Here’s what the Santa Cruz city election results say about growth, labor, the unhoused and door hangers

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The election returns are mostly in and – as I said in my previous column – our clearest message in the city of Santa Cruz is the end of the era of no-growth politics.  

Measure M, which called for a vote of the people on any building heights or other development features in excess of current zoning, suffered roughly a 60%-40% defeat. Most had thought the outcome would be closer.

It looks like all of the candidates for the city council who associated themselves with the Yes on M campaign also went down to defeat. This should not be misinterpreted as a swing to the “right” in Santa Cruz. City voters supported both county and city sales tax measures  – meaning the voters trust local governments to use the revenue wisely in supporting homeless and other social services along with disaster relief, environmental efforts and other programs.

In the city election, the four (likely) victorious council campaigns cooperated with the No on M campaign, the two sales tax measures – Yes on K and L – and local Democratic Party state and national candidates to fund a door hanger that went to every registered voter in the city. 

Voters who had not returned ballots by the weekend before the election received the door hanger a second time.

The door hanger certainly influenced the election, but it isn’t the reason all these measures and candidates won. So, it is worth some further analysis.

From the middle 1980s when the progressives took over Santa Cruz local government from conservatives until the progressive split in 1996 over a large proposed housing project at Terrace Point on the far Westside of Santa Cruz, the Santa Cruz Action Network (SCAN) produced a single door hanger every election that supported local progressive candidates and issues and Democratic Party candidates at the state and federal levels.

After the 1996 split, the more pragmatic, pro-housing wing and the more idealistic anti-development wing of the progressive community produced separate and opposing door hangers for each election. Opposition by some to the less than absolutely progressive platforms of some of the state and federal local officials meant that quite often the more idealistic door hangers did not include every Democratic candidate. This, in my view, made them less effective in getting voters to support that door-hanger slate.

In this recent election, there was only one combined campaign door hanger, as described above. 

One should not discount the impact of all of the people from the various campaigns who carried this door hanger around the city. The group had enough volunteers to require each to walk only half a precinct, when in the past some individuals had to walk several to get the whole city covered.

Most of those walkers had a partner and many friends through whom they expressed their commitment to the slate. In a low-turnout election such as the one we just completed, those numbers can really make a difference. (It is worth noting that district elections here, as in Watsonville and other places, tend to have dramatically lower turnout than in citywide contests.)

In addition to the door-hanger advantage of the pro-housing side of the progressive community, another dynamic was at work. All candidates who were defeated on March 5 were endorsed by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the Monterey Central Labor Council. SEIU, which represents virtually all the local government employees in the county, dominates the Central Labor Council. It has more delegates than all other unions combined.

Through an anomalous history, SEIU and the Central Labor Council tend to make their endorsements based more on candidates’ environmental and slow or no-growth politics rather than their records or views on labor issues. 

I have found no evidence that these groups have endorsed candidates more likely to support higher wages, better working conditions or benefits for public employees than their opponents. In fact, the opposite is often true. This is in part a legacy of the work of revered and recently deceased labor activist Glen Schaller, but he was not alone in supporting these politics.

City of Santa Cruz union activists, themselves members of SEIU, were often frustrated by SEIU and Central Labor Council opposition to development projects that would have brought the city revenue to support wage increases for city employees. But they were never able to change those politics. 

Consistent with their long-term politics, in this election, SEIU and the Central Labor Council endorsed Measure M, and this further tied the losing candidates in the March 5 election to the unpopular measure.

It’s worth noting that Joe Thompson, UC Santa Cruz candidate in city council District 5, and well known for path-breaking work organizing Starbucks employees, was hurt by the record-low turnout of UCSC students living on campus in their district. To what extent this was related to student views on President Joe Biden’s support for the Israeli war in Gaza is unclear. For whatever reason, the registration rate of students on campus was low and the turnout even worse, and that is a key factor in why Thompson, who started their campaign early and had great endorsements, might be going down to defeat. All the campus votes have not been counted yet, so the race isn’t closed, but the math right now tilts against Thompson. I’ll be watching those results closely.

Because we do not have polling on voter views in local elections, this can only be speculation, but I would also add that I think that local voters simply found the more pragmatic and, importantly, programmatic approach of the four (likely) victors in the March 5 primary more attractive than the more aspirational and abstract politics of their opponents. 

Shebreh Kalantari-Johnson, Sonia Brunner, Gabriela Trigueiro and Susie O’Hara all associated themselves with the city’s existing programmatic approach to dealing with homelessness – one that reduced the city’s homeless population by 29% last year. It helps that the city has replaced its “whack-a-mole” approach of scattering large homeless camps with a program offering every homeless person removed from an area an alternative shelter or housing alternative.

Abstract demands that the city simply leave the homeless alone or provide all with housing, with no program for how that would be funded or organized, were not attractive to local voters. Abstract calls for compassion simply did not compete well with existing approaches that have started to prove effective.

Let me be clear: I don’t think the losers in the March 5 election in the city are poor candidates or dangerously radical. They are all smart people committed to serving. 

But, they were not willing to make the commitment to the incremental, programmatic approach necessary in dealing with our most difficult social problems. 

This work requires patience, a willingness to work with existing institutions, funding sources, and city staff over an extended period of time. The work is full of frustration and has little to offer in the way of big, overnight successes or bold moralistic statements. But, I think we are fortunate in having a city council for at least the next two years that will make as good a go of it as anyone can expect.