(Cont’d Building Community at Home) Old Town, with its own past, could give Goleta Valley residents a sense of their own history and separate community identity. It even had a Community Center that hosted many community activities. The Community Planning Director at that time, Dan Gira, also thought Goleta should become a city able to determine its future as part of the County’s General Development Plan update.
The update was required by the state of California to accommodate the changes necessitated by a growing population. I was one of many moving to this beautiful area of the South Coast with its unique climate sheltered by east-west mountains and south facing beaches. Santa Barbara and the South Coast has always been a beautiful and very desirable place to live, and the people kept coming.
The County would apply to the state of California for the formation of a Goleta Old Town Redevelopment District, which would allow some tax monies to be withheld for use in Old Town to upgrade its housing and infrastructure. While I loved the beautiful outdoors and the nature that surrounded us, more housing was needed in Old Town. Many Mexican agricultural workers—mostly undocumented—were living in Old Town because of its cheap rents, but landlords were taking advantage by housing ten to twenty of them in a single dilapidated housing unit.
I had to raise $50,000 in the community: 50 percent of the expense the County would incur to do the studies necessary to classify Goleta Old Town as a redevelopment district. Dan Gira and I agreed the County would chip in its 50 percent in the form of time and labor, and whatever was needed for the feasibility study that would determine if Goleta Old Town fulfilled the state requirements for a redevelopment district.
The study would include a report on degraded infrastructure, such as inadequate surface transportation, and the number of bars and other “nonproductive” businesses in Old Town. The point was to determine the extent of blight, or physical deterioration, of the Old Town community, and a cost estimate for fixing those problems.
There was plenty of blight. Goleta’s Old Town had become run down in the 1980s as competing malls were built elsewhere to accommodate the new auto-dependent subdivisions built to hold the growing population. Bars had proliferated as businesses left Old Town. A fire partially destroyed a ten-unit apartment building. A Santa Barbara News-Press reporter covering the fire reported that residents thought the popping noise from breaking windows sounded like gunfire from gang warfare.
We raised $50,000, the County Planning Department hired a consultant to write the feasibility study, and it was approved within a year.
Old Town’s Revival
Thoughts of forming a new city of Goleta were now revived, and the actual planning of Old Town’s future began. There had been several unsuccessful efforts to form a city since the 1970s. The Goleta Old Town Revitalization Committee, a mix of local officials and residents that wanted Old Town’s infrastructure and services upgraded, was now created, and I was appointed its chairman. Hearings were held in Old Town’s Community Center so county planners could learn what Goleta’s residents wanted for a future town center. We were following the precepts of community organizing in bringing citizens together to solve some of the problems afflicting such a diverse community.
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