Isla Vista’s Friendship Manor Moving to Santa Barbara’s Eastside

For more than half a century, the cream-colored cinderblock building on El Colegio Road in Isla Vista has been home to generations of South Coast seniors. Now, Friendship Manor — the affordable senior living community that took over a former UCSB-area dormitory in the 1970s — is preparing for its biggest change yet: a move across the community's invisible border to Santa Barbara's Eastside.

As the Santa Barbara Independent reported, the community's management announced this summer that Friendship Manor has purchased 711 N. Milpas Street — the longtime home of Capitol Hardware — with plans to build a purpose-designed senior living facility on the site, targeting a move-in by 2029.

Why the Move

The decision didn't come out of nowhere. Boardmember Eva Turenchalk, a land-use consultant by trade, told the Independent that the current building's origins have always been its limitation. Developers constructed it in 1966 as a private student dormitory; Christian Home Services Inc. bought it in 1973 and retrofitted it with an elevator, ramps, and a connecting walkway to the dining hall.

But a dorm is not a home designed for aging bodies. Turenchalk said the building has required repairs to its pipes and heater in recent years, and major maintenance work is especially hard to carry out in a building that is fully occupied. Management began openly searching for a better-suited property as early as 2010, though the Milpas site only came onto their radar last year, when word spread that it was headed to market.

The Eastside location, Turenchalk told the Independent, turned out to be a strong fit: it sits on a main corridor near grocery stores and public transit, and remains reasonably close to the beach — a perk of the Isla Vista location that some residents have particularly valued.

A Decade-Long Housing Saga Comes Full Circle

The Milpas Street property carries its own long history in Santa Barbara's housing debates. The city first flagged the parcel for housing back in 2011. Alan Bleecker, Capitol Hardware's longtime owner, and his partners filed a preliminary application for a mixed-use housing project in 2015 — a proposal that would spend the next decade winding through the Architectural Board of Review and City Council, in multiple iterations, while drawing extensive public comment about its four-story scale, architectural style, and neighborhood impacts.

The project evolved again in 2020, when local developer Ed St. George joined as investor and co-developer, bringing the proposal to 82 rental units, including 16 affordable units with preference for teachers and police officers. St. George exited in 2025, leaving Bleecker and partner Jay Bjorndahl as sole owners.

Bleecker told the Independent that after the lengthy entitlement process and rising construction and financing costs, selling the property became the best path forward.

For Friendship Manor, the timing was fortunate. The organization funded the purchase with proceeds from the 2025 sale of an adjacent Isla Vista lot to UCSB. Escrow opened last fall, leadership met with city staff to confirm they could build something suitable for seniors on the site, and the deal closed at the end of June.

What's Planned for Milpas Street

The new Friendship Manor will look quite different from the housing project that neighbors spent years debating. Instead of 82 rental apartments, plans call for a 156-room senior living building with a shared kitchen, plus eight housing units for staff. Because most residents won't own cars, parking will shrink dramatically — just 31 spaces. Amenities will include two large activity rooms, a library, and a theater.

The shift has already had a human cost on the current site: because the new building will have 55 fewer units than Friendship Manor now operates, the community stopped backfilling its rooms this summer, allowing the Isla Vista population to gradually wind down ahead of the move.

Turenchalk told the Independent the organization hopes to secure building permits by early next year.

A Win-Win on the Eastside

For Bleecker, the sale carries personal meaning. His father spent the last five years of his life at Friendship Manor, he said in a statement to the Independent. "I know firsthand what a special place it is and the important role it plays in our community," Bleecker said. He and Bjorndahl characterized the transaction as a win-win.

And Eastsiders worried about losing a neighborhood institution can breathe easy: Capitol Hardware isn't going anywhere. "We are not going out of business," Bleecker said. "We are simply moving half a block down the street to the Santa Barbara Plumbing building, where we will continue to operate."

For Santa Barbara — a city where senior housing and affordable housing more broadly remain persistent challenges — the arrival of a long-running senior community on a key commercial corridor represents a rare piece of good news: a site that sat tangled in development disputes for a decade will now serve some of the community's most vulnerable residents, in a building actually designed for them.

The move also closes a chapter in Isla Vista, where Friendship Manor has quietly anchored senior life amid a neighborhood defined by its student population since 1973. If all goes to plan, by 2029, that legacy will continue on Milpas Street — a short drive from the beach its residents have long loved.