Downtown Santa Barbara is one of those places people carry with them long after they’ve left.
The architecture, the people, and the vibe come together to create something that feels both deeply local and genuinely world-class. At its best, State Street stands among the country’s premier downtowns.
After watching the State Street Master Plan presentation recently, that feeling was very much alive again. There was real vision, real commitment, and something that has been in short supply for a while—genuine excitement about what this street can become.
That progress is worth recognizing, not just from City staff, but from the people who have stayed committed to State Street through some very difficult years. Property owners who held on when conditions were uncertain. Business owners who kept their doors open through a pandemic, changing street conditions, and a challenging market. And the renewed energy of the Downtown Santa Barbara Improvement Association, which represents exactly the kind of private-sector leadership this moment needs.
It also felt familiar.
Back in 2019, I stood before the City Council as executive director of Downtown Santa Barbara and made a version of this same argument. The city and community had done real work (surveys, charrettes, consultant studies, working groups), and a roadmap began to take shape.
I asked the Council that day to build on it by establishing a director-level Economic Development position, streamlining permitting, and treating downtown Santa Barbara as the economic engine it is. Some of that work moved forward, but the economic track never fully came together. That’s the gap this moment calls us to close.
A core challenge is that what State Street is facing is not just a design or access issue. It’s an economic one. Solving it requires two distinct functions to run in parallel. The first is what the City is currently completing: planning and designing what State Street will look like in the future. That work matters enormously, and last night’s presentation showed how far it has come. The second is taking immediate economic action to influence what actually happens on State Street over the next 2 to 20 months.
Design sets the stage, but it doesn’t sign the leases.
Whether a business can afford to open, operate, and survive depends on lease structures, build-out costs, financing conditions, and the simple math of whether a concept can pencil in one of the state’s most expensive markets. Both tracks are necessary. Right now, only one is fully engaged.
So what does economic action actually look like? Not another consultant. Not another study. Not another working group. Economic action is concrete action the City Council could authorize right now to produce a visible effect within months.
The City could launch a targeted initiative focused on the most critical vacant stretches of State Street, using tools to help viable deals close. These could include limited tenant improvement support, lease gap assistance, or shared-risk structures that bridge the gap between a space’s cost and what a real business can reasonably afford. This isn’t about indefinitely subsidizing tenants; it’s about breaking the logjam.
The City could also establish a small, well-structured loan or grant program for local businesses seeking to open or expand downtown. In a market where the numbers often don’t work on their own, modest, strategic public investment can be the difference between a concept stalling and a storefront opening.
Other California cities of our size do this routinely. In my 2019 study of 20 comparable cities, every city had dedicated economic development staff actively incentivizing business development, marketing the downtown, and helping businesses navigate the permitting process. Santa Barbara was the outlier then. The Master Plan is an opportunity to ensure we aren’t still the outlier when the next study is conducted.
Here’s one more idea the Council could act on immediately, at essentially no cost: direct city staff to build and maintain a publicly accessible map of ground-floor commercial vacancies on State Street, with basic information about each space, regularly updated and visible to anyone.
Long Beach launched a similar program that does several things at once. It gives prospective tenants and brokers a single place to see what’s available, and it gives the Downtown Santa Barbara Improvement Association a real recruitment tool. It also creates accountability with no budget required, just a directive to staff.
None of this happens without someone being accountable for making it happen. Restoring dedicated economic development capacity, including a position focused on business recruitment and attraction and on working across departments to keep viable projects moving, would be a significant step forward. That ask is even more urgent today than it was in 2019. Without that kind of dedicated role, even strong projects can get diffused across departments and timelines. Economic development requires a singular focus that other staff simply can’t provide alongside their other responsibilities.
The timing couldn’t be better, and that’s the thing worth sitting with right now. A new start to the Downtown Santa Barbara Master Plan that gives the street a compelling long-term identity, a newly energized Downtown Santa Barbara Improvement Association, property and business owners working together, and a City Council and staff that are showing up for the City’s main economic driver. That combination doesn’t come together every day.
The economic actions I’m describing aren’t in competition with the Master Plan; they’re what make the Master Plan real. A more active, more fully leased downtown generates more sales tax revenue, more private investment confidence, and more of the momentum a long-term vision actually needs to succeed. The long-term and the short-term are of equal priority at different timescales, and they need each other.
The hard work of building consensus around State Street’s future is (nearly) done. What’s left is the harder work of actually building it, not just in pavement and stone and trees, but in open storefronts, signed leases, and businesses that can actually survive here.
We said in 2019 that the time for bold action was now. It still is. What that means now is moving forward on both tracks at once – shaping the physical space of State Street, and taking the economic actions required to make it more vibrant and functional today.
