••• Lots of people have been asking about the stoplights newly installed at the intersection of Coast Village Road and Hermosillo Road. They’re temporary, there for the duration of the Cabrillo/Highway 101 interchange reconstruction. The northbound offramp at Cabrillo closes in two weeks, at which point more people will be getting off at Hermosillo.
••• Blue Man Group is at the Granada Theatre on May 5 and 6. I haven’t seen them in decades, and I’m sure it’s satisfying for all ages, but maybe especially for tweens.
••• Beck plays the Santa Barbara Bowl on September 22. The name of the tour (and his new single) is “Ride Lonesome,” which implies a more introspective direction along the lines of his Sea Change album. I may hold out for whenever he decides to play the brilliant Midnite Vultures in its entirety.
••• The Linden Square outpost of The Shopkeepers appears to have closed, too.
••• Kismet’s Upper Village shop has been folded into Kismet Kids in Summerland, and the space will become an outpost of Asher Market.
••• The 101 Garden Street hotel project—”250 rooms (130 ‘extended stay’ rooms; 120 ‘select service’ rooms)”—at the edge of the Funk Zone goes back before the Historic Landmarks Commission today with some changes, but the bigger news is that according to the plans, the hotels will be branded as Residence Inn and AC Hotels, both of which are Marriott brands.
••• No one identified last week’s Where in Santa Barbara…?, so here’s the answer: it’s on the side of Montesano Market & Deli on Coast Village Road.
••• Radius Commercial Real Estate’s Q1 report had a bunch of interesting nuggets. First, the EoS Fitness gym coming to the former 24 Hour Fitness space at 820 State Street, will include an entrance on State Street. Second, S&J Fitness—possibly related to S&J Fitness and Kickboxing in Cerritos—is taking The Base‘s space at 116 Anacapa Street in the Funk Zone. (The Base is moving to 122 Gray Avenue on May 1.) Third, the 13,700-square-foot former CVS at 1109 State Street (Figueroa/Anapamu) is going to be occupied by A Royal Suite Home Furnishings, a chain that has stores in Santa Clarita and Oxnard. While there’s an argument to be made that any tenant is better than an empty storefront, and big retail spaces face immense challenges these days, I’m not sure this counts as a win for that block, one of the better ones on the promenade (home to La Arcada, the San Marcos Building, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Satellite, Dune, and more). State Street needs to be careful about sliding downmarket; it’s hard to go back up. Which leads to the fourth nugget from Radius’s report: “Approximately 12 resale-oriented retailers—variously categorized as vintage, consignment, thrift, or secondhand—now operate along State Street. These tenants typically do not meet traditional ‘high-credit’ standards and often transact on shorter-term leases at lower rental rates, which can impact property valuations under conventional underwriting metrics.”
················
Sign up for the Siteline email newsletter and you’ll never miss a post.
Sea Change was a very good album and anything in that direction is welcome.
State Street is just returning to its original form. Before the Verizon lease deal that changed the landscape of State, it was just a street filled with mostly resale shops and thrift stores. If landlords might worry about their property valuations they might need to look within and see the impact of their own hand on their demise.
The downmarket trend of Santa Barbara has been happening for decades. The city sold its soul to tourism years ago and the results are a steady decline in quality and value. When you appeal to the lowest common denominator, you end up with the lowest common denominators.
Meanwhile, CVR is thriving as retail and restaurants want to be where the money and the vibes live (yes I know CVR is technically under the rule of SB, but is it really?). Regardless of its overlords, the market responded accordingly.
The reality is the demographics of the avg SB resident does not warrant an investment in high end anything. Santa Barbara is a city full of low income immigrants, low income students and multi generational mediocrity. The money is in the peripheral, not downtown and the market has responded to this fact.
The only way out of this mess is to grow the incomes and job base downtown by offering businesses an opportunity to build here. Rising tides lift all boats! But there is nothing more antithetical to the people who run SB than economic growth via business and good old fashioned innovation. Instead, they want to give away more and more while taking in less and less. Your money, your town, their feelings…
The pathway is to foster startups and provide professional entities a foothold. Offer them free rent, offer them tax incentives, anything to start up and build something here. We need a path for the thousands of highly educated and capable graduates that our area produces every year to stay here. To grow a family here. To build a community. To earn a living here. To be able to afford to live here!
But instead of seeding the future, building long term viability, the city panders to tourism and its low skilled low wage service jobs and promotes reduction in services, tax increases and fee adjustments as a path!
So, yes, State St will continue to slide downmarket as 99c stores, funny socks and t-shirts, vintage clothing and cheap beer/ wine are what the market actually supports. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding.
Thanks for this comment. It’s insightful, articulate, and presents a compelling argument. Who doesn’t hate cheap beer?
“Santa Barbara is a city full of low income immigrants, low income students and multi generational mediocrity. ”
This is unkind, inaccurate, and makes you sound incredibly elitist. It undercuts the entire point of your argument. Do you just cast your eyes in judgement every time you’re too lazy to make your own meal or go out and have any form of entertainment?
Also, who do you think is working all those restaurants and retail stores on your precious CVR? (Hint: immigrants, college kids, and locals)
Go touch grass.
“While there’s an argument to be made that any tenant is better than an empty storefront, and big retail spaces face immense challenges these days, I’m not sure this counts as a win for that block, one of the better ones on the promenade ”
National retailers, the only ones really capable of taking on such a large space, don’t want to open on a street closed to traffic, certainly not one in such limbo as ours. So this is what we get. Personal feelings on the promenade may vary, particularly those who love a leisurely bike ride down State without actually conducting meaningful commerce, but that’s how actual businesses are looking at State Street – which is supposed to be our “commercial” core.
Show me 5-10 retailers willing to open on state if the street was open and you’ll change my mind. Unfortunately no one can show that. The street being open wouldn’t change a thing.
Talk to retail brokers, they will tell you. Whether the retailers are right or wrong about it doesn’t matter, that’s predominantly their position. SB is a tough market as it is.
This problem isn’t unique to Santa Barbara, storefront retail is changing and evolving everywhere. We moved back to SB in 2010 and stores were closing down pretty rapidly even before Covid. We also spend time in the Bay Area and stuff is closing there. Coffee shops and restaurants still thriving, everything else not so much. Younger demographic has been shopping online for awhile and Covid taught everyone else how to buy online. You can hate Bezos, but Amazon has taken over in many parts of the country. You can get clothing, groceries, pharmacy items etc and have it all delivered to your door. CVR is thriving because of many restaurants and a few high end shops. State street especially lower state lost some of their party people to the funk zone which has been a pretty big success. And SB has always been a tourist town, I would argue there’s more good jobs now than in the past. When I graduated UCSB long long ago most of my friends left to get jobs in Bay Area, LA or back east. Lots more companies and opportunities now and availability of remote work in some companies has also helped bring more people (and pump up housing prices).
This logic ignores the reality that the 400 block is open to cars, yet it is unquestionably the worst block of state street.