History of Santa Barbara, California

Many of the soldiers who came to build and garrison the Presidio had brought their families with them, and after their terms of service ended settled in Santa Barbara. They built their adobes near the Presidio, arranged haphazardly; a Boston journalist described the scatter of these buildings "as though fired from a blunderbuss."[11] Most of Santa Barbara's old families are descended from these early settlers, and many of their names linger in the street and place names, such as Cota, De la Guerra, Gutierriez, Carrillo, and Ortega.^[12] Among these early settlers was José Francisco Ortega, who was an important figure in the Portola expedition and became the recipient of the only Spanish-era land grant in Santa Barbara County, Rancho Nuestra Señora del Refugio, in 1794. This rancho would be the namesake for modern Refugio State Beach, and Ortega would be remembered as the capitán (captain) in the name of El Capitán State Beach on the Gaviota Coast

In 1793, Captain George Vancouver, the British explorer who was circumnavigating the globe on the Vancouver Expedition, anchored HMS Discovery off West Beach and received permission for his seacook to chop stovewood from the Mesa oak groves, and refill his water tanks from a seep at the base of the Mesa bluffs near Pershing Park.^[13]

Building the Mission itself continued throughout the rest of the century, along with the work of converting the Indians to Christianity, a task which proved difficult: according to the Mission registers, by 1805, only 185 of the more than 500 Indians in Santa Barbara had been baptized. The burial register shows that 3,997 Indians died between 1787 and 1841, the majority from diseases such as smallpox, to which the natives had no natural immunity. By 1803 the Mission's chapel was finished, and by 1807 a complete village for the Indians had been completed, largely by their own labor. The site of this village is on the Mission grounds along modern-day Constance Street.

The Spaniards also built a chapel to the west of the Mission, in an effort to Christianize a group of Indians that lived in the Cieneguitas (swamps) area between Modoc Road and the El Sueno tract who refused to be moved to the Mission compound. Known as the Cieneguitas chapel, it took the form of an adobe asistencia complete with a tile roof and two bells donated by the King of Spain, and stood from 1803 until the 1890s on a ridge opposite Cuna Drive at what is now 4308 Modoc Road, at the northern edge of Hope Ranch. When the first adobe mission was wrecked by the 1812 earthquake, this chapel was the only house of worship left to the friars.^[8]

On December 21, 1812, one of the largest earthquakes in California history completely destroyed the first Mission along with most of Santa Barbara. With an estimated magnitude of 7.2, and a hypothesized epicenter near Santa Cruz Island, the quake also produced a tsunami which carried water all the way to modern-day Anapamu Street, and carried a ship a half-mile up Refugio Canyon.^[14][15] Following the devastating earthquake, the Mission padres decided to build a larger and more elaborate Mission complex, which is the one that survives to the present day. The Franciscans began a search for material in 1815, obtaining limestone from a cantera (quarry) at 1450 Cantera Avenue in present-day Hope Ranch, mixing it with seashells, and baking it in a brick calera (kiln), the ruins of which lie at the foot of the slope south of 1161 Las Palmas Drive.^[16] While the church was ready in 1820, the bell towers were not finished until 1833.

Bouchard raids

The most serious military threat to Santa Barbara during the Spanish period was not by a colonial power, but by Hippolyte Bouchard, a French privateer working for the Argentine government, which was, along with Mexico, attempting to throw off Spanish rule. Bouchard, who was given the task of destroying as many Spanish assets as possible, and in particular the ports in the Americas, possessed two well-armed frigates, which had sufficient armament and crews to destroy any lightly defended towns they encountered. He had done exactly that to Monterey, the capital of Alta California, shortly before coming to Santa Barbara.

