Hundreds of Central Coast residents face eviction after Chicago company buys apartments

Samira Soto has lived in Isla Vista at CBC & The Sweeps apartments with her 4-year-old son for nearly three years. She grew up in Santa Barbara, and this is her home.

Last week, a notice of eviction was posted on her front door. She must be out by August.

Now, she’s looking for a new place to live for her family.

“I am a third-generation Santa Barbaran,” Soto said. “This is all I know. It’s not an option to just go to the next town over when your whole family, your friends, your grandparents are here.

“We deserve to also have a space where we can grow up alongside the generations that have been here with us previously and not feel like we are being pushed out of our hometown.”

Soto and her son are among several hundred people who are being kicked out of their homes after Core Spaces — a Chicago-based company that says it is “inventing the future of living” — purchased apartment buildings at 775 Camino del Sur and 6711 and 6721 El Colegio Road. The company plans to renovate the buildings and intends to evict all residents while the work is completed.

While Isla Vista is considered a college town because of its proximity to UC Santa Barbara, the unincorporated area for decades has been home to working-class families, many of them Latinx.

Those same families have been forced to compete with annual waves of college students who often can pay higher rents for the apartments, driving out generations of renters who previously lived there.

Landlords know this, and have been investing in apartment buildings recently with the goal of renovating them, evicting tenants and then charging higher rents.

According to Hayes Commercial Group, rental vacancy rates on Santa Barbara County’s South Coast are about 1.7%, and rents rose about 9% in 2022.

Apartment buildings are attractive to investors who are looking to buy into the South Coast’s relatively old housing stock and then remodel to increase rents and see a larger return on their investment.

In 2022, there were 20 apartment building transactions on the South Coast, with a total of $141 million — the largest total since 2015.

Core Spaces told Noozhawk that the company’s team is “working directly alongside our residents” to provide resources, financial assistance and letters of recommendation for relocation.

“We have planned substantial remodeling for the property that includes work that cannot be reasonably accomplished in a safe manner with tenants in place,” said Katy Darnaby, a Core Spaces spokeswoman.

She said about 550 residents will be affected, but tenants told Noozhawk that the number of people is much higher and closer to 1,000.

“We are allowing as many tenants as possible to continue living in the community until the end of their current lease term,” Darnaby said. “We have been able to honor the full lease terms for nearly all our existing tenants.

“We recognize that any relocation is a hardship for residents.”

However, Core Spaces may not have anticipated the community backlash.

Immediately after tenants spoke out, Santa Barbara County Second District Supervisor Laura Capps moved swiftly into action.

On Wednesday morning, Capps and her chief of staff, Chris Henson, were out walking the neighborhood, talking to tenants to glean information and offer their support as they pursue options to stave off the evictions.

“My heart goes out to our neighbors being displaced, and I hope to find solutions to alleviate the stress and burden of finding a new home in a very difficult rental market,” Capps said.

She had been working with the tenants to connect them with various organizations, including 2-1-1, the Isla Vista Tenants Union, the Legal Aid Foundation, the UCSB Associated Students Legal Resource Center, the UCSB Financial Crisis Response Team and others.

Capps said the evictions hurt the community’s most vulnerable.

“This travesty is happening to families who have lived in this complex for decades, diligently paying their rent each month so that they may provide a secure space for their children,” Capps said. “It is happening to students, who struggle each year to find housing due to UCSB’s failure to provide housing for its students.”

Darnaby said the company will keep the community posted.

“We will be complying with all applicable legal requirements, and our team will continue to keep residents and local media informed of our timeline and ongoing next steps,” Darnaby said.

Resident Kevon Ha was walking his dog Wednesday out front of his apartment. He was one of the people who received an eviction notice.

“It seems like they all want to cut us off as soon as possible so they can do their renovations,” Ha said. “There’s easily a thousand people who are going to be looking for new places to live at the end of this year.”

The eviction notices were unclear, Ha said. They noted that tenants had the option of leaving within 60 days of when the notice was served, or by Aug. 6.

Ha’s lease ends at the end of August. He said many students, including his roommates, have summer school classes, and now they will have to find a new place to live.

“This is going to exacerbate how bad the housing crisis in Isla Vista already is,” Ha said.

Ha, a senior at UC Santa Barbara, is originally from Los Angeles, and he said he can’t wait to leave the area and the conditions of Isla Vista.

“As someone who is not from Santa Barbara County, to see the dichotomy between high-income and low-income Santa Barbarans, it’s kind of pathetic,” Ha said. “So much of Santa Barbara, in my opinion, should not be what it is infrastructurally.”

The Isla Vista Tenants Union has started a Facebook group to help with the situation. An item on a posted fact sheet in the group states that “if they don’t have permits, this might be a good legal unlawful detainer (eviction lawsuit) defense.”

For Soto and her son, the situation is daunting. She has a Section 8 subsidized housing voucher to live at the apartment. Her son has an individualized education plan and attends Isla Vista Elementary School.

The eviction notice comes after she and other tenants already had to relocate for three weeks in January because the previous owners said they needed to fix mold and flooding because of the storms.

“When we received notice that we had new owners, it kind of gave us hope that we might have repairs actually done,” Soto said. “They spent most of December in and out of (the) houses. We didn’t really have much privacy the past few months. They didn’t really care about our situation. It’s pretty sad to see.”

“It’s just about money. A lot of these families have been living here for decades. You have six to eight people living in a one-bedroom house because that’s all that they can afford.”

Noozhawk staff writer Joshua Molina can be reached at jmolina@noozhawk.com .