Posted on 03/03/2009 1:56:44 PM PST by Lorianne
THE lawns are green and well-tended. The swimming pools are filled with water, not mosquitoes. Steve Cushman, head of the local chamber of commerce, counts just 27 empty storefronts out of 410 along the city’s main shopping street—a rate that many cities in California would envy. In the past year Santa Barbara County has seen a slight increase in employment. The secret to its health? Hostility to development and lack of youth.
Nowhere in California is immune to recession, but the oldest areas are proving most resistant. Of the ten counties with the lowest unemployment rates, nine, including Santa Barbara, contain an above-average proportion of people aged 65 or older. Youthful Los Angeles has shed almost a quarter-of-a-million jobs in the past year. Slightly older San Diego has lost a few thousand, while considerably older San Francisco has lost none. A map of the state’s retirees (see above) could almost double as a map of economic resilience.
California’s youngest regions are in its hot interior. In the middle years of this decade hundreds of thousands of families moved there in search of big, affordable houses. Unfortunately, many took on big, unaffordable mortgages to do it. Last month one in every 87 households in youthful, formerly fast-growing San Bernardino County received a foreclosure filing, according to California-based RealtyTrac. The housing crash has led such areas into an economic tailspin.
Santa Barbara has watched all this from the sidelines. In this slow-growth stronghold, anything other than a glacial pace of development is anathema. Mr Cushman says that only one block of flats for rent has been built in the region in the past 30 years. And some want to curtail growth further.
(Excerpt) Read more at economist.com ...
Just how is such an economic model supposed to apply nationwide?
Makes sense. The worst thing about the housing boom is the way so many new buildings have been built and everything has been designed to cater to the young adult and teenager, not to the sensiblities of, I’m not sure how to put it, people who mean to invest longterm, not merely on the latest trendy design for a building.
I think the point is that if you’re a stagnant command economy, you didn’t just lose 10 years of market value because you missed out on the last 20 or 25 years of growth.
So once we’re in grinding socialist poverty, we’ll never have to worry about a downward business cycle because we’ll never have upside growth again!
...money!
$250K annual income required to purchase the rare tract home that comes up for sale in Goleta and an average home price in Montecito of $3.1M.
If you head to northern Santa Barbara County (Lompoc-Santa Maria), house prices have taken a steep dive. Low $200K for a fairly new 3BR, 2BA home. Quality of life has declined just as drastically in these cities.
Yup. The Mexicans that mow the lawns, work in fast food franchises and clean rooms in San Luis and Morro Bay live in Santa Maria because of the affordable housing.
The Mexicans that provide services in SB live in Ventura County. The commute up 101 to SB in the morning and back down 101 to Ventura in the evening is hell.
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