Now I do dig the architecture in Santa Barbara. I love that Spanish style with the clay tiled roofs
I agree. Santa Barbara IS beautiful. I haven’t seen it in 20 years....I live in Maine now. Another state with high income taxes. And cold winters, unlike southern California.
Santa Barbara didn’t always have the Spanish-style architecture. It once had a mish-mash of Western style false front buildings and numerous other buildings of little architectural note in the downtown business district.
Mother Nature put an end to them on June 29, 1925 just before dawn. A shallow, 6.3 earthquake hit the city.....almost identical to the quake that hit Christchurch, New Zealand last year. The business district and many other areas of the city were in ruins. The city fathers decided to honor the city’s old Spain heritage when the rebuilding got underway, and that why there are so many stucco buildings with the orange clay tile roofs in Santa Barbara.
I’ve heard that real estate in Santa Barbara has dropped in price because of the recession and real estate crash. As I mentioned in my previous post, Santa Barbara has a liberal bent, but the mountains above the city.....the Santa Ynez Valley.....struck me as being very conservative when I lived there.
Santa Barbara has a reputation for being extremely snooty, elitist, clanish . . . exclusionist . . . virtually impossible for new comers to break into in any significant way . . . except for with other newcomers.
Also—not a high enough elevation and too close to the coast.