Bouchard's raiders landed first at Refugio Canyon on December 5, 1818, where they pillaged and burned the ranch belonging to the Ortega family, killing cattle and slitting the throats of horses. However, after being alerted by messengers from Monterey, the Presidio dispatched a squadron of cavalry, who caught three stragglers from the ill-disciplined raiding party and dragged them back to Santa Barbara in chains. Bouchard sailed the remaining twenty miles (32 km) to Santa Barbara a few days later, anchoring off of present-day Milpas Street, and threatened to shell the town unless his men were returned to him. José de la Guerra y Noriega, the comandante of the Presidio, granted his request, but Bouchard did not realize that he had been tricked. The town was not as heavily defended as it had seemed to be; the hundreds of cavalrymen Bouchard had seen through his spyglass were but the same few dozen riding in large circles, stopping and changing costumes each time they passed behind a patch of heavy brush. Although Bouchard had recently destroyed Monterey, he departed without attacking the town.^[17]

When Santa Barbara faced Bouchard's attack, the mission friars, on orders from Governor Pablo Vicente de Solá, used San Marcos Pass as an escape hatch through which they sent the church treasures and evacuated the pueblo's women and children to the asylum of Mission Santa Inés in present-day Solvang.^[18]

The incident frightened De la Guerra so much that he petitioned the viceroy to rush military reinforcements to bolster the defense of Santa Barbara. The so-called "Mazatlan Volunteers", 45 calvalrymen led by a man named Narciso Fabrigat, were assigned to De la Guerra's garrison. Fabrigat became a civilian when Mexico overthrew Spanish rule in 1822, and in 1843, he was awarded the 3,232 acres of Rancho La Calera by the Mexican governor Manuel Micheltorena.^[19] When the street grid was created, Voluntario Street was named after his group of volunteers.^[20]

A more lasting effect of Bouchard's California raid was the arrival of Joseph John Chapman, an American sailor who had been a member of Bouchard's crew but was left behind (either at Monterey or at Refugio) to become the first US-born permanent resident of Spanish California. Many years later, Chapman (who had married an Ortega daughter) also became the first US-born permanent resident of Santa Barbara.

Mexican period

Indian rebellion

In 1822 the Spanish rule ended and their flag came down forever, with their loss in the

During the Mexican period, civilian government replaced military and mission control for the first time. An alcalde (roughly equivalent to a "strong" mayor) was appointed, supplemented by other civilian officials. The Mexican government opened Alta California to trade with the United States, Great Britain and other foreign countries, and exports became important to the local economy. Principal export commodities were tallow and hides, both of which were carried by California clippers to Boston to the candle- and shoe-making factories in New England, in return for goods purchased by the locals. One of the most famous English-language descriptions of Santa Barbara from this period is by Richard Henry Dana Jr., who wrote of the town as a desolate place, at the ends of the earth, in Two Years Before the Mast:

...the large bay without a vessel in it; the surf roaring and rolling in upon the beach; the white mission; the dark town and the high, treeless mountains ... We lay at a distance of three miles (4.8 km) from the beach, and the town was nearly a mile farther; so that we saw little or nothing of it. Occasionally we landed a few goods, which were taken away by the Indians in large, clumsy ox-carts, with the yoke on the ox's neck instead of under it, and with small solid wheels. A few hides were brought down, which we carried off in the California style.

By 1833 the process of

Cattle ranching rapidly expanded, becoming the predominant land use; horsemanship and cattle ownership became the symbols of status, and the society developed quasi-feudal characteristics, in which the largest ranches were almost entirely self-sufficient. The Chumash who previously had served the padres in the Mission system became laborers on the ranches, occupying the lowest rung of the social ladder, with the oldest established families – the Ortegas, De la Guerras, and others – at the top. During this period the town of Santa Barbara grew into a modest, and informally organized collection of structures around the central Presidio. A few of these buildings – such as the Covarrubias Adobe, on the grounds of the Santa Barbara Historical Society on Santa Barbara Street, which was briefly the location of the capitol of California during the Mexican War – survive to the present day. By the mid-1840s the Mexican period, the population of Santa Barbara had reached approximately 2,500.^[24][25]

