to add one little thing, I mean, everything we said is totally correct, and I fully agree, I just want to say that making the downtown shuttle permanent is really critical for another reason. It's connecting the downtown and state street between the transit center to Amtrak, and I think it's really important to build those first and last mile connections, so for the people that either need to take Amtrak or visitors coming from Amtrak without that shuttle, they have to walk because there's no other convenient option. Yeah, that's true, and I remember when I was a little little kid, we had a transit center of Hollister, I think it's like a sheriff's station there, kind of by the 7/11, it was like a mini little transit center, so yeah, we have made a lot of progress over time. Let's talk about sort of the big thing, which is this clash between some property owners, some businesses, and state street, and the cars, and so I kind of want to get your perspective on this because, you know, Ian, you had mentioned like Las Pacidis, and right by Hidden Valley, and the excellent bike lanes and separated pathways that the city of Santa Barbara created there, but you know, state street is right in a commercial corridor. You have commercial buildings on both sides, and you know all the stories, you know, these developers say we don't have the density to convert, you know, these commercial buildings to housing, some of them choose to go with hotels, so Nuevo apparently could be a big housing project someday. So it isn't as though state street is happening in a vacuum, like there's stuff happening on both sides, so what do you say to the property owners who say, you know, it's great if we don't have cars on state street and everyone bikes and walks, but what is that going to do for shopping? Okay, what is that going to do to bring retailers in? Because now we're talking about just, you know, it's hard to know how many, but there are some who are vocal and they have the mayor's ear on this, and they say, you know, no retailers going to come to Santa Barbara if the street is closed, right? You've heard this, okay? So what is your take? Can we have a state street that is closed to vehicles and somehow that's going to revitalize all of the vacant storefronts, I mean, what is your vision for the business side of all of this? Well, I want to throw a reverse question back out there, show me how bringing back the cars will revitalize state street. So for those of us that have been here for a minute, we remember the conversations that started happening, I think as early as like 2015, if not earlier, about issues on state street and increase in retail vacancies or commercial vacancies. So I'm really curious if someone can show me a study that definitively proves that having cars on the street will be the key to revitalization. I would love to see it because in my research, I have found everything in the contrary in terms of having a vibrant act of transportation network supporting economic development. And I want to give space to my colleagues to speak in a minute, but I think there's lots of other factors that are contributing to this issue that, and that's what I tell property owners, but I just want to be clear that there's no real proof that bringing cars back will magically solve all the problems. And we did have vacant storefronts before COVID, right? So it isn't as though all of a sudden the street went vacant after COVID. So that is clear. Go ahead, Tristan. Yeah, we pre-pandemic, it was already vacant, but we're actually back to where we were before the Hayes Property Group put out a statement that we have the same amount of vacant storefronts as pre-pandemic now than before. So it's not like it's currently dying, it's getting better and better. There's a couple blocks that aren't doing as well, but the vacancies are going down, so we're moving in the positive trajectory. The other thing I want to mention is we were curious, like, what do people actually think about this? What do the business owners actually think about this? So we had four people go out during, I think, Memorial Day weekend, and we went and talked to a bunch of business owners and managers of various businesses. We tried to hit every single block of State Street, we tried to avoid restaurants because restaurants tend to want the pedestrian promenade more than others because they can do outdoor dining. So we talked to a bunch of people who own small, independent stores on State Street, basically. And we found that 75% of the people we talked to said that they wanted it close to cars. They wanted their block close to cars. Another 10% said that they didn't care at all, and then that last remaining 15% wanted it opened up. But that's an overwhelming majority of business owners that want it this way, and it seems to me like it's some property owners that really want it back to the way it was before. But I think that we should look forward and see what we can do, because this is a once-in-a-life time opportunity, right? And are we going to get to do this again? Let's go big. Right. Yeah. And I'll say his name, Jim Kanell, who's the owner or principal of SEMA, and I think he owns lots of properties, lot by lots, he threw out some percentage, but a significant percentage. And I think he's the one who has been saying he's heard no retailers saying that they don't want to come in. But again, like Joanna says, that's anecdotal from him. There's no study that says that. But if you think of a mayor, Randy Rouse, I mean, here we have a very progressive town. We have elected officials who are progressive, and we have the mayor who is like the biggest political backer of bringing cars back to state street. I don't know if you've talked to him, but I mean, what's your take on the figurative leader of our city having this perspective on cars? I just want to say, I think that there's a lot more alignment than people think, right? 