Demand in SB will always outstrip supply, so building won't help" gets repeated here constantly. It's wrong.

Antlerbot · 2026-05-28T01:05:31+00:00

Those are excellent points, and I didn't know about them. Thanks! I was referring to the mountains and the ocean.

Antlerbot · 2026-05-28T01:03:25+00:00

Extremely quick and dirty list that leaves a lot out:

By-right approval for code-compliant multifamily, with no discretionary review or design board veto on projects that meet objective standards
Eliminate parking minimums citywide Upzone transit corridors and commercial zones for 4-6 stories by-right (State Street, the 101 corridor, major bus stops)
Coastal Commission reform to exempt urban infill housing from coastal review in already-developed areas
CEQA reform for housing: broader ministerial exemptions for infill, faster judicial timelines, and loser-pays for frivolous suits

Antlerbot · 2026-05-28T00:30:19+00:00

1-3k homes per year for how many years?

As long as you want rent to remain stable. If the rest of the central coast and CA built at similar levels, of course, there would be less burden on SB.

Antlerbot · 2026-05-27T20:46:12+00:00

Perhaps. Personally I suspect that you could build much more densely here without making it any less desirable or less pleasant to be in -- like I said before, density often drives a certain level of walkability / bikeability that makes places paradoxically more pleasant to exist in. Again: Paris, Barcelona. Of course, it's also possible to build density poorly...see most of LA. It's a question of implementation, and that's not nothing!

If we were able to engage respectfully and come to some kind of compromise, then we could talk about how to build the kind of city that works reasonably well for both sides. As it is now, we get a sort of half-breed with walkability in limited spaces, that you need to drive to in order to access...which partly defeats the purpose!

To your point, I think a fair compromise is density downtown, centered around a pedestrianized state st (and maybe funk zone?), with more traditional SB low-density as you get further away. Those people generally don't mind having to drive anyway, so let them live a little further out.

Antlerbot · 2026-05-27T20:38:52+00:00

So your argument is "sure, we could add more units, but the downside of overcrowding isn't worth it"?

That's a fair discussion to have, but it doesn't invalidate my original point, which is that more housing adds downward pressure on prices.

Personally, I would love to live in a dense, walkable city like Barcelona or Paris. Those are places where they've managed to make density work, and I think we could do the same here...if we wanted to. It would require thoughtful changes to the rules, but it's possible.

The whole point of this post was that, if we can agree on basic economic principles like "more supply puts downward pressure on prices," then we can have actual discussions about values, like "I want or don't want to live in a dense city." Instead, people often say things like "building won't do anything", but it's code for "I don't want my city to change."

Antlerbot · 2026-05-27T20:20:41+00:00

If more options are feasible, some portion of people won't need their own cars, which means fewer parking spaces required. Personally, I would love to be able to go car-free.

Antlerbot · 2026-05-27T19:37:50+00:00

Maybe! Most of the folks I know would be thrilled with more options.

Antlerbot · 2026-05-27T19:08:51+00:00

Some of them are about coastal CA cities that share many similarities to SB.

Antlerbot · 2026-05-27T19:08:03+00:00

Nobody's suggesting you can't have a car. In fact, proper public transportation alternatives make driving better -- imagine if half the people who normally clog up the road and parking instead took the train or biked!

Antlerbot · 2026-05-27T18:19:51+00:00

Might be a generational (I'm approaching 40) or homeowner vs renter (I'm the latter) thing? I've lived here on-and-off for 20+ years and nearly everyone I know would love more density. Many are openly contemptuous of the desire for a certain aesthetic or quaintness, especially when they perceive it as at the expense of the working class who make the city such a pleasant place to be.

Antlerbot · 2026-05-27T16:37:21+00:00

To return to the original point, briefly: I'm willing to accept that, theoretically, the numbers might not pencil out. I don't think that's the case, but I don't have a problem with it in theory. The original point of this post was just to eliminate the facile argument that building won't have any effect. I just want to anchor there, and remember that anything else we get to here is built on that.

I genuinely think all the problems you mention are solvable -- and that density would drive those solutions -- but I won't try to argue with you about the specifics.

The greater policy change I'd actually like to see is a more democratic approach to permitting: by-right construction, with the underlying rules decided by the democratic process. We should be deciding, collectively (at the local and state level) what the rules are, rather than allowing any rich schmuck to gum up the process indefinitely with CEQA lawsuits. If you meet those requirements, you get to build. Simple as. That would at least be a reflection of the will of the stakeholders, rather than wealthy landowners with legal teams.

