Anonymous
November 27, 2018, 8:48 am
4.6k Views
11 Comments
Source: City of Santa Barbara
A series of workshops brought together entrepreneurs, brokers, and property owners to find vacant space downtown.
A new sign template was also developed to help start-up businesses open their doors quickly and generate foot traffic downtown.
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Ugh. You don’t open a store to create demand. You open a store to fulfill a demand. The city needs to populate State St with people who will shop State St – ie Tourists. Legalize STRs within six blocks of State, from the ocean to Mission. Solved.
You and SANTABARBARAOBSERVER are right on! The city is the number one impediment to new business opening on State Street. Our elected “leaders” keep spewing business friendly rhetoric but that doesn’t trickle down to their staff who throw up as much red tape and regulatory hurdles as possible, all the while they have the discretion to act otherwise. Maybe it’s to create more work for themselves and justify their bloated staffs, just a guess, but let’s hire more consultants anyway…
That picture isn’t exactly accurate either. There is already a women’s boutique open in one, the
other is a poke / ice cream restaurant whose ready to open but the owner said the city won’t let him hook up his fire sprinkler system to the water main until January, business friendly indeed!
The city is a business. It makes money by making requirements. The more requirements, the more staff to manage those requirements, the more permits needed, the more money made. All done “for the good of the people.” Ahahhahahahahaha
Great idea. Will the landlords lower rents to make this possible?
Here’s an idea: How about the city reduces 33% of its staff and gives them a “template” for opening up their own business on State St. That way we can save millions a year in superfluous payroll expenses while increasing the sales tax coffers. All while treating the bureaucratic noodle-brains to a taste of what life is like on the other side of the counter. A win win! Or we can spend a few million on consultants that inform us to the fact that the city’s employees are not doing the very job their hired to do and therefore we need to hire more of them to make up for their disparity…
The entire mission accomplished city Environmental Services crew could be cut loose and open a fair trade coffee shop in this space. There is an easy one million dollar in city staff compensation saved.
Maybe a fish processing business or a meat packing plant would work downtown. It would definitely create jobs, increase walk-in traffic by the homeless, give new experiences to tourists, and add the special smells that people talk about forever. Make Santa Barbara Great Again!
absolutely not. remember Esaus? he was forced out when he was on State street…that’s almost 18 years ago. the place is still vacant. they use the vacancies as a tax right off and the city allows them to do so….this is why the landlords don’t care if they are vacant or not. very very few businesses can afford this ridiculously high rent
The homeless and the aggressive panhandlers OWN downtown. Tourists will go there ONCE and never return. Locals know to stay away. Nothing will succeed until that problem is fixed, and our “leaders” don’t have the backbone to fix the problem.
That’s not the way tax write offs work SMH. People are quick to blame the landlord but don’t know a thing about what it takes to manage retail buildings like these.
About 18 vagrants hanging our around the Art Museum today, ready to pounce on any new downtown shoppers. So all the good ideas downtown has to bring people back are sabotaged by this same chronic group of abusers. All establishing their stakes on city sidewalks so they can be first in line for the rolling tiny houses? Every feel-good attempt by our city council is always countered by this same group of provocateurs who have resisted every and all attempt to change their behavior. Drying up the handouts down town only moved their business operations out into the rest of the city. Free housing will now make their downtown daytime activities permanent. Just look what happened to Fresno.