Beyond the Super Bowl and the semiquincentennial: Your big sneak peek at 2026 entertainment events to come
You made it through a harrowing 2025 and a half-decade of challenge. Now, put aside your fears of catastrophic climate change, the collapse of American democracy, and AI data centers stretching from sea to shining sea — for just a moment — and plan some fun in the year ahead. Here’s an overview from Wallace Baine.
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OPINION: Santa Cruz will soon host 76% of homeless shelter beds in the county. That has to change.
Santa Cruz shoulders an outsized share of the county’s shelter beds, safe-parking sites and day services, despite making up less than a quarter of the population, local activist Kevin Norton writes in a Community Voices op-ed. That’s because when someone becomes homeless in Boulder Creek, Scotts Valley, Capitola or Soquel, they often end up in Santa Cruz — or sometimes Watsonville, he writes. Taxpayers in Santa Cruz also pay far more per person than other jurisdictions, spending, according to Norton, at least 100 times more on homeless services each year than residents of Scotts Valley. Norton calls for a more even distribution of shelters, day-service centers and affordable housing, arguing that the current system overloads a few neighborhoods while making it harder for homeless people to heal and reintegrate into the community. Read his opinion piece here.
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