Mexican–American War

The end of the Mexican period came quickly for Santa Barbara, but without bloodshed, during the United States' conquest of California in the Mexican–American War, which had broken out in May 1846 over the annexation of Texas. In August, Commodore Robert F. Stockton anchored a warship in Santa Barbara harbor and deployed a contingent of ten Marines to occupy the town. They proceeded to the Presidio where they ran the Stars and Stripes over the city for the first time; not long afterwards, seeing the town was peaceful, they left, being replaced later by ten cavalrymen from John C. Frémont's army. However, a contingent of a hundred Mexican cavalrymen sent by General José María Flores came and chased them out. The outnumbered cavalrymen, rather than surrender, fled on foot up into Mission Canyon, and fortified a rocky ridge below La Cumbre Peak, resisting the calls to surrender by their pursuers. When the Mexican force set fire to the chaparral, the Americans clambered over the mountain ridge overnight, escaping north and eventually reaching Monterey, where they joined forces again with Frémont.

The culminating event of the Mexican–American War for Santa Barbara was Frémont's return, over the surprise route of San Marcos Pass, which at the time was little more than a trail. On the night of December 24, 1846, during a torrential rainstorm, he led his California Battalion over the mountains. In spite of losing many of his horses, mules, and cannon to the treacherous and muddy slopes – and not a one to enemy fire – he reached the foothills on the other side in the vicinity of present-day Tucker's Grove, spent the next several days regrouping, making camp along Mission Creek between Anapamu and Canon Perdido Streets,^[13] and then marched into Santa Barbara to capture the Presidio. He encountered no resistance: all men interested in fighting had left for Los Angeles to join the forces headed by Flores and Andrés Pico which had assembled to defend that city. On January 3 Frémont headed south, skirting the cliffs of the Rincon at low tide (no road existed then), arriving in Los Angeles ten days later. The Treaty of Cahuenga, signed on January 13, 1847, ended the war in California. After the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed a year later, Santa Barbara formally became part of the United States.

U.S. annexation; Gold Rush; Haley; Civil War

Gold rush settlers, incorporation, street grid, and newspaper

Change came quickly after the end of the war. Gold was found at Sutter's Mill in the Sierra foothills, and hordes of gold-seekers flooded into California from the eastern United States and other places to become rich. Few did, but Santa Barbara began to attract settlers as newcomers discovered the place's charms, including that almost anything planted would grow there. In 1850, California became the 31st state, and immediately after its establishment, both Santa Barbara City and County came into being. By 1850, the area was still sparsely populated, with the census showing only 1,185 people for the entire county, but that number doubled in ten years.^[26]

Some of the changes that occurred involved administration, communications, construction, urban layout, and transportation. On April 9, 1850, Santa Barbara incorporated as a city and formed an official town council.^[27] The appearance of the town began to change as well. Settlers from the east wanted dwellings made from wood rather than the sensible adobe built by the Spanish and Mexican residents; to build them, they needed to import wood from distant Oregon, as the local oak trees were not suitable for lumber. This was one of several pressures that resulted in the development of the port.^[28]

Another consequence of the American takeover was the creation of the street grid, which replaced the previous haphazard jumble of dwellings and irregular paths. Its execution, the disastrously bungled survey of 1851 by Salisbury Haley, is a notorious event in local history. Haley's survey chains were broken in places and held together with oxhide, a material that expanded on damp mornings and contracted in the afternoon sun; since his chains varied in length depending on the time of day he used them, most of his measurements were off, accumulating errors of as much as 45 feet (13.7 m) out of true by the time he had crossed the city. Haley had been ordered to create neat square city blocks exactly 450 feet (137 m) on a side: a subsequent corrective survey established that he had created blocks ranging from 450 to 464 feet (137 to 141 m) on a side.^[29] The lot misalignments and street grid problems caused by Haley persist to the present day. Kinks in Mission Street at De La Vina and De La Guerra at Santa Barbara Street are two of the awkward places well known to city commuters, which resulted from Haley's unfortunate measurements. In addition, Haley decided to lay out the street grid at an angle of approximately 48 degrees from north, with State Street approximately midway between the Mesa and the Riviera, paralleling both hills, an orientation that confuses both residents and visitors.^[30] Downtown's Haley Street, named after him, is ironically one of the streets that did not need a dog-leg to compensate for his variable-length chain.