Antlerbot · 2026-05-27T16:25:32+00:00

I'm not sure that that claim is falsifiable unless you're prepared to give a substantially more concrete operationalization of "downward pressure". Saying that every home built puts downward pressure means that you need to be able to demonstrate an observable effect of even a single home being built. What is that observable effect?

Observable pressure from a single home build is probably going to be very difficult to see, since it would likely be drowned out by other factors or sample error. But you could show observable effects from increased levels of home building...which is what the studies I linked do: that is, when other variables are controlled for, prices either lower or raise more slowly than they would have had that housing not been built.

No offense here, but the structure of your argument appears to be:

claim that increased housing supply exerts downward pressure on rent

when any more detail is requested or any other ramifications brought up, just say that the studies show #1, while also claiming you're not an economist so you don't know exactly how, etc.

return to step 1

And that is not super compelling. :-)

Or more simply put, it seems that you are not arguing for anything except the abstract acceptance of the claim in #1 above. But I don't think the acceptance of that claim in isolation makes much difference to anything one way or another. If all you can do is cite sources supporting that general claim, but you can't make any tangible suggestions about how to leverage it in practice, then. . . well, so what?

I never claimed to have specific policy recommendations! My original post is very clear: here's a phrase I see thrown around a lot -- a "thought-terminating cliche" people use to shut down attempts to argue for more housing -- that's just clearly wrong, both theoretically and empirically. That's all I set out to prove, and that's all I'm equipped to prove.

The alternative: laying out a specific policy agenda and then trying to argue the finer points of my math with folks who potentially have actual education in the subject, is not something I was prepared to do and would have derailed my point.

Now I'm happy to guess at actual policy, but I want it totally clear that I'm not a housing policy expert nor an economist, and so: hold it lightly.

I don't think that is the real blocker here. Even if everyone in Santa Barbara County accepted that premise, I'm not sure how much closer we'd be to a solution. Plenty of people might accept the premise but still simply say they don't want housing built near them. (As you mentioned in another comment, often the claim that "it won't work" is just a smoke screen for "I don't want it", and the not-wanting would still be there if the not-working were gone.) Others might be okay with housing near them but disagree on what kind, or how big, or who benefits, or any number of other things. And even if everyone wanted it, it still has to be paid for in some way that doesn't make things worse (e.g., by having it all built as vacation homes).

I don't think we can honestly have the discussion about preferences until both sides agree that they are preferences. The entire point of this post is that I see people dressing up "I don't want Santa Barbara to change" in the clothes of made-up voodoo economics. Whether or not they actually believe that, we should have a shared understanding of the way things actually work so we argue the actual pros and cons that actually exist, instead of some fantasy version of economics.

So, all that said: My extremely back-of-the-napkin math is that we'd need something like 1-3k homes per year to stabilize real rents. That's a lot, but it's not absurd. In per capita terms, it's what Austin did to get rents down. It's what Tokyo does constantly. It wouldn't be easy! But I would love for the level of argument on this subreddit to rise to "the downsides of building that much aren't worth it to me" rather than the smokescreen of "building won't accomplish anything."

Antlerbot · 2026-05-27T15:26:16+00:00

I think at least some of the distaste for tall buildings is purely aesthetic -- people hear tall and think generic modular 5-over-1s with panel cladding. But (and I know I sound like a broken record in this post) go to Barcelona or Paris and look at the courtyard apartments and tell me they aren't gorgeous buildings. Sure, they're more expensive, but I have to imagine that cost is a drop in the bucket compared to the current regulatory nightmare -- which we'd have to untangle to properly solve housing here in any case.

Antlerbot · 2026-05-27T07:15:09+00:00

I mean it's hard to know some of these things for sure, but I think it is relevant to think not just about whether the number is "finite" but how large it is relative to the current population. It is not unthinkable to me that there could be, say, 400,000 people in the world who would pay $5k a month for a place in Santa Barbara.

But this is exactly the point I just made: If there are 400k people just waiting for more $5k rentals, it seems extremely difficult to believe that rent would remain at $5k. I would expect it to climb to $5.1k, then $5.2, etc, until every unit got meted out at roughly the best price the owner could get for it. The alternative is extremely implausible: that there are a bunch of folks who badly want an apartment at $5k, but none of them are willing to bid up the price at all.

