In first electoral run since his recall, Chris Krohn aims to stop the ‘selling off’ of Santa Cruz to developers as mayor

Chris Krohn says he wasn’t really considering running for Santa Cruz mayor even six months ago, but when he kept hearing concerns that there might be only one candidate — longtime politico Ryan Coonerty — he decided to go for it. He sees a lack of candidates as a problem, adding that, while he likes District 3 County Supervisor Justin Cummings personally, him running unopposed for reelection to that seat is “bad for democracy.”

“I’ll never attack Ryan on his character, integrity or anything like that, because I think he loves Santa Cruz and just has a different vision of Santa Cruz than I have,” Krohn said of Coonerty. “I think the folks who are running now all have different, particular interests that we want to put forward, and they’re not the same, but it’s much more wide-ranging and promotes a debate and discussion.”

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Krohn said the Santa Cruz County Democratic Central Committee’s failure to reach a consensus on endorsements for the Santa Cruz city races shows that the organization has also opened up to more perspectives.

“It was a resounding victory for the reason all of us ran,” he said. “We all felt like, ‘Wow, this is amazing. We’re getting a conversation here.’”

Krohn has lived mostly in Santa Cruz since 1983, with stints in Washington, D.C., working on political asylum applications for Salvadorans and Guatemalans, and in Nicaragua, where he helped run and teach at a language school. He was drawn to Santa Cruz when he heard about the late Mike Rotkin, one of the few mayors in the country who called himself a socialist. Krohn attended UC Santa Cruz and connected with Rotkin, who co-founded the university’s Community Studies program.

Krohn has served two separate terms on the Santa Cruz City Council, the first from 1998 to 2002, serving as mayor in 2002. His second term was to run from 2016 to 2020, but he did not finish it, as he and fellow councilmember Drew Glover were recalled in March 2020. Now, he’s returning to electoral politics to push back against what he sees as “selling off Santa Cruz to outsiders.”

“Are these people producing housing for folks who live here? My contention is they are not,” he said, arguing that much of the new housing mostly caters to second-home buyers or people in the tech industry. “I’m afraid they want to bring in a different class of people.”

Krohn also takes issue with the potential housing development planned for the site of The Catalyst. “I think the city could do something to save that venue, or at least designate another venue before they’re out of business,” he said. “Because you know that music venue is not going back there. Nobody’s gonna want to live above a nightclub.”

Krohn said one of his first priorities is advocating for a town hall meeting for residents to discuss development in the city. He said he’d want to include people from various perspectives, including Yes In My Backyard (YIMBY) advocates, homeowners associations and more, including people from jurisdictions such as Santa Monica and Los Angeles involved in lawsuits against the state.

“The folks on the council want this development, and they’re using ‘my hands are tied’ as a way of saying the state is doing this,” he said. “We could slow it down a lot.”

Krohn said his vision of successful development is two- to four-story projects that better fit the scale of Santa Cruz. He said he also would push for city staff to work with affordable housing providers rather than luxury housing developers; he believes the city has too much high-end housing in the pipeline. He pointed to Paris, which he said has high-rises in only a specific part of the city, despite a much larger population than Santa Cruz. He said he’s glad that Measure C, a real estate transfer and parcel tax, passed in November, but thinks it could have gone even further and taxed the most expensive properties more aggressively.

Krohn said he thinks the dwindling of homeless services, such as the closure of Housing Matters’ day services, is serious, and that social services are “paramount to the progressive era.” He said that while he understands Housing Matters’ decision, he thinks the nonprofit can’t just take the services away with no alternative.

“[Housing Matters] has a vulnerable population moving into those new places and they’re going to have to go through that gauntlet of human misery, so I get that,” he said, adding that it reminds him of when the city moved to close the encampment between Highway 1 and the Gateway Plaza. “It wasn’t like, ‘Where are we going to locate folks? This might not be the appropriate place,’ they just wanted to get those people out of there.”

Krohn said he’d look to expand a county program that pairs a nurse and social worker together to respond to nonviolent and mental health crises. He said he himself used the program to check on his brother dealing with mental health issues, and the responding social worker got his brother proper medication and treatment at a Capitola nursing facility. 

“Let the police do what they do best if they’re going after criminals,” he said. “A social worker nurse program is expensive, but so are police officers.”

Krohn said pulling out of the Flock Safety contract was the “most progressive thing I’ve seen the city council do.” He said he wouldn’t support automated license-plate readers of any kind, and expressed concern with Coonerty’s willingness to explore the technology.

Should he win the mayorship, Krohn said other top priorities would be working to fill vacant storefronts, improve the city’s bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure and prepare for federal immigration enforcement, particularly by barring the feds from using city-owned property and training city employees on how to deal with agents, should they come to the city.

Krohn was recalled after he was accused of mistreating city staff and fellow councilmembers. He argues, however, that the impetus for the recall went well beyond personal or political disagreements. He said he and a short-lived progressive majority were “focused on the most vulnerable people in our community” as well as social justice issues and affordable housing, which the current council has strayed from.

“It has much to do with capital, has to do with money, and we didn’t represent those interests,” he said. “Santa Cruz is a very valuable place, and this city council is not protecting that value. It is denigrating the value, and it’s giving the value away to these outside developers. I’m running for city council to bring about balance in that relationship.”

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