Another change that accompanied the transformation of Santa Barbara from a small village to a significant town was the founding of the first newspaper, the Santa Barbara Gazette, in 1855.^[31] The newspaper was half in English and half in Spanish since the population, not all of whom were bilingual, was split between the two languages. English gradually supplanted Spanish as the language of daily life. Although minutes of the newly formed City Council were kept in English by 1852, Spanish remained the language used for public records until 1870.^[32]

Lawlessness, high temperature, and drought

The 1850s was a tumultuous and violent period. Life in the town was disrupted by rowdy Americans recently returned from the gold camps in the Sierra foothills, and gangs of toughs and highwaymen. Some of these lawless newcomers targeted the local Spanish population, causing violent racial incidents including

The town continued to grow, and slowly ended its isolation after the American Civil War. The war itself had little effect on Santa Barbara. One troop of cavalry organized to join the Union cause, but never saw action against Confederate forces; they served briefly and bloodlessly in Arizona versus Apache raids.^[39]

In 1869, the first coeducational preparatory school in southern California, Santa Barbara College, opened at State and Anapamu Streets.^[40] Improvements in the harbor included the building of Stearns Wharf in 1872, which increased the commercial capacity of the port; formerly, ships had to anchor several miles offshore, and load and unload their cargoes by rowing small boats to the shore.^[26] In that same year, Jose Lobero built an opera house (at the current site of the Lobero Theatre), State Street was paved, and gas lamps were lit downtown.^[40]

Writer

The isolation of Santa Barbara ended in stages. The building of Stearns Wharf allowed easy access by steamboat; in 1887, the railroad to Los Angeles was completed; and in 1901, the railroad was put through to San Francisco, forming the first version of the Coast Line. Santa Barbara was finally accessible both by land and sea. The day that the first train arrived from San Francisco was also the last day that the stagecoach bumped over dusty San Marcos Pass. These new connections made possible Santa Barbara's development into the resort destination it has remained ever since.^[43] Within the city, the first electric streetcar line opened in 1896, as the demand for transportation increased. By 1900, the population had reached 6,587, doubling in twenty years.

The discovery of oil changed the local economy as well as the landscape. While the black gooey stuff had long been known from natural oil seeps, and was used as a roof sealant during the building of the Mission, its value as a fuel did not become widely known until the late 19th century. In the 1890s, the large Summerland Oil Field was found and began to be developed. Summerland was the site of the world's first offshore oil well. While most of the oil had been pumped out by 1910, derricks remained on the beach in Summerland into the 1920s, and the field remained partially productive until 1940.^[44]

Hope Ranch

Meanwhile, further west, Thomas Robbins, who owned Rancho Las Positas y La Calera, died in 1860, and his widow was incapable of managing the 6,000 acre ranch. Seizing the opportunity, a man named Thomas W. Hope borrowed $8,000 from fellow Irishman Nicolas A. Den, owner of Rancho Dos Pueblos west of the Goleta Valley, and in 1861 purchased the entire Las Positas y Calera rancho from Senora Robbins. It was henceforth known as Hope Ranch. Hope had emigrated as a teenage boy from County Meath, Ireland, to become a cowboy in Texas at the time of the massacre at the Alamo. Moving westward by wagon train at age 29, Hope passed through Santa Barbara on his way to San Francisco, where he married Delia Fox. They operated a rooming house to get a stake with which they bought 2,000 sheep, which Hope drove down to Santa Barbara to graze on land leased from the Cieneguitas natives. He and Delia lived in an adobe believed to have been located near today's Vieja Valley school.^[45]

