Santa Maria’s New Crop: Homes

Forged in the sweat of farm workers, this once rural Santa Barbara County town is being reshaped into a suburban mecca by newcomers seeking affordable homes along California’s pricey Central Coast.

Housing tracts are being hastily constructed within earshot of strawberry workers bent to load trays in nearby fields. New cul-de-sacs are suddenly sprouting sport utility vehicles and portable basketball hoops. Even the most rundown shopping centers along Broadway, Santa Maria’s main drag, are coming to life with new coats of plaster and refurbished red tile roofs.

This boom is directly linked to the sticker shock many home buyers face when shopping in south Santa Barbara County, where the median price of a home reached an all-time high of $530,000 in February.

An hour north of Santa Barbara on U.S. 101, Santa Maria sits in a sunny, cool river valley, and the median price of a home is the lowest in the region at $156,000.

Danny Leon, 27, bought a three-bedroom, two-bath home downtown two years ago for $113,000. A native of Cuernavaca, Mexico, Leon works for a firm that installs doors and is delighted that neighboring homes are now selling for $150,000.

“I’m comfortable in Santa Maria,” he said as he watched his two toddler sons ride their bikes down the driveway. “Santa Barbara is supposed to be so special, but it’s just way too busy for me, too crowded.”

Some longtime residents worry that Santa Maria has been too quick to bulldoze precious farmland, noting that farming historically has been the region’s only stable lifeline. But civic leaders point with pride to the town’s robust economy.

Santa Maria has a population of 72,000, nearly double what it was in 1980. An additional 20,000 people live in adjacent Orcutt, which is even more popular with commuters because it is south of Santa Maria and closer to the high-tech jobs of Goleta and Vandenberg Air Force Base.

Unlike other Central Coast communities that have sharply limited development, city officials here have a strong pro-growth attitude. Santa Maria approved 2,300 new housing permits between 1990 and 1998, compared with 860 in much larger Santa Barbara.

“We don’t have a creek running through the center of town like San Luis Obispo,” said Santa Maria planning director Bill Orndorff. “We don’t have ocean frontage like Santa Barbara. We don’t have missions like either of them, but you can afford to live here.”

Caline and Aaron Pugh were early believers.

After an extensive 1997 search in Carpinteria turned up nothing they wanted for less than $300,000, the couple bought a new $169,000, four-bedroom tract home at the north end of Santa Maria.

They spent their first months commuting to Santa Barbara jobs before Caline Pugh took time off from her career as an accountant to raise her children. Her husband switched from being a manager for United Parcel Service in Santa Barbara to working for Federal Express in Santa Maria. They now have a 2-year-old son, an adopted son and a daughter and they are expecting a fourth child in the fall.

“We have so many friends in Santa Barbara, and they are buying houses which are 60 years old for $300,000 to $500,000 and spending another $200,000 to totally remodel and make them livable,” Caline Pugh said. “We think we made the right choice.”

Dawn Harris moved two months ago, just after the birth of her baby son, to a three-bedroom tract home in Orcutt after a fruitless search to find a home in the Solvang area, where her husband works as a physical therapist. Solvang, in the Santa Ynez Valley, has seen home prices rise dramatically because of its closer proximity to Santa Barbara.

“The only thing we found was a tiny two-bedroom in the high $200,000s which was built in 1900,” Harris said. For $186,000, her family found a three-bedroom tract house on a cul-de-sac across the street from a small park full of sparkling new climbing toys. These days, she is just trying to adjust to a new town, with a newborn and a husband who is often tired from commuting. “Santa Maria seems like a nice place, but I don’t really know anybody yet,” she said.

Santa Maria’s fortunes have seen vast swings in the past.

Housing prices have jumped up and down with the rise and fall of missile projects at Vandenberg. Oil came and went in the region between the 1940s and the late 1980s, when most of the area’s crude oil was sucked out.

Fred Balderama, 70, has lived in the Santa Maria area since 1945, when he was making 65 cents an hour in the fields. He worked as a welder on produce refrigeration units for 35 years before retiring.

“When you were at Broadway and Main in the center of town, as far as the eye could see was farmland,” he said. “There’s a lot of good land under those new houses. Give them time and some of these Santa Maria leaders are going to be kicking themselves on losing that forever.”

There is also a growing fear that as more affluent newcomers discover Santa Maria, lower-income residents will be priced out of the area.

“The rents are higher than they ever were,” said Pam Hubbard, a Century 21 real estate agent in Santa Maria. “It’s because of the demand. People are buying former rentals and fixing them up to live in. We haven’t seen that before. The rental market has dried up.”

Bob Hatch, president of the Santa Maria Valley Chamber of Commerce, said he thinks Santa Maria will find a way to grow but remain true to its working-class roots.

“Santa Maria is not a real yuppie place,” Hatch said. “We have people who do the service jobs. The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, the bank teller, the mailman, ad nauseam. They create their own little economy within an economy, but they can have a life here.”