80% of people wanted to keep the street close to cars when they did a survey of over 5,000 people. Obviously, Randy is not one of those people, and he wants to reopen it to cars. But he just wants what's best for the community. He just does a very different way of looking at it. And I'm not just trying to say that to be nice. We've tried to talk to him several times, we've introduced ourselves. I think that he knows that we don't align fully with his goals, but there's a lot more overlap. I talked to Cass and Berg, for example, who a lot of people might think are more aligned with Randy, and we were talking and 90% of the things were exactly the same. We just think that a little bit different about the actual implementation of it. I do have to say though, State Street is incredibly vibrant right now. It is great, and we talked to business owners who are saying that some of their core base isn't coming back, some of the people who live in the Riviera, for example, because Randy keeps saying, "Oh, it's dead downtown, it's scary downtown," and that is actually having a damping effect on our own economy. Because if people keep hearing this, then they're going to avoid it. We need to be like, "No, I would invite all of those people to go downtown, go to State Street, walk down the entire length of it," and you'll see for yourself the narrative that is being spun is completely false. I'll just say, and I'm happy to bite on that question about the man, but I'll just say, I agree, me and my friends would constantly walk down State Street as just a thing that we did as teenagers, right, and we would get meet up and say, "I'm away," though, usually, and then we would walk down to the war, and if we did that on a week night, it was almost like it was a ghost town, and there's ebbs and flows in the economy and tourism, obviously, and there's seasonal impacts. But I was just there yesterday, Tuesday night, and it was dropping all over the place, and we walked up to the thousand block, and it was, we were doing very well for a town of our size, I think, and I think a lot of what Tristan said is very valid. I think you're hearing a cry for help from a lot of the restaurant owners and other business owners downtown, at Oak Bull, at Carlitos, at Holodrens, and a variety of others, the Cruisery, Aaron Ashland, who are being very vocal about this promenade can be improved, of course, and we agree, but what we have right now has a lot of value, and as Santa Barbaraans, I think we should take pride in it, and I'll just say, maybe this is just my perspective, but I really think that the mayor of Santa Barbara should not be the biggest critic publicly of Santa Barbara, and I feel like Randy's contribution to this conversation has been limited to writing the same op-ed four times about, I don't have, he explicitly says, I don't actually have any evidence as to why cars will be the solution, but what we have right now doesn't work, so let's just do something differently. You could say that about everything, right? So yeah, like Joanna said, we're open to every idea, but if you're gonna propose just your big solution for downtown is get rid of all the parklets and bring cars in, how are you improving from what we used to have in 2019 when we were having this exact same conversation, and, you know, about the kind of how we support these businesses and retailers, commercial real estate nationwide is having kind of a moment post-COVID, and you're having banks across the country even go under for being over indexed in commercial real estate. I've heard from, you know, my dad has talked my ear off about this, and I don't pretend to be qualified on real estate, but you know, what I've heard is that the more sophisticated commercial real estate property owners now aren't using car traffic as their metric of whether to invest in a place, and that might still be true for some of the big national chains, but it matters, you know, what we've heard from retailers even in public comment in this process is we need people on the sidewalk looking through the window into these stores, and the way we bring those people down there is, let's widen the sidewalks, let's make it even more pedestrian friendly. Yeah, so I could go on and on there, Josh, but yeah, I think that the conversation could be a little bit divorced from reality of what we have right now, which we should be proud of, and we should also work diligently to improve. Yeah, I think the conversation should really be focused on Fox and looking at the real measures, what is actually impacting the downtown, and the city is already invested