Wool prices skyrocketed during the Civil War, which made Hope a rich man. But he had his problems: stagecoaches bound for Gaviota Pass crossed his property daily, and farm wagons and other public traffic followed in the stage ruts, giving Hope reason to fear that continued public usage might lead to the condemnation of a right of way across his property. To prevent this, Hope stationed his Native American foreman, the giant Juan Justo, to barricade the road and turn all traffic out of Hope Ranch. In 1873, the county surveyor J. L. Barker began staking out a road along this path, and Hope clouted him over the skull with a fence rail, which cost him a $1,000 fine for assault and battery. Because of Justo's role in the controversy and because the Modoc War was raging in the lavabeds of the Oregon border that summer, locals began referring to the disputed thoroughfare as "the Modoc Road", giving it the name it bears to this day.^[46]

Later, Hope donated a 100-foot-wide highway from his ranch to the intersection of Turnpike Road, which evolved into modern Hollister Avenue as far west as Ellwood Canyon. Hope also deeded a pie-shaped piece of land, east of today's Juvenile Hall, for use as a Catholic cemetery. Most of the burials were transferred to Calvary Cemetery on Hope Avenue starting in 1912, but the Catholic Diocese of Los Angeles still owns Hope's donated land.^[47]

Thomas Hope never learned to read or write, but he lived affluently. The first flat racing course in California for trotters and pacers was laid out by him near Laguna Blanca, and the first hurdle racing in the State took place on a course encircling the lake. Here Hope raced Honest John, Harry Lazarus, and Selin, three of the most celebrated racehorses of their time. In 1875, Hope commissioned Santa Barbara's premier architect, Peter J. Barber, to build a $10,000 Victorian home at what is now 399 Nogal Drive. It is constructed of heart of redwood lumber, impossible to obtain today, and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978.^[47]

Hope died unexpectedly before the mansion was finished, on January 11, 1876, of a digestive disorder variously diagnosed as food poisoning or stomach cancer. He bequeathed the western half of his property to his widow; the eastern half, extending to Arroyo Burro Beach, was divided equally among Hope's surviving children: Rose, 16; John, 14; Teresa, 13; Anna, 10; Katie, 8; and James, 7. One clause in Hope's will stipulated that "should any of my daughters marry a worthless drunk or spendthrift, her part shall be held in trust by my beloved wife", a precaution that happily never had to be exercised.^[48]

A decade later, in 1887, the Southern Pacific Transportation Company built a railroad across Hope Ranch, entering from the flats now occupied by La Cumbre Junior High, veering south of Laguna Blanca to traverse the hillsides along what is now Vieja Drive, and exiting Hope Ranch toward More Mesa at Puente Drive. The line, part of Southern Pacific's Coast Route from Saugus to San Francisco, was surveyed by the engineer Walter Storey and was very crooked because a near-level grade had to be maintained. The railroad was realigned to bypass Hope Ranch in 1901 when the Coast Line was completed after a 14-year delay.^[48]

Also in 1887, Delia Hope sold her half of the ranch to the Pacific Improvement Company for $200,000 in gold. The company was founded in 1878 by the Southern Pacific's "Big Four"—Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins Jr., and Collis Potter Huntington—and its agents had long coveted Thomas Hope's land, envisioning it as the ideal site for a tourist resort.^[49] In the decades to follow, Hope Ranch would be intensively developed into its present form.

Early 20th century to World War II

Silent film industry and continued growth

Lon Chaney, Sr., Frank Borzage, and Victor Fleming worked at Flying "A" in their early careers. In 1911, before the Flying A had become the predominant studio in the area, there were 13 separate film companies working in Santa Barbara. The local film era ended in 1922, largely as a result of American's dissolution in 1921, and the remaining studios moved south, needing the resources of a larger city.^[52]

During this period, the city continued to grow, and at an even faster pace. By 1920, the population had reached 19,441, tripling in twenty years. The completion of the water tunnel under the mountains to newly completed Gibraltar Reservoir on the Santa Ynez River relieved the water shortages for a time. Also during the teens, a movement for city beautification commenced, led by Bernhard Hoffmann and later by Pearl Chase; their idea was to unify the city's architecture around a Spanish Colonial style, harmonious with the Mission and surviving pueblos. Many of the buildings from the late 19th century were, to their eyes and the eyes of many citizens, ugly, dilapidated, and no different from those in dozens of other run-down western towns. The Lobero Theatre, built on the site of the original Lobero Opera House in 1924, was an example of the architectural style they promoted, as was the first part of the Santa Barbara Natural History Museum.

