Letter from California:
SANTA BARBARA — We didn’t plan to come here. But the grounding of the Boeing 737 MAX forced Southwest Airlines to cancel a lot of flights. One was our flight to Puerto Vallarta, our favorite vacation spot. The butterfly effect is always at work.
But we’re flexible.
We reshuffled, booked a nonstop Southwest flight into LAX and reserved a room at the Kimpton Canary. It would be our first visit to Santa Barbara. About two hours north of Los Angeles, Santa Barbara is one of the prettiest places in California.
Leaving Los Angeles
Leaving LAX wasn’t difficult: The Santa Barbara Airbus stops right outside the Southwest terminal. The fare is less than $50 a person. So it costs about half of what an Uber would cost and you get a great view from the high seats on the bus. Driving anywhere in Los Angeles is a drag, which is why we chose to take a bus. It’s a pleasant ride up to Santa Barbara.
Everyone knows that real estate is expensive in California. But you have to go there to get a visceral sense of it.
The first indication was the Uber driver who drove us from the bus stop to the hotel. He was more than an Uber driver. He was also a Realtor. Not long after that, the young woman who served our breakfast announced that she, too, was a Realtor. After a while, you begin to wonder who isn’t?
Staying at the Kimpton Canary
The Canary is a small and charming hotel. It’s just off State Street, which runs straight to Stearns Wharf and the Pacific Ocean. The hotel has no grounds, but it has a pool, hot tub and large terrace on the rooftop. Magnificent views in all directions.
A few of the rooms have French doors to balconies. All are well furnished. If you can, stay in room 505, 405 or 305 – the rooms with balconies and wonderful light.
The hotel offers a nightly happy hour with nice wine. The restaurant, Finch and Fork, offers an interesting menu in a very comfortable wood and leather space with soft light and booths. It feels intimate and private. The service is excellent.
Just remember, when booking, that Santa Barbara is a weekend getaway place for Angelinos. Room rates are a lot higher on Friday and Saturday night than other days of the week. It also costs $38 a day to valet park your car, another good reason to leave the driving to buses and Uber.
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What to see?
You can’t go wrong with the most popular places in Santa Barbara. That would be the mission, the courthouse, the marina, the zoo and the art museum. But my wife and I loved just walking: admiring the architecture of the commercial buildings and the full, mad effulgence of mature plantings surrounding the houses along Garden and other streets. We clocked over 55,000 steps in four days of exploring.
It isn’t difficult to start wondering: Why doesn’t everyone live here?
The answer is that just about everyone has tried. That’s why California is an unbelievably expensive place to live.
We all know that, of course. Who can escape the stories about multimillion-dollar condos in San Francisco, San Diego and Los Angeles? Who can avoid the stories about the hordes of homeless people all over the state?
Homeless in Santa Barbara
And, yes, there are homeless people in Santa Barbara, too. The beauty of Santa Barbara is a bit like the mood in Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” — casual beauty with a rising sense of impending doom.
In Santa Barbara you are surrounded by fashionable beauty – places like Raoul’s textiles, where linen sells for as much as $250 a yard. Then, only a few yards away, you’ll see a street person walking a supermarket cart piled high with plastic bags.
You can get an idea of how expensive Santa Barbara is by doing a search on Zillow. In a search of homes, condos or manufactured homes under $500,000 I found nine listings. All were manufactured homes.
They were priced between $95,000 for a one-bedroom, one-bath home of 496 square feet to $389,000 for a two-bedroom, two-bath unit with 1,100 square feet. That’s a cost of about $200 to $350 a square foot.
To put that in some perspective, the typical cost of a new manufactured home runs under $70 a square foot. Last year I toured a luxed-out doublewide on an Austin sales lot at $80 a square foot, but there was room to bargain.
And, by the way, you rent the land. You don’t own it.
Seriously.
With many California manufactured home parks under rent control, having a lease has become valuable in itself. Here’s an example. Just before the 2017 fires in Sonoma, a manufactured home marketer paid $45,000 for the privilege of removing a 1973 doublewide from a rent-controlled lot and taking over the lease. He would put a new doublewide on the lot and sell it for about $250,000.
Now add the California state income tax. It hits 9.3 percent on taxable income over $56,086. It tops out at 13.3 percent.
Maybe, just maybe, that’s why more people move to Texas from California than from any other state.
Related columns
Scott Burns, “Watching California: The National Yard Sale Begins,” 10/22/2008 https://scottburns.com/watching-california-the-national-yard-sale-begins/
Sources and References
Santa Barbara Airbus website: https://www.sbairbus.com
Kimpton Canary Hotel website: https://www.canarysantabarbara.com
Finch and Fork menu: https://finchandforkrestaurant.com/menu
Planetware top attractions in Santa Barbara: https://www.planetware.com/tourist-attractions-/santa-barbara-us-ca-sb.htm
Zillow screen for homes under $500,000 https://www.zillow.com/homes/Santa-Barbara,-CA_rb/
Typical manufactured home costs: https://www.thehomesdirect.com/blog/average-cost-of-a-manufactured-home
California state income tax rates https://www.bankrate.com/finance/taxes/state-taxes-california.aspx
Trailer for “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELeMaP8EPAA
Raoul’s textiles: https://www.raoultextiles.com/store
The Bluewater Grill: https://www.bluewatergrill.com/locations/santa-barbara
This information is distributed for education purposes, and it is not to be construed as an offer, solicitation, recommendation, or endorsement of any particular security, product, or service.
Photo: Scott Burns, view from the terrace of the Bluewater Grill
(c) Scott Burns, 2020