Santa Cruz County shares 911 and libraries. Why not housing?

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When Aptos High School Principal Lisa Lansdale describes the housing crisis, she doesn’t start with rent.

She starts with the student who left without picking up a diploma.

The family, she said, was moving away — the cost of living had finally won — and there was no time to come back for a piece of paper.

That student is one of thousands. 

According to state projections, Santa Cruz County is on track for the steepest decline in school enrollment of any county in California — more than 21% over the next decade. Public school enrollment has already fallen about 16% in a decade — more than 6,500 K-12 students are now gone from our schools. Countywide, K-12 enrollment has already slipped to under 36,000 students, the lowest level since the mid-1990s, with roughly 6,000 more children projected to disappear from our classrooms by 2035. 

Here in Santa Cruz County, residents old enough for Medicare now outnumber the children in our K-12 schools.

This is what a housing crisis looks like after decades of not building enough housing, especially affordable housing.

It doesn’t just make housing expensive. It hollows out the community and lowers the quality of life for everyone. When you lose the students, you lose the teachers, too. During graduate school, one of my public health professors often described American healthcare this way: “It’s not a system. It’s a mess.” 

Housing in Santa Cruz County has the same problem. 

It’s not a housing system. It’s a collection of disconnected systems. 

The housing market does not stop at city limits, even if our institutions do. We already know how to solve regional problems that no single city can solve alone.

We do that with the 911 system. Santa Cruz County doesn’t operate five separate 911 call centers, although Scotts Valley does have its own system. Our public libraries also work together, instead of each city having its own. (Watsonville is an outlier.) 

Housing deserves the same kind of collaboration.

Instead of five jurisdictions largely solving housing on their own, we should build one regional institution whose job is to help them solve it together. 

Santa Cruz County should create a countywide regional housing trust — a “joint powers authority” that allows local governments to work together while leaving zoning decisions in local hands. Its mission would be simple: pool local funding, unlock state grants reserved for regional housing trusts and help finance permanently affordable homes for extremely low- and very-low-income families. 

Housing isn’t broken only because homes cost too much. 

It’s failing because no one is responsible for making the entire system work.

Families searching for affordable housing encounter a maze of agencies, waiting lists, forms, eligibility standards and websites. Affordable housing developers must assemble multiple funding sources before a shovel can hit the ground, adding delays and higher costs every time. Every jurisdiction has its own permitting process, priorities and requirements. Cities and the county often compete against one another for the same grants. 

None of these rules were written with bad intent. But together they produce friction, delay and inertia in a county that can least afford it.

The results are increasingly difficult to ignore. 

In recent years, the City of Santa Cruz has been the only jurisdiction in the county to meet its state housing targets. The county itself is falling behind. Watsonville, Capitola and Scotts Valley are nowhere close to meeting their goals. Smaller jurisdictions routinely cite limited staff capacity and resources as barriers to progress. Between 2018 and 2024, Scotts Valley added only five affordable housing units for low-income residents.

The problem is not individual. It is structural.

Housing has become too big and too interconnected for any one city to solve by itself.

Teachers priced out of Santa Cruz often move to Watsonville. Healthcare workers who can’t afford Live Oak look to Watsonville. Increasingly, families leave the county altogether. 

At Aptos High, where enrollment has dropped by 161 students since 2021, Lansdale told me most of her staff can’t afford apartments of their own, so they rent rooms in other people’s homes. Lansdale herself commutes 45 minutes each way, because she cannot afford to live in our county. The goal is not to create another layer of bureaucracy, it’s to standardize and streamline it. 

A regional housing trust would not take away local control over zoning. Each city and the county would continue making its own land-use decisions through its own elected officials. 

This is not far-fetched. Orange County and the San Gabriel Valley are already doing this – with state approval. In 2023, the Legislature passed Senate Bill 20, which makes it easier for two or more public agencies to create housing trusts for low-, very-low- and extremely-low-income families. The legislation was inspired by the San Gabriel Valley Regional Housing Trust, which since 2020 has helped fund more than 1,000 affordable homes and roughly 130 units of interim housing. 

A regional trust can attract state and philanthropic money that individual cities can’t, with some trusts amplifying every local dollar several times over. It can acquire and preserve existing apartments as permanently affordable homes, offer a revolving loan fund, and steer resources to smaller cities like Scotts Valley and Capitola. 

Most importantly, trusts can do something our current system often cannot: connect the pieces.

Across Santa Cruz County, the ingredients for housing already exist. Some fire districts hold capital funds, but lack the expertise to develop housing that firefighters and paramedics can afford. School districts control surplus land but often lack the financing needed to turn a concept into a project. Private employers might have land, funding or a workforce need, but not the staff or experience to navigate affordable housing development. 

We have land in one room, money in another, expertise somewhere else and no institution whose job is to bring them together. 

Consider the 172-acre former cement plant in Davenport. Educators, firefighters and community leaders have discussed the possibility of workforce housing, a new school and other public-serving uses. It is the kind of ambitious, multi-agency project that could benefit the entire county.

A regional housing institution could make that happen. 

It could also make life easier for all of us. Right now, we have a maze of separate systems to navigate. Every apartment requires a new application. Imagine a single countywide application portal where people provide information once and gain access to multiple affordable housing opportunities. Other California communities have already demonstrated that this approach is possible.

Obviously, transparency would be key, and any regional housing institution should be  independently audited and governed by leaders directly accountable to the public. Decisions about housing should happen in the open, not behind closed doors.

The question Santa Cruz County can no longer avoid is simple: Are we willing to approach a countywide crisis with all hands on deck?

The student who left Aptos High without picking up a diploma is already gone.

So are thousands of others.

The question is not whether Santa Cruz County can afford to create a regional housing institution.

It’s whether we can afford another decade of watching 6,000 more students and their families leave, while every jurisdiction tries to solve the crisis alone.

Kevin Norton lives in Santa Cruz and has a background in public health.