Cutting Through the Noise: The Most Powerful Voice at the Meeting
At last week’s October 14, 2025, Santa Barbara City Council meeting, the most powerful voice during the discussion cut through the usual political slogans and rhetoric. An immigrant, mother, attorney, and real estate broker delivered a hard truth that too many in local government would rather not hear.
A Dangerous Assault on the American Dream
She spoke passionately against the rent control and rent stabilization plan proposed by Councilmembers Sneddon and Santamaria, making it clear that this is not about compassion. This is about control. The consequences of that control are real — and ruinous.
“This is a communist affront to the American dream,” she said.
Some scoffed.
But is she wrong?
History’s Warning: Rent Control’s Failed Legacy
The proposal is not new. Versions of this same ideology have been tried — in San Francisco, New York, Venezuela, and the Soviet Union. The results are always the same: reduced housing supply, decaying units, bloated government bureaucracies, and a growing class of people who depend on politicians for their basic needs.
Government Overreach Hidden in Plain Sight
The language may sound progressive, but the outcome is regressive. The so-called “Rental Housing Stabilization Board” is a Trojan horse — not for stability, but for political power. It injects government directly into private rental relationships, distorting natural supply and demand, and punishing those who provide housing.
Who Really Benefits? The False Promise to “Essential Workers”
Supporters claim rent control protects teachers, nurses, firefighters, and police officers — the essential workers we all respect. But the data says otherwise. Studies show rent control decreases new housing development, ultimately reducing available units for the middle class. It creates winners and losers — with no regard for merit or investment.
The Hidden Cost: Nonprofits and the Vanishing Tax Base
Meanwhile, Santa Barbara quietly bleeds revenue. The city is filled with nonprofit-owned residential and commercial properties — including those run by the Santa Barbara Housing Authority and other so-called affordable housing developers — that pay zero property tax.
Property taxes fund our schools, police, fire departments, streets, sewers — the very core services local government provides. As more property is taken off the tax rolls under nonprofit or affordability banners, the rest of us bear the burden. Despite a looming multimillion-dollar deficit, City Hall’s answer is to add bureaucracy and raise taxes again.
This is fiscal mismanagement disguised as social equity.
The Real Fix: More Housing, Not More Red Tape
We want Santa Barbara to be livable. But that doesn’t mean legislating utopia. It means facing the economics of land, labor, and investment — and resisting the urge to centrally plan our way into a housing solution.
Instead of choking the rental market with controls, we should strengthen what works: our philanthropic community, existing affordable housing programs, and smart development policies that encourage new supply — not punish it.
Protecting Dreams, Not Dependence
The dream that brought the most powerful voice during the meeting to this country was not a rent-stabilized cubicle in a gray apartment block. It was the chance to work, save, and own. That dream is under threat — not from landlords, but from ideology.
This plan must be stopped. Not only because it won’t work – never has; never will –, but because it replaces opportunity with dependency, freedom with bureaucracy, and sustainability with insolvency.
The American dream is not lifetime tenancy under a rent board’s watchful eye. It’s ownership. It’s agency. And it’s time our council members remembered that.
Full Public Comment from the Most Powerful Voice During the Meeting
“Okay. Thank you. Mayor Rowse, council members, — I’m an immigrant, mother, real estate broker, attorney.
I rise to speak against this terrible punitive plan to destroy the inherent supply and demand checks on rental housing.
You must realize this proposal is an effort to impose communist-derived rent suppression and create a quagmire bureaucracy through the proposed Rental Housing Stabilization Board.
Even as a 16-year-old teenage immigrant to this country, I knew that the true American dream was the opportunity for economic advancement and home ownership through education and hard work — which I did.
Councilmember Santamaria and Sneddon’s plan — I apologize if I said that wrong — is a communist affront to the American dream. It truly is. It’s no joke.
The Santamaria-Sneddon plan seeks to create lifetime tenants who are encouraged to live as renters in neighborhoods that they cannot afford. It’s a dependency trap. You must see it.
This plan steers citizens to become reliant upon local politicians to enact and sustain rent suppression policies and creates a bloated bureaucracy.
Being a lifetime tenant dependent upon the government for housing is not the American dream. It is the adoption of the failed communist policies that ultimately deprive citizens of their dignity and creates a dependent class of people that rely upon politicians for their basic needs.
It’s a dependency trap.
The role of local government is not to be a charitable organization distributing other people’s hard-earned money to get votes.
What do you think forcing people to give up their hard-earned money creates? It creates extreme dissatisfaction with the government and division.
Santa Barbara has an extraordinary philanthropy community and an amazing affordable housing program. Your efforts should go there.
Parading as a champion of tenants — suppressing the rental market’s inherent supply and demand controls while punishing private property ownership — is not a new idea.
Everywhere in the world where this philosophy has been tried, it has ended in total and abject failure.
We heard about New York and San Francisco. Let’s look at the former Soviet Union — there are miles of government-owned, gray, lifeless vertical apartment buildings that store government-dependent humans in cubicles like inventory.
Closer to home, we’ve seen these failed policies of destroying capitalist market controls and enacting government control of private property rights in Venezuela.
Under Hugo Chavez and Nicolás Maduro, private property ownership is held in disdain. In Venezuela, there is no shortage of rental housing — thousands of apartments vacant — millions of people fleeing Venezuela.
The ordinance description that it supports essential workers like the ones we like and respect — firefighters, nurses, policemen, teachers — has no support in the data.
The National Association of Home Builders’ recent study shows that rent control decreases new multifamily housing development.
May 2025 studies from the Apartment Owners Association of California have shown that in the mid and long term, middle-class renters like teachers, firefighters, administrators, police, and nurses end up having less available housing choices because housing inventory per capita ultimately decreases.
About homelessness — studies show that homelessness, which is used as a pretext for this measure – is far more correlated to substance abuse, mental health challenges, and income loss, rather than rent increase.
Thank you. Vote NO to placing the proposed ordinance on the agenda. Kill it. Thank you.”
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The City owning and renting ~3500 housing units is not the role of government.
BD, great job. When I think about what it means to be arrogant it centers on folks who believe their generally ill-informed opinion trumps well researched facts. World class UCSB economist Peter Rupert takes time each year (and sometimes before the Council) to present studies and data that date to the 1940’s showing that Rent Control just does not work (for all the reasons you mentioned). Yet (and I have this on pretty good authority) certain council members have said that they “don’t believe the data.” HUH? Rent control voter propositions have failed at the State level (and within city limits) 3X. Nice that certain council members think their opinion should trump both data and the electorate. Wrong! Sad Truth: Our vacancy rates are at an anemic 1.7% when all data shows that a healthy rate—one that will drive pricing down—is 8%. News Flash: The city pegs 24% of folks as “rent burdened.” Across 500 small US cites —some that I wouldn’t wish my worst enemy to live in—30% of the people are “Rent Burdened”. Yes it sucks that rents are so high but this is America (not just SB!) circa 2025 and Rent Control is not the magic bullet but more inventory is … in my humble opinion.