1925 earthquake

Main article: 1925 Santa Barbara earthquake

The most destructive earthquake in Santa Barbara history, and the first destructive earthquake in California since the

Modified Mercalli scale was determined to be VIII for the coast from Goleta, through Santa Barbara, and to Carpinteria.^[54]

The low death toll (13 or 14) is credited to its early hour, 6:23 a.m., before most people were in the streets at risk from falling masonry. A fire which broke out after the earthquake destroyed more of the town, but was contained by a company of U.S. Marines who had arrived immediately to help maintain order. The earthquake, coinciding with the movement for architectural reform, is credited with giving the town its unified Spanish character; during the rebuilding, Hoffman and Chase pushed for new structures to be in a Spanish style. The most famous of these was the Spanish-Moorish style

Thomas Storke, who later changed his mind, saying that his former opposition was due to his belief that such compulsion infringed on the constitutional rights of property owners. Storke in 1932 created the city's main newspaper for the next 74 years, the News-Press, by winning a libel suit against his rival Reginald Fernald, and absorbing that publisher's Morning Press into his Daily News.^[56]

Oil fields and World War II

In 1928, oil was found at the Ellwood Oil Field on the other side of Santa Barbara, and development of this new and rich pool was fast: the peak production in 1930, only two years later, was 14.6 million barrels (2,320,000 m³) of oil. As at the Summerland Oil Field, derricks went along piers into the ocean, and the cliffs were dotted with storage tanks. Some of this development remains to the present day, with one active wastewater disposal well and several large storage tanks adjacent to the Ellwood Open Space.^[57][58] In 1929, as part of the wild burst of oil-drilling activity following on the Ellwood discovery, the Mesa Oil Field was discovered within the city limits. Centered just south of Cliff Drive near the intersection with Santa Cruz Boulevard, the field sprouted over 100 oil derricks in the early 1930s, occasioning the city's first anti-oil protest, but a local ordinance had already been enacted allowing such development. The field's failure in the late 1930s—it proved to be smaller than initially thought—allowed residential development to continue on the Mesa, although the field was not formally abandoned until 1976.^[59][60]

World War II brought sweeping change to the Santa Barbara area. The U.S. Marines took up residence on the high ground adjacent to Goleta Point, current location of the

Public Proclamation No. 1, which began the long internment of Japanese during the war, and approximately 700 people of Japanese ancestry assembled on Cabrillo Boulevard to be taken to Manzanar.^[61]

After World War II

After the war ended, many people who had seen Santa Barbara during the war came back to stay. The population grew by 10,000 by 1950, in just five years. During this time the University of California took over the blufftop Marine camp, turning it into a modern university. The burst of growth brought traffic, housing, and water problems, which led to improvements in the transportation system, such as the building of Highway 101 through town; tracts of low-cost housing, especially on the Mesa, where oil derricks were removed and replaced by houses; and the building of Lake Cachuma reservoir on the other side of the mountains, along with another water tunnel to bring its water to thirsty residents. During this period, the city selectively recruited businesses to relocate there, choosing clean industries such as aerospace and technology in preference to the oil industry which had already marred many local landscapes with

abandoned wells and sumps.^[62] In 1959, Santa Barbara Junior College was moved to its present Mesa location and renamed Santa Barbara City College

.

