Quick Take
The Santa Cruz City Council is moving forward with a new accountability and preference system to ensure local workers and residents get priority for affordable housing. Bruce Van Allen, a former Santa Cruz mayor and a longtime housing advocate, is a member of the progressive group that pushed for this resolution. He says the move marks a major step in community trust and will result in a public dashboard that will track affordable units and how quickly they fill. He believes this sort of accountability will boost transparency and enable better community conversations about affordable housing progress. The resolution, he writes, aligns with Measure C, the Workforce Housing Affordability Act, which he and other group members now support.
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Lookout Santa Cruz readers might be interested to hear about progress in local accountability around affordable housing.
In recent years, skepticism has abounded about whether local residents and workers actually benefit from affordable housing programs. This skepticism has hampered local support for sorely needed affordable housing.
I – along with a group of local activists and affordable housing advocates – decided that criticizing and complaining wasn’t improving anything.
We studied recent civil grand jury reports on housing and the recommendations for tracking and verifying that the city is implementing affordable housing preferences for residents and local workers. We researched policies and practices that are working in other communities, and we verified how cities may enforce local preferences under state and federal anti-discrimination laws.
We formulated a proposal that addresses accountability head-on.
We are pleased that this past Tuesday, the Santa Cruz City Council adopted our proposal. The action by the mayor and city council is a significant step forward in the city’s response to the affordable housing crisis.
To begin with, the proposal strengthens the city’s existing preference system to ensure that local workers and local residents, particularly those facing displacement, get priority for occupancy of affordable housing. It also establishes a comprehensive mechanism for continuously verifying, tracking and assuring compliance with local preferences, and for reporting the results to the community.
That will mean some sort of portal or dashboard that shows who is getting into affordable units, how fast they are filling and who is getting priority, while protecting residents’ privacy. In order to believe the city is doing work – particularly in these times of government skepticism – it is important to be able to see it.
That is what this does. We want, over time, to see the numbers of people we are helping into affordable housing go up.
Schools have to regularly report test results, attendance and more. That is what I imagine for this. It will take time to put into place. But it will be worth it.
Local preferences for city residents and workers help stabilize families and the community. We all benefit when better tracking gives us the information to improve access by locals to affordable homes.
The next step is that the city staff will come back with recommendations for implementation. And, to make these changes more durable, the city council will create an ordinance, likely sometime in January.
Ensuring local workers are given preference for affordable housing will help more people cut long commutes to their jobs in Santa Cruz, reducing climate impacts and congestion and freeing time for workers’ personal lives.
The city council’s adoption of this proposal is an important step in building trust and transparency in city government and in responding to the concerns of many across the community’s political spectrum who support good government.
Displacement due to rising rents and prices disrupts personal lives while schools, businesses and nonprofits lose dedicated, experienced workers. We are all tired of seeing friends and neighbors forced out. The adopted city council action adds affordable housing preferences for local households at risk of displacement.
We know that a single city council action does not address every concern or solve every problem in our affordability crisis. But we believe that this action is a necessary and significant step forward in how our community responds to the crisis.
We salute the mayor and city council for adoption of this proposal as a crucial step that improves trust and transparency in city government.
The council action establishes enforcement of the local preferences written in Santa Cruz Measure C, the Workforce Housing Affordability Act, to raise locally controlled funds for local affordable housing. As a result of this passage, our group of local progressive activists now support Measure C.
We look forward to monitoring the city’s progress from this point forward and reaffirm our commitment to affordable housing that truly meets the needs of the people who live and who work here – who make Santa Cruz the special place it is.
Bruce Van Allen is a longtime advocate for affordable housing and tenants’ rights. He currently serves as an elected trustee on the Santa Cruz County Board of Education and is a former mayor of Santa Cruz. Members of the local preferences working group of progressive activists include: Gillian Greensite, Sandy Brown, Lira Filippini, Rick Longinotti, John Hall, Lisa Eckström, Russell Brutsché and Len Beyea.