in trying to answer that question. And so there's already been a few good studies done over the last decade or so to answer that question of what's going on downtown. So I think housing is a big part of it. Like Ian said, you know, we have too much commercial space. And so really, I think what we need to be focusing on is how do we change use from what we don't need to what we desperately need. And then also looking at how we can support, you know, how our downtown can support those future residents and making sure we have the types of businesses that will, again, support State Street, not just as a visitor destination, but also like a great place to live. Which it already somewhat is, I think most of us on this call are downtown on State Street a lot. I'm on State Street all the time with my young child, and I can tell you it's a million times better from my perspective as a parent to be down there than it was before the pandemic. Especially when you have a toddler that just wants to run out of your hand and you're terrified of what might happen when your child runs into the middle of the street. So I think that as both my colleagues said, you know, just go out there and see for yourself what you think about it. And let me follow up on eBikes and bicyclists. We know that there are good drivers and bad drivers, and that's also true for people who ride bicycles. There's respectful drivers and respectful bicyclists, you know, what's your experience? I mean, I know, you know, speaking personally that, you know, I have a 10 year old, so not a toddler, but some of the bicyclists can be kind of obnoxious and go kind of fast, you know, and I've tried to walk in the middle of the street and it's like, this one, I get to walk in the street. So I guess you like the separation, you know, having the bikes in their lane and then people back on the on the on the wider sidewalks, but what would you say to bad bicyclists who are watching or who go too fast or, you know, who maybe not are thinking about the senior citizen on the street or the toddler on the street? Definitely. And that's a huge question we've been trying to answer. So we've done an insane amount of research into this and looked at how other communities have solved this issue because we're not the only ones dealing with eBikes. And actually the city commission to study, they tracked eBikes speeds on two distinct blocks and they found that the 85th percentile bikes were going a very reasonable speed, 15 miles an hour or less. It's that top 5%, top 10% of bikes that have throttles that actually are illegal in California that really shouldn't be going that fast in the first place. And there's a couple different ways we can deal with it, but the way that we think that would be the most beneficial is to make it hard for them to go that fast in the first place. And you can do that in a lot of different ways. First of all, that study that they did found that the blocks with parklets had naturally slower speeds than the blocks without parklets. When they added the bike lanes, it visually narrows the space that bikers have before they just had like the entire width of the street to just barrel down. Now they have a painted little lane and it's already improved a lot. It's not helping with that plus 10%. But for those, you can do a lot of treatments even with that 20 foot fire lane that we have to have to visually narrow the street to add actual barriers to going that fast. Literally just plant some trees. It will slow people down, meander the bike lane, it will slow people down. You can use different materials to visually distinctively say this is bike space, this is pedestrian space. If you're in bike space, treat everybody well. I was in San Francisco a few months back and they had painted little triangles in front of wherever pedestrians might cross. And literally those little triangles alerted bikes to the fact that, hey, this is a pedestrian space. And so something even just that simple can do a lot to help with 95% of the bike traffic. Yeah, that's good. And I think the vibe I'm getting from all of you is these things are a little bit complicated, challenging. Community conflicts, but you guys, you all are solutions based, right? You are looking at me. How can we find a way to do this as opposed to find ways not to do it? And if you're not anti car, you're not anti anything or anyone, you're really about, let's make it work. Let's put our heads together and figure out a way that works rather than stopping when there's a potential problem. So this is helpful. Let's talk about housing, because everyone says once we get housing downtown, that's going to infuse so much energy. Housing is expensive, right? I don't know how much those apartments, I think those are 99 on Guterres Street, 99 apartments. Who knows how much those are going to cost, but we know new apartments, downtown, studios, one bedrooms, two bedrooms, if they're any. By the time they're built, 4,000, 5,000, 6,000, who knows? It's going to be a lot. This is prime real estate. And I know one of the things I've been reporting on in terms of the housing element in the county is we're building more housing, but this stuff downtown, are these going to be occupied? And maybe it's not a bad thing, right? He's