Downtown Santa Barbara is at a crossroads. The Paseo Nuevo mall, once the city’s retail heart, has become a relic of another era. Built for department-store shopping and car-based consumption, it’s now a half-empty monument to a time that’s gone. We can either cling to nostalgia or step forward into a more vital, livable, and economically sustainable future.
That future must include housing. For decades, Santa Barbara has talked about creating a true mixed-use downtown, one where people live, work, and shop locally instead of commuting in and driving out. The redevelopment of Paseo Nuevo finally makes that vision possible. It’s a once-in-a-generation opportunity to replace obsolete square footage with homes, open space, and smaller-scale retail that actually fits today’s reality.
Under the current proposal, 233 market-rate apartments would rise where the Macy’s box now sits, joined by 80 affordable units developed by the Santa Barbara Housing Authority on nearby City Lot 2. In total, that’s more than 300 new homes in the urban core, the largest infusion of downtown housing in Santa Barbara’s modern history…