Often said to be the most lovely small city on the California Coast, and to have the “most beautiful downtown in the world” Santa Barbara is a stunning example of successful planned development. During the city’s development , deliberate choices were made to stick to a certain architectural style and a policy of deliberately limiting growth in order to protect for the purpose of protecting the city’s livability and saleability as a tourist destination. In 1922, an association of community activists calling themselves the “Civic Arts Association” began promoting an architectural style called “Spanish Colonial Revival”–a Mediterranean style incorporating Andalusian, Moroccan and Italian elements–through their “Plans and Planting Committee.” They announced that:

“Our committee aims to preserve the city’s early nineteenth-century Hispanic buildings, remodel or replace the non-Hispanic buildings with Spanish Colonial ones, use this imagery for all new buildings, encourage landscaping compatible with this image, and use planning tools to maintain the scale and size of the community.”

Of course, Santa Barbara’s attractiveness is not solely due to its architecture. located as it is between the Santa Ynez Mountains and the Pacific Ocean, the “American Riviera” is also blessed with scenic beauty and a mild climate often called “Mediterranean.” However, it was a natural catastrophe –a devastating earthquake that devastated the downtown commercial district –that played a major role in the city’s eventually becoming the beautiful locale it is in the present day .

The quake struck at 6:44 in the morning of June 28, 1925. Most residential buildings survived the temblor more of less intact, but the downtown commercial district experienced extensive damage. fortuitously , owing to the fact that most residents were still at home when the tremor struck , there were only thirteen fatalities .

The timing of the quake was fortuitous in another sense for the Civic Arts Association. The architectural style they had been championing was not only well adapted to the local weather and a good match for the Mission and Santa Barbara’s old Spanish adobes, more significantly to their fellow Santa Barbarans, the Spanish Colonial structures that were already standing had held up well in the earthquake. This fact increased support for the idea of creating a city modeled on the Spanish Colonial Revival architectural style.

Even before the earthquake, a “Community Drafting Room,” which offered design assistance to builders , had been set up by the Plans and Planting Committee, and an “Architectural Advisory Committee” had been instituted by the city government. straight off after the temblor , the first formal Architectural Board of Review in the United States was established by Santa Barbara .

As part of the rebuilding effort, the Community Drafting Room provided free plans for all types of shops and buildings, mostly in the Spanish Colonial Revival style. inside a year, over 2,000 projects had been approved by the Architectural Board of Review and, with the new structures white stucco walls and red tile roofs, Santa Barbara had been metamorphosed into a Spanish city located , not altogether incongruously, in Southern California.

The crowning achievement of the rebuilding and beautification drive was the Santa Barbara County Courthouse, completed in 1929. The courthouse, which has been called “the most beautiful public building in the United States,” is an elegant example of the Spanish Colonial Revival style and affords stunning views of Santa Barbara’s red-tiled rooftops, the Santa Ynez Mountains, the ocean, and the Channel Islands from its eighty-five-foot-high clock tower.

The main reason that the views from the clock tower are so impressive is that building height limitations first set in the late thirties have been maintained up to the present . The highest building in the city is the eight-story Granada Theater, built in 1924, before the height limitations had been put into place . Today, commercial buildings cannot exceed four stories or sixty feet, and multifamily residential buildings can be no taller than three stories or forty-five feet.

Another measure that has helped to keep Santa Barbara livable is its zoning code, established in 1930. Rather than having single-use zoning districts, as is typical in most cities, Santa Barbara has a pyramid scheme that allows residences in the same area as other-use buildings. Corner grocery stores can still be found in residential neighborhoods, and you can see single-family homes and apartment buildings standing next to each other .

The City has also been successful in keeping its downtown area alive as a popular option for shoppers and diners who have not all been siphoned off by sprawling suburban malls, as they have in so many other towns and cities. Six blocks of Santa Barbara’s main shopping street, State Street, have wide, landscaped sidewalks, wooden benches and mid-block pedestrian crossings, while the street has been narrowed to only one lane each way. The purpose of these changes was to create a “Hispanic Drive-Through-Plaza” all the way down to the waterfront. It is not a problem to park your car and get around to all the downtown shops, restaurants and movie theaters on foot.

In 1973, a newly elected anti-development city council put in place a population limit of 85,000 residents within the city limits, and limited growth in the surrounding area by being sting in their granting of water meters to developers. In 1989, a measure limiting non-residential development to 3,000,000 square feet was adopted. The anti-growth measures of course have a downside–Santa Barbara is not a cheap place to buy property. But it also has been a successful economic strategy when you consider that one of Santa Barbara’s chief assets, and certainly its main tourist draw, is its scenic and architectural beauty .

Santa Barbara is an example of a city that has managed to make itself livable for residents and attractive to visitors by consciously choosing an architectural style that, while not exactly indigenous, is well suited to its climate and scenery. This has been a successful experiment which demonstrates that opting for ambiance over utility and pure market forces can be a smart economic choice that adds value to a city.

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