Isla Vista is a spirited college town of nearly 20,000 people crammed into a half-square mile of the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara. This book tells the story of how local politicians, uncaring officials at the University, and greedy developers and landlords conspired to build a company town that 60 years later remains 96 percent renters and 30 percent paved over. It’s the gripping tale of how residents rose in rebellion during the tumultuous year of 1969-70, during which they burned down the local Bank of America and put Isla Vista on the front page of newspapers across America. This book is also the only account of how a community rose from the ashes of that fire and how its youthful planners created a vision of a self-governing and environmentally sound village that continues to resonate with each new generation of students, but whose implementation has more often than not been contained by the alliance that created it.