Creating the Future community
MAN OF CHANGE: UCSB professor Richard Appelbaum said teaching and mentoring young people gives him hope.
PAU L WELLM AN F I LE PHOTO
Do you have concerns that efforts to limit growth effectively limited supply of housing but still allowed enough commercial development to increase demand? We argued at the time that to be effective, two conditions had to be met: Growth control had to be region-wide, and it had to focus on controlling commercial expansion rather than limiting housing expansion. Needless to say both of these have been harder to achieve. Limiting housing is relatively easy (you down-zone); limiting commercial expansion — especially on a region-wide basis — not so easy. Years ago, when I was more focused on housing, rent control, and homelessness, I did some research on comparable California coastal communities (some with growth controls, some without) and found that housing costs were uniformly high in all cases. Still, it is clear that many of the people who work in Santa Barbara are priced out of the local housing market, particularly as homeowners. All you need to do is drive south at 5 p.m. on a workday to appreciate how serious a problem this is. I would say that growth control in Santa Barbara has had mixed results — it has preserved the local quality of life, but contributed, in part, to higher housing costs. Perhaps smart growth can pave the way to a better solution.
Or, How to Make Waves and Still Accomplish Stuff
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BY N I C K W E L S H ich Appelbaum may be the most influential Santa Barbaran whom most people have never heard of. Certainly, his fingerprints are all over not just the South Coast’s political landscape but the actual streetscape itself. A quintessential activist-academic, Appelbaum — who recently announced his retirement as a UCSB sociology professor — was a major contributor to the city’s now-famous Impacts of Growth study. Likewise, Appelbaum’s work had a profound effect on how State Street would evolve. Were it not for his political opposition to a downtown Bullock’s department store in 1983, there likely would be no Paseo Nuevo today. Unlike many eco-minded slow-growthers, Appelbaum was equally focused on issues of economic justice. His studies on rent control seem once again urgently interesting, given the South Coast’s astronomical rents. Appelbaum has since shifted his focus to international labor and sweatshop working conditions and, more recently, to preparing graduate students on how to effectively run nongovernmental organizations in less-than-third-world circumstances. When Appelbaum isn’t busy struggling to save the world from itself, he and his family while away the hours climbing mountains or riding their bikes up Santa Barbara’s steep, scenic, forbidding Gibraltar Road. All this he manages to do with an utterly deceptive “Look, Ma, no hands” casualness. Santa Barbara Independent editor Nick Welsh emailed Appelbaum with more questions than anyone should ever have to answer. An edited version of their exchange follows. For more, including short films by videographers Phyllis de Picciotto and Stan Roden about the professor’s formative years and various cohorts, visit independent.com.
We first met during the Bullock’s battle. In hindsight, what do you think that accomplished? The Bullock’s project was a bad idea from the start. It would have used redevelopment money to put a single department store in a part of Santa Barbara that clearly was not in need of redevelopment. And of course, apart from that, it brought on the wrath of Penny and Terry Davies and the loyal clientele of the Earthling Bookshop. Ben Bycel ran the campaign, John Davies did the media part, and I did the research. It was a tough sell: We took on the mayor, City Council, and the Redevelopment Agency, and we forced a referendum on Measure D, which was a pro-Bullock’s measure. We had a live televised debate, and we hosted a public design
charrette. We won the referendum hands down. We showed that a small group of people could prevail at the ballot box in Santa Barbara, even against elected officials. A victory for democracy in action! We brought a Nordstrom to town, and — while I can’t attest that this resulted in Nordstrom anchoring the Paseo Nuevo — I like to imagine that it at least whetted the family’s appetite. And I learned a great deal about how redevelopment and tax increment funding works. I also learned not to believe doomsday pronouncements (the powers that be constantly claimed that Santa Barbara was doomed if Bullock’s didn’t come to town). You were among the crew who established Santa Barbara’s 85,000 population limit. How big a deal was that? The Impacts of Growth study was a very, very big deal. The City Council had called for a study, and the standard approach was to project out past trends, thereby creating a self-fulfilling prophecy requiring public officials to accommodate to the prediction. [UCSB sociology professor] Harvey Molotch would have none of this, and created a team of five: Harvey, myself, Paul Relis, Jennifer Bigelow, and Henry Kramer. Our strategy was to argue “growth is not inevitable; it should be the result of policy decisions, not past trends.” We identified seven different “population impact point” scenarios: no growth (the city’s population at the time was 73,132); making permanent the temporary half-density ordinance that the city had adopted pending the outcome of the study (117,486); full build-out to the maximum permitted by the General Plan (139,720) or zoning (170,039); and probable build-out for the half-density ordinance (93,555), General Plan (103,444) and zoning (119,460). To make a long story short, we involved hundreds of people in what I now understand was an example of “participatory action research” — research whose goal is to make a difference, not only in terms of outcomes, but also in terms of “empowerment”: providing research participants with skills and knowledge that would enable and encourage them to become engaged activists long after the research was completed. The study of growth impacts had many impacts of its own. It led to a down-zoning, both commercial and residential. It brought many young planners to Santa Barbara since the study and city’s approaches were considered to be models. And I think it can take some credit for Santa Barbara remaining the paradise that it is.
You teamed up with Paul Orfalea and Mark Juergensmeyer to create a graduate program for people seeking a career in community nonprofits. Where have your students ended up and what kind of footprints have they left? The MA Program in Global & International Studies was something I had been pushing for since the early 1980s. When Mark joined the UCSB faculty, he and I pushed together. The first result was the Global & International Studies Program, which soon acquired an undergraduate degree in Global Studies (there are now 1,300 majors). The MA degree, which was to produce scholar-practitioners, remained elusive — until Mark befriended Paul, who had been teaching an undergrad Global course in business practices every quarter. Paul promised a generous endowment if we could get proposal approved within nine months or so. I took the lead on the proposal, the chancellor went to bat for us, and the rest is history. By now we have graduated more than a hundred students. When I last looked at it (two years ago), our students have populated nongovernmental organizations from Direct Relief to the Clinton Global Initiative; business groups like Google, The Gap, and the Royal Bank of Canada; become academics at universities in California, New York, and around the world; worked for the government at the DOD; and taken advanced degrees here, at Harvard, Leipzig, and probably more by now. What’s the coolest thing about students today? The most frustrating? The students in Global Studies (GS) are terrific. The undergrads are motivated as global citizens. Our GS major, for example, sends more students on Education Abroad’s year-long study program than any other department in the entire UC system. I love teaching Global (intro to global studies politics and economics), and I asked to be recalled for one quarter each of the next four years so I could teach it. I find young people challenging, stimulating, and activist. UCSB has one of the most active United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) chapters anywhere. I have used undergrads (and of course grad students) to do research on labor issues, some of which has been published by the Center for American Progress. Hanging out with people and the many grad students I work with in Soc, Global, and the Center for Nanotechnology in Society, who are not yet jaded, gives me hope. Now that you’re retired, what lake would you most like to jump into? Labor issues. UCSB labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein and I are currently editing a book on global labor that grew out of a conference we cohosted at the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, Italy, in the fall of 2013; we are also writing a book on the topic. I just returned from Bangladesh, where fires and building collapses have claimed the lives of some 2,000 apparel workers over the last decade. My retirement energies will largely go into doing research and providing whatever assistance I can to the ■ global struggle for workers’ rights.
independent.com
january 8, 2015
THE INDEPENDENt
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