It is extremely difficult to form a new city in California, or any other US State for that matter. The studies required to justify taking jurisdiction away from a county government really means taking it away from what is in essence state control, since county governments were originally set up under state jurisdictions, and controlled by state laws and regulations.
This is evidenced by the financial strings state and county governments hold over cities; mainly in terms of its planning and zoning regulations, but also the share of tax revenues to various local services, such water and sanitary districts.
The birth of a new city in the Goleta valley was a vision that took years to realize, and huge amount of patience and persistence to bring together a unique admixture of its citizens—from Mexican immigrants to hi tech engineers, to university-educated environmentalists, and Defense Department employees; from supporters that wanted more municipal improvements such as flood and highway improvements, to those that wanted it to remain a sleepy bedroom community serving the adjacent City of Santa Barbara.
Forming a brand new city was the most challenging example of community building I experienced in my life because it meant bringing together enough of its residents in a common vision of their community. Seasonal farmworkers that harvested large lemon and avocado groves lived side-by-side with University of California Santa Barbara students and their professors in the unincorporated valley.
Because of this diversity there were an almost equal number for and against the formation of a new city. But it finally happened on the fourth try—February 1, 2002. The high crime rate in Goleta’s Old Town—the historical center of the Goleta Valley since it was settled more than 100 years earlier—was documented in the Redevelopment District Agency study commissioned by Santa Barbara County. There were more bars than restaurants and it was home to several gangs. There were also serious environmental concerns, as high traffic totals were causing air pollution, and successive floods during the 1990s following an earlier drought required greater flood controls.
Just the fact that it became a city enabled Goleta to contract with the County Sheriff to provide a neighborhood police service accountable solely to Goleta residents. This resulted in Goleta being listed as one of the 50 safest American cities in 2017, eleven years after its formation, according to a survey by Safewise, a security firm.
The re-design of Old Town Goleta also seemed an ideal location to practice some of those precepts of True Urbanism, or New Urban Design, all labels attached to what is now a worldwide movement that sought to make cities more citizen friendly.
How hard could that be, though we didn’t realize the state’s Environmental Quality Report (CEQA) would require flood improvements before anything else was done. We didn’t realize in a word what an effort it would take, and continuing struggle it still is, to bring together so much diversity of opinion and conviction into a well-functioning and sustainable community that epitomized what pro-city residents wanted in a new city.
The first step was to organize a design conference to provide design and planning alternatives for the future—something county planners supported after three failed Goleta cityhood elections. It was obvious that without a community effort to create a town center with a unique identity that contrasted with neighboring Big Sister city Santa Barbara, Goleta’s cityhood might never succeed.
The American Institute of Architects was co-sponsoring eight simultaneous design charrettes across the country and in Hawaii at the time, in an attempt to create design outcomes using these new urban planning techniques. All were retreats that brought design professionals such as architects, designers, and urban planners together to envision and help to re-design a project area—such as a district or town center.
The Goleta Old Town design charrette, a French term for a gathering of designers and interested parties to create an innovative atmosphere in which a diverse group of stakeholders can collaborate to “generate visions for the future” to use Wikipedia’s description, was also hooked via Internet to the seven other design charrettes so we could share ideas and outcomes. All were weekend-long marathon sessions that began early and went late into each evening of those two days, creating a feverish intensity that only an assembly of very creative individuals can foment.
The idea of a design charrette was exciting in itself. It is a well-known architectural concept first adopted by students of Paris’s Ecole des Beaux Arts, Frances’s major design school, in the 1800s. They were used to cramming for exams at the last minute while riding in a charrette, or horse cart to the exams. So this was an exciting chance for local students, environmentalists, and some developers that wanted to participate in what Goleta might become for future generations.
These retreats were co-sponsored by the American Institute of Architects, or AIA, and included Honolulu and Charlottesville, Virginia, home of the Jefferson designed University of Virginia and Jefferson’s nearby Monticello home, of course. I remember Charlottesville was surrounded by a rusting industrial belt needing resuscitation that could benefit from mixed-use design concepts of the new urban planning, just as Old Town was surrounded by auto-dependent suburban malls and shopping centers with few pedestrian conveniences.
We were able to assemble 100 design professionals and civic activists such as myself. It was a vehicle to begin the process of envisioning, or re-visioning a future for Old Town and the Goleta valley community.
We basically locked ourselves into a large industrial building and broke into eight committees, each tasked to come up with a different design concept for that weekend. The eight results covered the gamut of ideas for Old Town, an area of no more than 20 city blocks and population of 5,000. The designs ranged from a totally pedestrian environment only accessible to public transportation with room for pedestrian-oriented businesses and entertainment to draw them out of their autos, to one that permitted automobile access, (which local small businesses badly wanted to sustain their small businesses), but with more off street parking and lots of green landscaping.
