Roadmap to Recovery – The Road Home
Click here to download The Road Home II
In April 2023, the Santa Barbara South Coast Chamber of Commerce launched our Roadmap to Recovery: The Road Home.
The Road Home is phase three of the SBSC Chamber’s Roadmap to Recovery, which began during the pandemic and developed plans and action steps to help get businesses, large and small, reopened safely and focused on long-term recovery strategies. The Road Home is a basic roadmap to help guide our community out of the current housing crisis and to build consensus around the proposed solutions.
In July 2024, The Road Home II was launched at a Community Housing Workshop hosted by the Chamber. The is a living document that discusses the current state of our region’s housing crisis, and proposed solutions, from a local business community perspective. Since the original document, the Employer Sponsored Housing Consortium has gained much community support and momentum as we have championed the development of this new model program. And housing, an already hot topic, has only become even hotter since April of last year.
We are facing a housing crisis, due to years and years of not building enough housing. We cannot, as a region, ignore this issue any longer. All the while, we are relying on people to commute long distances for more affordable housing, losing intellectual talent to other states, forfeiting business growth because employers cannot find housing for the people they want to hire, forcing multiple generations to share properties, and preventing future generations from being able to live and thrive in Santa Barbara County. These consequences set our local businesses back from being able to make other investments in our local economy.
Through concepts like employer-sponsored housing, adaptive reuse of underutilized properties, and expeditious support for new developments, the housing supply will increase creating opportunities to meet demand and affordability. We are calling on our community leaders—from those elected to represent us, to those who work in and lead the businesses we frequent, to the non-profit leaders, and our neighbors, to sign onto The Road Home Pledge to plan for and support the production of 10,000 new units in varying sizes and price ranges by 2033.
