Quick Take
On Wednesday, the City of Santa Cruz's zoning administrator approved a coastal permit for a street sweeping pilot in the Harvey West area, part of the Westside and in Seabright. The program, which has drawn criticism from advocates for the unhoused community who say the city's aim is to punish people living in their cars, still needs to be approved by the city council.
UPDATE: 5:30 p.m., Wednesday, April 17 – A street sweeping pilot program targeted for the Harvey West area, a Westside neighborhood and Seabright in the city of Santa Cruz earned a preliminary thumbs-up from a city zoning official Wednesday, despite pushback from advocates for the houseless community who said the program purposely targets vulnerable residents living in their cars.
Zoning Administrator Samantha Haschert granted a coastal permit for the new program, which plans to send street sweepers through the three neighborhoods twice a week. Although the city already runs a residential street sweeping program, this new effort employs parking restrictions, and threatens to tow away any vehicles parked along the curb on sweeping days.
The tow-away threat is what Santa Cruz Cares, a local organization advocating for houseless residents, claimed unnecessarily targets people living in their cars. The Westside streets included in the pilot program — Swanton Boulevard, Delaware Avenue, Mission Street Extension and Natural Bridges Drive — have been hotspots for people living in their recreational vehicles and other oversized vehicles.
The program now needs approval from the city council before a planned summer-to-fall launch. However, Reggie Meisler of Santa Cruz Cares told Haschert he planned to appeal the decision to the California Coastal Commission, the state’s influential land-use arm that oversees its 1,100 miles of coastline.
ORIGINAL REPORT: A new street sweeping pilot program the City of Santa Cruz says is aimed at clearing trash and debris has drawn sharp objection from local advocates who say the effort only further targets people living in their vehicles.
If approved, it will be the city’s first street sweeping program that employs parking restrictions and the threat of tow-aways during cleaning days, which advocacy organization Santa Cruz Cares says harms people who might be living in their cars. In the three sections of the city proposed for the program — the lower and upper Westside, and Seabright — cars would be blocked from street parking between 5 and 9 a.m. on cleaning days.
The pilot earned unanimous approval from the city’s Transportation and Public Works Commission in February. The lower Westside sector, which includes stretches of Mission Street Extension, Natural Bridges Drive, Delaware Avenue and Swanton Boulevard, requires a special permit because of its proximity to the coast; the city will seek that coastal permit during a public meeting in front of the city zoning administrator at 10 a.m. Wednesday. The program will also eventually need a thumbs-up from the city council since it employs new parking restrictions and tow-away penalties. If approved, the staff is aiming for a summer or fall launch.
City public works and planning staff say trash and debris accumulation data drove the street selection for the pilot program. However, a city map of data from a 2023 trash report shows that Swanton Boulevard and Natural Bridges Drive do not meet the “moderate trash” threshold used by the city to select which streets to pilot the no-parking program on.
Before the city’s overnight oversized vehicle parking ban took effect at the end of 2023, these Westside streets, as well as Delaware Avenue and Mission Street Extension, were known to be hot spots for people living in their recreational vehicles and trailers to park indefinitely. The oversized vehicle ordinance, which banned large recreational vehicles from parking on city streets from midnight to 5 a.m., cleared many of them out, but through the use of tickets and fines. The street sweeping program would extend that prohibition to 9 a.m. on cleaning days, and threatens to tow away those who don’t comply.
Reggie Meisler, a member of Santa Cruz Cares, said the new rules and proposed tow-away zone signs create a “hostile architecture,” aggressive in its message that poor people should stay away.
“It’s just an extra form of intimidation,” Meisler said. “Anything that focuses where houseless people park and combines it with two threats [tickets for overnight parking and tow-aways for street sweeping], that makes it seems like it’s not about trash and debris cleanup.”
In 2015, the California State Water Resources Control Board mandated that all jurisdictions stop the flow of debris and trash into natural waterways by 2030. To meet this mandate, the city has been talking since 2018 about a street sweeping program with more teeth, Eric Dhakni, a senior planner with the public works department, said. The city’s existing street sweeping program moves its way through neighborhoods whether or not cars line the curbs, but Dhakni said trash too often gets caught between the cars and curbs, and then makes its way into storm drains and out to Monterey Bay.
“Tow-away is a last-resort protocol,” Dhakni told Lookout. “The cars blocking the gutter and access to the curb is what limits the effectiveness of the street sweeping.”
As for the selection of the lower Westside streets, Dhakni, said Delaware Avenue and Mission Street Extension reach the moderate trash accumulation threshold. Dhakni said Natural Bridges Drive meets this moderate standard as well, a claim that contrasts from what the city’s own maps appear to show.
Swanton Boulevard is the only residential street proposed for inclusion in the street sweeping pilot. Dhakni said this isn’t based on the same data, but on observations from staff about trash accumulation on the street.
During the February transportation commission meeting, Commissioner Scott Harriman voiced skepticism about the pilot before voting to advance it.
“We all want clean streets, we all want clean water, but only two streets had significant long-term poor street maintenance and street trash,” Harriman said. “I want to express concern that this is pretty – I don’t want to say hardcore – but it’s a pretty interesting way to go about balancing clean streets and clean water.”
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