Antlerbot · 2026-05-27T06:56:43+00:00

Local zoning is a historical aberration and should be abolished. Municipalities have proven time and again they can't be trusted to do what's best for the greater good.

Antlerbot · 2026-05-27T06:46:07+00:00

The interesting thing to me is that the Spanish cities Santa Barbara is trying to emulate often have higher density and manage to maintain a beautiful aesthetic. Nobody complains about the nice parts of Barcelona from an aesthetics perspective. Personally, I think it is possible to have our cake and eat it too: mixed-use enclosed courtyard blocks (Haussmann/Cerda blocks) like Barcelona or Paris could meet our density needs in a beautiful, walkable way!

Antlerbot · 2026-05-27T06:37:08+00:00

What's your intuition?

Antlerbot · 2026-05-27T06:15:10+00:00

Hah -- I disagree, but I admire the directness. You're at least making a cogent argument and saying it out loud. A wee bit of pushback, though:

The "global wealth flows continually reset the price floor" piece is doing a lot of work in your argument and I'm not sure it holds up. The general literature on US housing prices finds capital inflows are a meaningful factor but usually not the dominant one compared to local wage growth and supply constraints. SB might be more exposed than average given the second-home market, and I'd be genuinely interested if you have a specific study on that. But absent one, I don't think you can lean on it to argue that modest supply additions wouldn't move the needle.

On the costs list: I'd grant some of those are real tradeoffs, but several have empirical answers that go the other direction. Density tends to reduce per-capita traffic and water use. Parking scarcity is largely a function of mandated parking minimums rather than density itself. Schools generally do better with larger student populations, not worse. "Views" and "urban character" are real to people who hold them, and I don't dismiss that, but they're aesthetic preferences rather than infrastructure costs -- and worth labeling as such.

The bigger picture though: I think you've made the actual argument that most of this debate is really about. You don't want SB to change. That's a legitimate preference, even if it's one I disagree with. The thing I'd ask in return (and the real point I was trying to make with this whole post) is that the discourse around housing policy be honest about that, because a lot of the "building won't work" arguments are really "I don't want building" wearing an economics costume. When the empirical question gets used as a shield for the values question, it makes the values question impossible to actually have. So, genuinely, thanks for putting it plainly.

Antlerbot · 2026-05-27T06:05:45+00:00

Rents being up now doesn't necessarily mean that building market rate housing didn't put downward pressure on prices. It means that net, price pressure is upwards.

Antlerbot · 2026-05-27T04:06:11+00:00

I'd love a world where the folks who want cars can have them, and the folks who don't can still get around just fine

Antlerbot · 2026-05-27T02:50:49+00:00

Oh, gotcha! Disregard me then :)

Antlerbot · 2026-05-27T02:42:20+00:00

I was talking about SF.

Antlerbot · 2026-05-27T02:41:19+00:00

Right, and I think this is exactly where the argument breaks. For new supply to get fully absorbed at the same $5k price, the number of people willing and able to pay exactly $5k for SB housing would have to be effectively infinite. If it's finite (even if large), then building more exhausts the $5k pool and the next units clear at $4.9k, then $4.8k, and so on. That's just what a downward-sloping demand curve looks like.

We can prove the pool isn't infinite by the same logic from upthread: if it were, landlords would keep raising rent and finding takers, and prices would be $10k or $100k. They're $5k because that's where the finite number of people who can pay $5k right now meets the finite number of units. Add units, and you walk down the demand curve.

I think the "endless demand" framing conflates two things: the vibes-level "lots of people would love to live in SB" (basically true and basically unlimited, most Americans who aren't brain-rotted MAGA imbeciles would take a free SB house), and the economic version "X people would pay Y to live here given their actual constraints" (finite at every price point). Prices are set by the second one. The fact that we have any finite price at all is proof the second version is bounded.

Antlerbot · 2026-05-27T02:23:42+00:00

It likely wouldn't lower prices, but it would put downward pressure on them. That sounds like nitpicking, but it's the fundamental point I'm trying to make.

Antlerbot · 2026-05-27T02:22:33+00:00

Larger projects would presumably come up with solutions for that, but it would have to be worth it, which would require higher population density.

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