Jerry Roberts
By Jerry Roberts of Newsmakers
Not content with destroying local control over land use planning throughout the rest of California. San Francisco state Senator Scott Wiener now proposes to declare open season for development of the state’s iconic coastline.
“This is a huge issue for the coastal commission,” said Santa Barbara city councilmember Meagan Harmon, who also represents the Central Coast on the California Coastal Commission.
“We certainly understand the need for housing, particularly affordable housing, in the coastal zone,” Harmon said, on this week’s edition of Newsmakers TV. “But it’s got to be done in a way that protects that resource that’s so precious to all of us, that thing that makes California Caliofornia, our precious coast.”
Wiener, Twit-S.F., is a native of (checks notes) New Jersey, who has spent his last several years in office doing everything in his power to transform the Golden State into the fetid landscape he doubtless remembers fondly from his youth. Chief Server of the glut of build-baby-build housing legislation that’s been shoved down the throat of local government in recent years, Wiener has a nice racket going, posturing as the tribune of “progressive” housing policy with one hand while raking in tens of thousands in real estate industry campaign contributions with the other.
Now comes his Senate Bill 423 which, among other wonderful things, would allow “by right” housing development along California’s iconic 800 miles of coastline, bypassing local and state planning processes, not to mention public input, if a project includes a certain percentage of so-called “affordable housing.”
As every school child knows, state voters in 1972, motivated by the Santa Barbara oil spill and appropriately anxious that development could cut off public access to the ocean, approved Prop. 20, the California Conservation Initiative (aka “Save Our Coast”), which created the California Coastal Commission to tend to the preservation and protection of the coast.
The Commission implements the 1976 California Coastal Act, which gave the agency permanent authority to adjudicate and oversee land use decisions on the coast. The Commission has voted unanimously to oppose Wiener’s bill, which already has passed the state Senate and is working its way to the Assembly floor.
Harmon, one of the loudest advocates for building more affordable housing in Santa Barbara, said she, along with her colleagues on the Commission, are “very pro-housing,” but that the case-by-case, painstaking approach the agency takes towards proposed coastal housing developments would be lost if the Wiener bill becomes law. (Also: more work for lawyers).
“The California Coastal Commission was put into the state Constitution by the voters and it’s not something we can, or should, railroad in this way,” she said. “The voters tasked the commission (to decide on coastal developments) and we’re fighting hard to do that.”
District 6 council representative Harmon also discussed several key city issues with Josh Molina and the genial host, including the simmering controversy over density and height limits on downtown housing projects, as well as the latest developments in Whither State Street?, the long-running civic soap opera now in its eighth decade, at least.
Plus, inquiring minds want to know: exactly when did Meagan Harmon arrive in Santa Barbara anyway?
All this and more, right here, right now on Newsmakers TV.
JR
You can watch our conversation with Megan via YouTube below, or by clicking through this link. The podcast version is here. TVSB, Cox Cable Channel 17, airs the program weeknights at 8 p.m. and at 9 a.m. on the weekend. KCSB, 91.9 FM, broadcasts the show at 5:30 on Mondays.
I bet SB has 4 to 6 story apartment buildings all over the east and west side within 20 years. The quaint one story bungalows just cannot accommodate enough. Miami, anyone!??
Thousands of homes that are built on California’s coastal hillsides will eventually have views either from the ocean out or, as several homeowners in Rolling Hills Estates are finding out, their homes will have views of the hillside canyons from the bottom up. The sliding of homes down our hillsides will continue and only get worse. Tens of thousands of California’s expensive home are built on ocean cliffs which are being scoured by the ocean from below during every moment of every day. The same is true about canyon homes that are built on porus unstable ground.
And Scott Wiener doesn’t care about any of it. Not about public safety, not about environmental damage, not about sensible planning and not about low income housing. He is bought and paid for by tech industry billionaires, developers and the real estate industry. His vision is of a California with massive apartment buildings full of market rate housing run by corporate landlords.
We can’t allow the poor rabble to live so close to the beach! The first thousand yards is reserved for the elite. The coastal commission chokes off all development and ensures the few new projects that are allowed maintain the exclusionary property values and rents the elites rely on to keep the undesirables out. Here’s a great article on how rich liberals rely on exclusionary zoning to keep the unwanted from living in their neighborhoods.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/how-rich-blue-suburbs-keep-the-poor-away/ar-AA1eenwm
Well said, Chip. The beautiful people shouldn’t have to ever live near the riff raff except perhaps for an occasional colorful homeless character or two that we can pretend to care about so we can revel in how generous we are. But they better not annoy us when we’re not feeling generous.
LOL, amazing ignorance, see my comment above.
Chip, not surprising in the least that your assertion about how the CCC operates is entirely false.
No one and I mean no one, is going to pony up the money necessary to acquire coastal property for the purposes of building low income housing. This is a function of something right wingers LOOOOOOVE to talk about–supply and demand and capitalism.
It’s literally laughable how wrong you are about the CCC. In fact, CCC spends most of their time insuring that wealthy people( you know the ones who can afford the land) are not able to build what they want in the Coastal Zone. And they spend significant time and energy creating and maintaining access for the poor rabble to enjoy our coast.
Or maybe would at least like to see the ocean when they bike or drive by? Check out Malibu and other areas where building adjacent to the beach was permitted. Would it be any different if the close-up properties were low-/no- income housing? Object to multiple income/net worth all you want, but don’t try to make the 2 issues into one.
With sea rise and climate change building on the coast seems like a very bad idea. Wiener cares about Wiener not California.
Newsom and his Wiener are blowing it with this buildout policy. Coastal California = “affordable housing”?? You’re kidding right?
Eventually it comes down to a question of “do you want to have restaurants and other service industries?” Because the people who work in those places are having to commute from further and further away. Eventually we either have to give those things up, invent Star Trek transporter technology, or allow for new housing to be built.