going to be occupied by the highest paid young professional tech workers who, you know, are not really the people who are serving the guts and the core of this community that we rely on as the backbone, you know, the working class individuals. I mean, what is your take? I mean, I know I've heard all housing is good, Josh. If you build housing, then people will move up and up and it creates new housing. But I don't know. Are we going to have the service industry, the gardeners, the housekeepers? Are they ever going to be able to afford to live downtown? And does this really help for the need where we need it most? Yeah, I think that's the key question. I do think, you know, it depends on the goal you're trying to solve. And there's a lot of different goals in this community with housing. Obviously, it's like the number one issue for Santa Barbara and especially for our generation too. I think for the economic vitality that we're trying to inject into downtown, like there's a reason why the Pacena Nuevo redo conversation is about how many units can we cram in there. We need bodies there, living there. And I think, you know, there's going to be certain dynamics that are true in every city about the concentration of wealth and income in certain neighborhoods. But I think we see that, you know, the best and most vibrant and resilient communities are the ones where there's room for everybody everywhere. And so I think, you know, I have my own opinions about the inclusionary housing requirements. Maybe we can go towards more of what Galita's doing. I don't think that would end housing development. But yeah, there's a lot of creative solutions out there to address affordable housing, the housing trust fund, giving the housing authority the support they need. There's even a couple extra parking lots, maybe, that the city could develop and put some affordable housing on. Right. So there's a lot of solutions. I don't think, you know, anything we do with downtown is going to solve the affordable housing crisis in Santa Barbara, unfortunately. But you know, it's interesting you brought up the Gutierrez, like Solterra, I think it's called apartments. I actually asked a tour because I'm looking for an apartment and it's like right downtown. Be cool to live there, right? And you know, it's out of my price range a little right now. I think you need like it's like 3,200 for the one bedrooms there, which is definitely pushing it. I think in a brand spanking new super desirable location, you know, a lot of people are going to pay that. But I think yeah, it's about public private partnerships, community involvement, try and get people together adaptive reuse. I know the city's working on, yeah, I think there's just the point is there's a lot of ways we can tackle this, but we do need a downtown with housing and we don't have that right now. The housing kind of surrounds downtown, but it isn't downtown and it was always meant to have housing. It just didn't get built. So. One of the thing I want to point out is just the reason we're saying, Oh, housing downtown, right, is it kind of ties all of this together because we're all about, okay, can we increase walkability? Can we increase bikeability? Can we meet our needs within a certain amount of time of walking or biking, right? And if you don't have housing in those places, then there's no way to meet their needs. You can't have a grocery store downtown because it won't, there's none of people that live there to support that grocery store. So actually our founder, Sullivan Israel wrote an article in the Ammonosito Journal a couple of months ago or maybe a month ago where he looked at data of where are the most walkable and bikeable areas where are the people that people don't live and there's almost a direct correlation of those two of people don't live in the most walkable areas. People don't live downtown. And so when we think about like transit oriented development, it's because that kind of housing you can support more of a car light lifestyle or more of a car free lifestyle. Yeah. We got about 10 minutes, then we're going to wrap up on who's going to pay for all this, right? So flattening the promenade, flat and flexible, 10 million, I've seen all kinds of, you know, 10 to 20 million dollars. So we're in the planning stages and what do we worry about that once we get there, come up with the plan or how do you envision this be paid for city of Santa Barbara doesn't have that kind of money. They were trying to raise parking fees, you know, free parking, you know, there's a lot of things they're trying to do. So if you thought about that, you know, what are some ways to fund all this down the road? It definitely has to be phased, right? So we're saying, oh, we would love to see no cars on from the 400 block to the 1300 block, but that doesn't mean we have to do flatten flexible the entire way, the entire thing all at once, right? We can start maybe their point, they're leaning towards the daily get a plaza area. Like can we start there? Can we make that one big cohesive flatten flexible area and then leave the other areas kind of in their current configuration, maybe spur some economic development there, but start small, prove, hey, look, this is the path forward and then build