Margaret Connell, a recent Goleta city council member who supported the Old Town revitalization plan and wanted Old Town to be part of a new city center, voiced some of her concerns because much of the work has remained undone since cityhood: “…So Goleta Old Town feels more embedded than the more recent housing and worksites, and it also suffers from some disadvantages of being “old.” It lacks sidewalks through much of the older residential areas, though the city is taking steps to remedy this. There are many children who live here, but there are very few parks — a pocket park on Nectarine, a larger one on Armitos Avenue, and a four-acre, active-recreation park on Kellogg Street, which is still being developed,” said former council woman Connell.
The major environmental concerns were a lack of alternative transportation (such as busses and bike lanes) to manage traffic flow during peak rush hour that could still service Old Town residents and businesses. Flooding was also a major concern, in spite of periodic droughts, since Santa Barbara and the south coast had suffered several devastating floods during the 1990’s that ended a prior eight-year drought.
The flood that broke the 1993 drought was called the March miracle because 11 inches of rain fell that month, even closing the Santa Barbara Municipal Airport for several days that had been formed from a saltwater estuary.
Old Town’s main street was flooded as well one night with at least a foot of water from a torrential rainfall that overflowed the two creeks bracketing Old Town’s boundaries. That is why flood control improvements, such as an enlarged and channelized creek bed, were required in the CEQA (California Environmental Quality Act) report as the first step in any redevelopment effort.
The droughts and consequential flooding also made everyone aware of the limited water supplies in California, even though some areas that year had experienced the greatest rainfall totals since the 1880s.
This is why the work of the new city of Goleta has just begun. The community plan balances environmental with livable concerns, but there was a casualty of the 2007-2009 Great Recession that caused an unexpected disruption of Goleta’s future infrastructure upgrades; especially in Old Town, which is adjacent to Santa Barbara’s municipal airport with its own accessibility problems.
California, to solve its budget problems from the Great Recession, dissolved all 404 Redevelopment District Agencies in 2011, which removed the tax financing that Old Town was counting on to fix some of those transportation problems and relieve the traffic congestion. That has put many of the planned improvements on hold until alternative financing is found.
So has Goleta become a more livable city? Its residents think so, though affordable housing will always be a problem. Local Historian Walker Thompkins’ description of the Goleta valley as a pastoral paradise is immortalized in his book, Goleta, the Good Land that is still available on Amazon’s website.
The livable cities movement, which is what it has become as cities now compete to attract the best and the brightest people and best jobs, has evolved into a ranking contest. The annual rankings of the most livable cities are published by several well-known lifestyle publications and organizations, including the AARP Livability Index, Monocle‘s “Most Liveable Cities Index”, the Economist Intelligence Unit‘s “Global Liveability Ranking”, and “Mercer Quality of Living Survey”.
Unfortunately, not a single US city on the Economist’s list makes the top 10 in a study of the world’s 140 major cities. Melbourne, Australia topped it in 2016, with Perth and Adelaide Australia also in the top ten. Honolulu, Hawaii is the only American city mentioned at all. It makes the top ten list of most improved cities over the past 5 years.
Is their bias showing? A ranking released by the Economist Intelligence Unit, attempts to quantify the world’s most “livable” cities—that is, which locations around the world provide the best or the worst living conditions. The index, measured out of 100, considers 30 factors related to safety, health care, educational resources, infrastructure and the environment to calculate scores for 140 cities.
“Those that score best tend to be mid-sized cities in wealthier countries,” said the Economist survey. “Melbourne tops the list for the sixth year in a row, and six of the top ten cities are in Australia or Canada. But Sydney, Australia’s largest city, drops out of the top ten due to fears over terrorism.”
So the safety of its residents and the threat of violence and terrorism seems to have knocked American cities off the list, and put Australia at the top of most livable cities rankings. How do we solve the increasing dangers from violent extremism and domestic violence that make so many American and European cities unsafe?
Goleta Old Town’s revitalization is still a work in progress, in other words. Goleta became a city in 2002, but is still wrestling with the idea of putting a new City Hall in Old Town rather than continue to rent space in an industrial complex farther to the west in the midst of malls and office complexes. It remains to be seen just what the new city of Goleta will look like 15 years after its formation, and whether it is able to embody the livable planning principles we envisioned in the design charrette.
And what are other institutions that might bring us more peace and freedom in the world with its droughts, mass migrations, inequality and civil unrest in so many countries? How can we nurture more viable communities and neighborhoods? There are modern social movements and community development tools that can bring this about. We will describe some of them in the next chapters.
Harlan Green © 2019
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