No, Measure C isn’t a ‘Keeley project’ — and the City of Santa Cruz is keeping its housing promises

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Every good opinion writer is going to use some selectivity in presenting “facts.” So it was with Keven Cook’s most recent Lookout commentary, written in the aftermath of Measure C’s success in the November election. Cook lays out many suspicions and tries to raise doubts about the Santa Cruz City Council’s work on affordable housing.

Of course, I will select some different facts (and offer fewer opinions) as I attempt to undermine some of Cook’s arguments and assertions.

Starting at the top of his op-ed, Cook repeats the trope that Measure C, also known as the Workforce Housing Affordability Act, was pretty much Santa Cruz Mayor Fred Keeley’s baby. As one of the other “parents” present at Measure C’s birth, I could feel insulted. 

However, I’m not – and that’s not my concern here. My concern is that Cook persists in minimizing the collaboration of dozens of people in the development of Measure C. And he ignores the wide range of organizations and individuals who either endorsed or worked on behalf of Measure C. 

MORE ON MEASURE C: Read Lookout’s news and Community Voices opinion coverage here

Cook paints a great picture – if you are trying to make Measure C appear to be some kind of sinister and/or less than thoughtful affordable housing effort. Unfortunately for him, he’s painting a fanciful drawing rather than presenting an accurate picture.

Measure C – because it was a collaborative effort trying to address a range of concerns – was an imperfect, but quite reasonable, compromise. Clearly, 56% of the voters thought it was a fairly good one. (It ended with 56%, not the 54% mentioned in Cook’s op-ed.) The actual numbers were 13,575 in favor of C and 10,604 opposed. He tries to emphasize the importance of the no votes but – as we all know – it’s better in elections for the wishes of the majority to be honored.

Which brings me to my next issue: UC Santa Cruz votes. Cook suggests two things here. First, that UCSC students might have been the deciding factor in this. That is easy to debunk. If one removes all the votes from UCSC campus precincts, Measure C still would have achieved a majority vote. Case closed. 

The second thing is that UCSC students don’t have the same ties to the community as the rest of us. Let me suggest something different: 

If I were a UCSC student, I sure as hell would believe that voting on a local housing measure would not only be my right – it would also be something very important to me as a student trying to find a place to live in this rough housing market. Each of us brings our own self-interest to the ballot box. 

I hope we won’t start minimizing the importance of other voters’ concerns simply because they don’t align with our own. Let’s remember that thousands of students have jobs here and pay taxes here. Students and student concerns are permanent fixtures in our community. 

Let’s accept this reality and move on.

Let’s go next to the most important part of Cook’s argument: that we can’t trust the city government and the city council to follow through on the affordable housing commitments in both Measure C and the city’s housing plans. There are plenty of reasons these days to have little faith in elected officials and in government. 

However, to simply lay our generalized distrust of government on Santa Cruz’s affordable housing efforts is, to put it bluntly, wrongheaded. If a government entity actually has a good record on a particular area of work, that needs to be recognized rather than presumed to be lacking.

So let’s look at that record on affordable housing.

Between 2024 and 2027, the city of Santa Cruz will be bringing on more than 890 affordable apartments. Homes for 890 households with lower incomes. Homes for more than 2,000 people. 

In relation to our size, this is one of the best records in the state. (Only 2% of California cities met their state-mandated affordable housing targets in the eight-year period from 2017 to 2024, and Santa Cruz is in that 2%.) 

Every one of these apartments has rents set well below market rate. And these rent rates are legally locked in for 50 years or more. There are more of these rent-regulated apartments coming online downtown than there are unrestricted market-rate apartments coming online downtown in the same 2024-to-2027 time frame. 

Some folks, such as Cook, want us to believe that all the building happening around town has little to do with affordable housing. Clearly, they are misleading you.

Let’s take it one step further. They want you to think that the city is lax in its use of funds dedicated to affordable housing. However, they are misleading you again. 

The city housing department has been using its limited resources carefully – and it has leveraged a relatively modest amount of money flowing through the city’s Affordable Housing Trust Fund into hundreds of affordable apartments. The city does this by putting a modest amount of money up front to help an affordable project get started.

Once initiated with city support, a project becomes eligible for various state, federal and institutional funding. This is local government at its best: using funds wisely to build homes for people who work here and can’t afford an apartment here — and thereby creating a more balanced, healthy community. 

And, yes, these affordable apartments are going to local families and local workers. The city housing staff recently investigated the records of the most recently completed affordable apartment complexes and found that over 90% of the units were taken by folks either living or working locally.

There are several other assertions in Cook’s missive that need correcting. 

He waves around the unpopular Clocktower Center project downtown and the Food Bin project on Mission Street – both multistory buildings – to question the city’s use of funds for affordable housing. Misleading is too mild a word on this, since neither of these projects is using city funds and neither is an affordable housing project. 

It’s a nice scare tactic, but really just nonsense.

And finally, this one. 

The city is considering changing its procedures so that 100% affordable housing projects could be approved more quickly when they meet adopted standards. This would include elimination of “public hearings” on this specific type of project. 

Because of this change, Cook writes: “Isn’t eliminating public hearings what authoritarians do?”

Here’s the problem with that assertion/question. State law has already made it so that almost all these kinds of housing projects cannot be turned down by local government bodies. Thus, to have public hearings on these projects becomes an empty exercise.

The result, after the hearing, would always be the same: approval. What is useful and would remain in place is a city-mandated public community meeting where residents can make comments on the initial proposal before it is formally submitted to the city.

It seems to me that to continue the old city public hearing model we had become accustomed to would be a farce – and a reason for residents to become more frustrated and cynical. To put it bluntly, holding a “show” of democratic participation (a public hearing at the end of the planning process) that has no influence on the outcome – isn’t that what authoritarians do?

I do agree with Cook on one point. 

We should hold our local officials accountable and expect them to do what we’ve asked them to do. But we should also recognize good performance when we see it.

Personally, as an affordable housing advocate, I’d be inclined to support a councilmember who has performed quite well when it comes to affordable housing. And I would be disinclined to support candidates who want to create new obstacles to meeting our affordable housing needs. 

Cook and his allies actively worked to stop the building of more than 120 very affordable apartments included in the new downtown library/housing project. This makes me wonder if he’s looking for future candidates who will be accountable or just candidates who will slow affordable housing efforts.

Don Lane is a former mayor of Santa Cruz. He serves on the governing boards of Housing Santa Cruz County and Housing Matters and has been a homeowner for 40 years.