up from there and they should definitely pursue grants because there's a lot of grants available for active transportation and this is essentially an active transportation project. So there should be money available for that, potentially not for all of it, but they can be creative. They got a grant for the downtown waterfront shuttle. Yeah, in the state of California, as you know, cut lots of funding for active transportation grants. You guys are solutions based and I am too, yeah, hopefully in a few years that will change. Go ahead. Yeah, I was going to say, I mean, I'm not too savvy on this necessarily yet. I do know that there are groups involved in the state straight conversation that are very keen on public private partnerships and so part of that is securing private financing to build out the vision and so I think there's other avenues that yet to be that are yet to be explored that I think can really be, you know, this could become a community investment. So I think that just saying like, don't build the vision because it will never happen because then money will never materialize is not a great way to approach this process. I think we should definitely build the vision and then we'll move forward and I think that we'll be able to find ways to implement it. Yeah. Totally. I think that's exactly it. Right now we're just in a master planning process, right? So the point right now with the committee and the draft plan needs to be this is the downtown we dream of and then we can work on the more pragmatic, practical and financial aspects of that. I think Tristan's right about the phasing, you know, it's going to have to take some time and it's probably, you know, the way things get built in the city. It's going to maybe take a decade or more for this to pan out. Hopefully not though, you know, I know like Francis State Street is out there ready to galvanize some of the philanthropic support in the community. Some other people are talking about wonky your ideas that I can't pretend to fully understand called like an infrastructure finance district where you take the property tax increment, presumably investing in this great plan will make these properties more valuable. You can take I guess the difference in tax property tax and funnel it towards building this kind of thing and housing. That's how I understand it. I'm sure that could some other people can speak more eloquently about it. But yeah, there's a lot of creative solutions out there and, you know, we have to try, right? And I think I'll just make a broader point about like, you know, my one criticism, I think we've made a lot of progress in this master planning process so far, but my one criticism remains, let's not, you know, stop before we start. We have to like on some of these blocks, we're hearing, oh, there's an, you know, a public space the fire access difficulty with like the 400 block, for example. So it needs to be this way. And that might be true. I can't say that it's not true, but we should at least plan and I have our vision be what we really want and that might be a free car free 400 block. And then maybe have a plan B, have a plan C, right? Right now it feels like on some of these topics, the decision is being made outside of the community process. And that's kind of defeats the purpose of a community driven master planning process with, you know, a dozen town elders on this committee, right? They're supposed to be adding their really valuable insights to this process. And I want to, we want to, you know, be solutions oriented. We have a clear point of view that while we want to see, but yeah, let's, let's plan for the dream and then try and try and work on it. So I would imagine any candidate for office in this election year is probably going to want to appeal to the members of strong towns Santa Barbara, because you are active and you're vocal and there's a lot of you and maybe some of you yourself could be running for stuff this year or down the road, you know, so do you all get involved in elections? Will you get involved? Will you make endorsements? What role will you play and sort of decide helping to, you know, decide the outcome of these races? We have a big election at district one on the east side, tons of transportation, you know, issues there separate from state street. What's your role as it relates to the upcoming elections? Yeah, the, this is an interesting one because yeah, we, somehow, I don't know how we got here, but we started a year ago and somehow we have over 300 members already. And when we asked our community, hey, can you please ask the SSAC, the state street advisory committee, to like keep state street car free, we got 125 separate people to email them and completely overwhelm them, sorry, as I say, if you're seeing this, but the people seem to really want this kind of thing that we're driving for and we're seeing this nationwide. This isn't just a Santa Barbara thing, I think we're ideally suited to it here. And so there is going to be some, some of our ideals showing up in this next election. We've had all three of D1 candidates, two of them came to our meetings, one of them, we've had discussions with, were not necessarily going to endorse anybody, but our plan is we're going to send out surveys of