CHAPTER ELEVEN
Old Town’s Revival
Chapter Eleven is an excerpt from my memoir that discusses tools needed to form a community consensus. Our effort was dedicated to redevelopment of Old Town Goleta, prior to forming the new City of Goleta.
But such techniques to build consensus could apply to climate change. The Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act will begin to implement the new legislation in disadvantaged communities with tax credits and outright grants to start up new projects and clean up their communities of toxic wastes.
The dream of forming a new city of Goleta was revived once its former Old Town center has been approved for redevelopment by Santa Barbara County, but what are the requirements for a livable community?
As recently as 2005, the Institute of American Architects said that
. . . broadly speaking, a livable community recognizes its own unique identity and places a high value on the planning processes that help manage growth and change to maintain and enhance its community character.
There had been several unsuccessful efforts to form a city since the 1970s.
The Goleta Old Town Revitalization Committee, a mix of local officials and residents that wanted Old Town’s infrastructure and services upgraded, was now created, and I was appointed its chairman.
The first task was to find such an identity that could unite a diverse community. The Goleta Valley’s Old Town was its 100-year-old historical center that could provide a unique sense of identity to a new city.
Hearings were held in Old Town’s Community Center so county planners could learn what Goleta’s residents wanted for a future town center. We were following the precepts of community organizing in bringing citizens together to solve some of the problems afflicting such a diverse community.
The Goleta Valley in many ways was a microcosm of small-town America and all that had happened to those communities since the sixties: rapid population growth with little concern for the environment. It had an early history combining both rural and urban life with industrial and research centers while being adjacent to the Santa Barbara Airport.
Our new organization (that included several future Goleta city mayors) was more than a redevelopment district because we believed it could aid in giving the Goleta Valley its “own unique identity” that planners and architects deemed requisite for a livable community.
I had read and was influenced by M. Scott Peck’s book The Different Drum, describing the elements that bring a community together to achieve whatever they want. His approach epitomized for me the essence of community development. Dr. Peck, a medical doctor, psychologist, and author of a better-known prequel, The Road Less Traveled, broke down the steps that a community goes through to come together in a meaningful way in The Different Drum.
He warned that the process could take time. Any community usually goes through four stages to reach agreement and to be able to function effectively, whatever its goals. He characterized these stages as Pseudo community, Chaos, Emptiness, and (true) Community.
Pseudo community is the first gathering of any group with the initial pleasantries and avoidance of conflict in the desire to be nice to each other. But it is a false community, because until the second stage of Chaos is reached, individual differences aren’t revealed, and a discussion of the real problems doesn’t surface.
Chaos described the early stages of our hearings when open discussions brought out the conflict between those residents who loved Old Town’s funkiness and cheap rents, and those landlords and landowners who wanted to improve their properties. The goal of the Old Town Advisory Committee was to bring the sides together. There was also a Goleta Beautiful organization that wanted to preserve and restore some of the more historic Old Town structures.
Dr. Peck’s third stage is Emptiness: a time of resignation, when the group or organization gives up their individual prejudices, ideologies, control needs, and begins to see what can be accomplished as a group. In Old Town, it wasn’t until the second year of the hearings that this happened. More Old Town residents were put on the committee, and we began to see a vision of what a revitalized Old Town could be for the Goleta community.
After many hearings and dialogues with planners, architects, developers, and residents that included a weekend Design Charette that I will discuss in a later chapter, the committee members began to have a sense that we were all in this together and would be able to create something beneficial that was a (true) community.
Dr. Peck wrote:
. . . initially I thought this book’s title should be “Peacemaking and Community”. But that would put the cart before the horse. For I fail to see how we Americans could effectively communicate with the Russians, (or any peoples of other cultures) when we don’t even know how to communicate with the neighbors next door, much less the neighbors on the other side of the tracks.
In our culture of rugged individualism— in which we generally feel that we dare not be honest about ourselves, even with the person in the pew next to us—we bandy around the word, “community”. . . [but] if we are to use the word meaningfully, we must restrict it to a group of individuals who have learned how to communicate honestly with each other.1
The Old Town Revitalization Committee needed two years and 100 hearings to form the Old Town Revitalization Plan.
The final report approved by the County on June 16, 1998, stated: “The purpose and objectives of this Redevelopment Plan are to eliminate the conditions of blight existing in the proposed Project Area and to prevent the recurrence of blighting conditions in said Area.”
It took four more years and another election to transfer what we learned in revitalizing Old Town to create the new City of Goleta in 2002 encompassing most of the Goleta Valley, but this was its start.
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1 Peck, M. Scott. The Different Drum. Simon & Schuster, 1987. P. 56
Harlan Green © 2023
Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen
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