Quick Take
Chris Krohn, a former Santa Cruz mayor and city councilmember, sees a shift he doesn’t like in city politics. Gone, he believes, are the days of grassroots, progressive fights for social services, parks, a women’s commission, pedestrian amenities and the greenbelt. “Santa Cruz,” he writes, is beginning to buckle under the weight of the current for-profit credo of “build-baby-build,” which he insists is “the local flavor” of the Trump mantra “drill-baby-drill.” The current council, he writes, “has been rapidly selling off our city’s seed corn.”
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Is the Santa Cruz progressive political era over?
The progressive era in Santa Cruz arguably began in 1972 when former county supervisor Gary Patton, and ex-mayors Celia Scott and Katherine Beiers, along with hundreds of fellow Santa Cruzans, stormed city hall and demanded the council save Lighthouse Field from the rapacious over-development sweeping through California in the 1970s. Later, in 1979, voters elected “socialist-feminist” candidates Mike Rotkin and Bruce Van Allen to a conservative-leaning city council. They joined liberal councilmember Bert Muhly, and the progressive era was off and running. Patton led a thin majority on the board of supervisors and progressives initiated monumental political and land-use changes throughout the county.
Today, the Santa Cruz City Council is producing benefits too, but only for corporate realtors and for-profit housing developers.
Some like to play Monday morning quarterback and insist that local politics changed forever with the acquisition of the Cowell Ranch by the University of California Regents, and the opening of UC Santa Cruz in 1965. This singular event likely propelled Santa Cruz from a sleepy, Republican backwater to a vibrant, politically engaged city. The opening of UCSC shifted the political landscape left, but it took several years to incubate into a leftward, only-in-California brand – not quite Berkeley and Santa Monica, but definitively progressive.
Ezra Klein, New York Times political columnist and podcaster and a UC alum, recently argued that American politics have taken a decidedly sharp turn and are perhaps forever changed by the political heft and fierce attacks on democracy by Donald Trump. The old Democratic and Republican parties are less relevant now, and it might be the Trump party that is most aligned with a narrow majority of the American electorate.
Santa Cruz politics have also changed dramatically in recent years. The rhetoric and tone of local political discourse has come to mirror some of the Trumpian rhetoric of the Washington, D.C., power struggle. As I see it, the voters of Santa Cruz did not vote for the hundreds of new market-rate housing units now littering our central city. With Sandy Brown off the city council, we now have a solid pro-developer, pro-real estate industry cohort of office-holders led by a former progressive, but now born again, neo-liberal mayor running our community.
Santa Cruz is beginning to buckle under the weight of the current, for-profit credo of “build-baby-build.” This view is decidedly the local flavor of the Trump mantra, “drill-baby-drill” and contrasts with the progressives’ public benefits strategy. The current council has been rapidly selling off our city’s seed corn for very little in what I believe will yield only luxury apartment units, more traffic and greater pressure on our limited water supply.
A walk down either Pacific Avenue or Front Street now affords vistas of a “new” Santa Cruz Wall Street – an unarticulated and unadorned TV flat screen of concrete sameness. Santa Cruz politics used to be centered in fighting climate change and conserving water. It’s now shrouded in cement and there’s talk of needing an energy-sucking desalination plant.
All of this is to say that any semblance of a once community-centered, laid-back beach town inhabited by nature-loving denizens is now precariously hanging in the balance. The new era of greed is well underway in Surf City.
The former bread and butter political issues of traffic, water and affordable housing are now political roadkills, trampled under the ruse of satisfying the needs of developers’ penciled-out bottom lines. The well-heeled status quo political advocacy group Santa Cruz Together – which spent more than $1 million to defeat rent control in 2022 – now puppeteers several seats at the current city council table.
Can the ironically named fringe group Take Back Santa Cruz be far behind? Are these rightward factions hoping to “Make Santa Cruz Great Again”?
In Trump’s America, everything that was once sacred to social justice advocates — the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, police review, LGBTQ rights, the environment — is all being trashed. And it’s only the start of his administration. Pete Hegseth, Russell Vought, Elon Musk, Kash Patel, Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller are all setting the public debate bar ever lower. In Santa Cruz, support for social services, parks, police review, a women’s commission, pedestrian amenities, bicycle lanes and the greenbelt – all critical goals during the progressive era – have now given way to downtown for-profit housing canyons, chamber of commerce golf outings (where still more deals are made), the squelching of the New Year’s Eve town clock celebration, wall-to-wall traffic and a water-intensive hotel industry, which continues to build more $300-a-night rooms.
Who is being served by Trump’s policies and who is benefiting from Santa Cruz’s era of greed?
It’s all been part of an impolite displacement of the goals and values once cherished by Santa Cruz voters. Call it “The Selling of Santa Cruz,” our local version of the 1969 Joe McGinniss classic, “The Selling of the President.” I’m channeling here the spirits of former progressive elected officials and activists Bert and Lois Muhly, Mardi Wormhoudt, Louie LaFortune, Keith Sugar, Bernice Belton, Paul Lee, Joyce Malone and the recently departed Paul Elerick and Peter and Celia Scott, all of whom took various stands during the progressive era for preserving a livable Santa Cruz against the developer exploitation of our community’s resources.
The progressive era was about people over profit, whereas the current one is marked by unlimited profit over the people.
Chris Krohn is a former Santa Cruz city councilmember and mayor, who for 20 years ran the environmental studies internship program at UC Santa Cruz. He retired last year.