The oil industry moved most of its local operations offshore during the 1950s and 1960s. In 1947, offshore leases were approved by the federal government, and seismic exploration of the Channel took place in the 1950s, even though fishermen complained that the underwater explosions were killing fish. The first of the huge black fifteen-story oil platforms, a feature of the seascape south of Santa Barbara for fifty years, went up in 1958. During the period, Stearns Wharf was the main connection for oil services going out to the platforms.[63]

Making the relationship between Santa Barbara and the oil industry even worse was the disaster of January 28, 1969, one of the formative events in the modern environmental movement. A blowout on an offshore oil well at the Dos Cuadras Offshore Oil Field spewed between 80,000 and 100,000 barrels (13,000 and 16,000 m³) of oil, producing an immense oil slick which spread over hundreds of square miles of ocean in the Santa Barbara Channel, contaminating shorelines, killing wildlife, ruining the tourist industry, and appearing on television screens worldwide. The anti-oil group "GOO" (Get Oil Out) formed shortly after the spill, and oil drilling has been a sensitive issue in the area ever since.^[64] Wider consequences of the spill included the 1970 passage of both the National Environmental Policy Act and the California Environmental Quality Act, laws which require assessment of potential environmental impacts of projects before they begin.^[65]

Several catastrophic fires burned portions of Santa Barbara and the adjacent mountains in the late 20th century. In 1964, the Coyote Fire burned 67,000 acres (270 km²) of backcountry along with 150 homes, blackening the mountain wall behind Santa Barbara, and briefly threatening the entire town of Montecito. In 1977, the smaller but more destructive Sycamore Fire roared down Sycamore Canyon on the northeast fringe of Santa Barbara, destroying over 200 homes. Most destructive of all was the 1990

Sundowner wind event, crossing over the freeway to Hope Ranch, and causing over a quarter billion dollars in damage.^[66][67][68]

By the mid-1970s, forces opposing uncontrolled growth had become stronger than those favoring development. On April 8, 1975, the City Council passed a resolution to limit the city's population to 85,000 through zoning. In order to limit growth in adjacent areas, such as Goleta, it was standard to deny water meters to developments which had been approved by the County Board of Supervisors, effectively shutting off growth. The city and immediately adjacent areas stopped their fast growth, but housing prices rose sharply.[71]

When voters approved connection to state water supplies in 1991, parts of the city, especially outlying areas, resumed growth, but more slowly than during the boom period of the 1950s and 1960s. While the slow growth preserved the quality of life for most residents and prevented the urban sprawl notorious in the Los Angeles basin, housing in the Santa Barbara area was in short supply, and prices soared: in 2006, only six percent of residents could afford a median-value house. As a result, many people who work in Santa Barbara commute from adjacent, more affordable areas, such as Santa Maria, Lompoc, and Ventura. The resultant traffic on incoming arteries, particularly the stretch of Highway 101 between Ventura and Santa Barbara, is another problem being addressed by long-range planners.^[72]

See also

• Category: Ranchos of Santa Barbara County, California
• List of mayors of Santa Barbara, California

References

• Baker, Gayle. Santa Barbara, Another HarborTown History. HarborTown Histories, Santa Barbara. 2003. ISBN (print) 0-9710984-1-7, (e-version) 978-0-9879038-1-5
• Birchard, Robert S. Silent-Era Filmmaking in Santa Barbara. Arcadia Publishing. 2007.
  ISBN 0-7385-4730-1
• Graham, Otis L.; Bauman, Robert; Dodd, Douglas W.; Geraci, Victor W.; Murray, Fermina Brel. Stearns Wharf: Surviving Change on the California Coast. Graduate Program in Public Historical Studies, University of California, 1994.
  ISBN 1-883535-15-8
• Tompkins, Walker A. Santa Barbara, Past and Present. Tecolote Books, Santa Barbara, CA, 1975.
• Tompkins, Walker A. It Happened in Old Santa Barbara. Sandollar Press, Santa Barbara, CA, 1976.
• Tompkins, Walker A. Santa Barbara History Makers. McNally & Loftin, Santa Barbara. 1983.
  ISBN 0-87461-059-1
• Tompkins, Walker A. Santa Barbara Neighborhoods. Santa Barbara Board of Realtors, 1989.

Further reading

• Noticias, the journal of the Santa Barbara Historical Society

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to History of Santa Barbara, California.

• Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation
• Ranchos of Santa Barbara County Map