downtown's principles to see what candidates principles on those are and we're going to publish those and let, let members and other people in the community use those as guides to make their own decisions. Okay. So I think, yeah, that's great, that district one is a big one. I don't know if there will even be competitive races in the other districts, we will find out, but there's stuff going on everywhere, you know, Kalita as well. So let's wrap up, we give you all maybe like last words here on State Street and the master plan and obviously members of the committee are going to watch this and this is going to run long before their next meeting and you all will be there at that meeting and being important in the conversation there and I know they'll be listening to you. So just, you know, each of you want to take some final comments before we wrap up on, you know, State Street and the master plan. I just want to say thank you to literally everybody involved at Len Vic was on your podcast last week. He's on the SAC. He's pushing for his ideal vision of State Street and he's put in a lot of time and effort into it. Every single member of the SAC has put in two, three years of their lives into this process and it's slow moving, but we're moving in the right direction and we're starting to move faster and just thank you for listening to the community. Thank you for listening to the restaurants, to the bike groups, to the car free groups. We're part of the community and we just really appreciate everybody listening and driving this process forward because we can do this. We can make a fantastic downtown together. Great. Great, anyone else? Yeah, I agree with that and thankful and I'm glad that Santa Barbara has this community driven kind of planning process and it's, it's not all top down and, you know, you get a fully baked cake from some consultant and you just have to either accept it or reject it. I don't want to see this process go down that road. We should have, you know, we should strive for to create as much consensus as we can. We're not going to all agree on everything obviously I think even the three of us disagree on like different, you know, minor policy differences, right? And that's okay. The goal is to create inclusive, vibrant space in our downtown and we can get there. What I just want to emphasize to folks is why not do the grandpa say for the whole thing? What is the reason we can't? There might be good reasons you can't on any particular block, but let's at least fully evaluate that idea because in my opinion, if we're going to have these gateways, they should be gateways to the grandpa say and not gateways to a block of driving before the grandpa say. And yeah, I'll also just say I really hope that the city council listens to the overwhelming majority of the community who wants to see this process play out and doesn't screw it up in the interim. They took a vote to keep it the way it is until 2026 or this master plan is implemented and I'll say to someone who plans to be involved in elections upcoming, let's stay true to our work there for the five men that voted for that. Yeah, there are some rumors that there's going to be some play to reopen it, parts of it, while the master plan is playing out more than rumors that there could be a political play to do that. We'll see if that happens. Yeah. Question for them if they're listening is why, is it because you're getting feedback? We have feedback in the other direction as well. So let's just be thoughtful. We can always disagree about the outcomes and what we want. That's fine. But they did make a commitment, five of them to keep it the way it is until 2026 as a car free thing or the implementation of this. And I think a lot of the negativity about downtown from a business perspective centers on the uncertainty of what's going to happen. So let's keep true to the plan. Let's see this process through. And yeah, get everybody's input. Yeah, I don't have much else to add on the specifics. But I think my last thing I want to say is having this be an open invitation to come talk to us, to go to our website strongtownsp.org. And we really love having conversations. We love having informed conversations. So we are really willing to listen and we hope to hear. We hope to hear to people that may disagree or hear from people that may disagree with us. Yeah. Well, thank you all for your time, Joanna Kaufman, Ian Bauke, and Tristan Miller. I know I learned so much and I have very respect for all three of you for what you're doing and how much you care about the community to try to make a difference and have an impact. And I'm sure down the road, someday, you guys will be, you all will be sitting up there on the council or somewhere in elected office because you're too good not to. Okay. So all right. I know I know at least one of you is political aspirations. So maybe all of you. But thank you so much. I really appreciate it and have a great day and good luck. I'll see you guys around. Thank you so much for having us, Josh and happy belated birthday, by the way. I saw that. Oh, wow. I saw a birthday person. I don't know how you found out about that, but I got a notification somewhere. Oh, okay. All right. Well, thank you. I appreciate it. All right, take care.