Quick Take
Santa Cruz’s plans to enforce strict parking restrictions to facilitate street sweeping face scrutiny from the California Coastal Commission on Thursday amid claims it unfairly affects those living in their vehicles. Proponents argue it’s a crucial environmental measure; critics warn it enacts “hostile architecture” against the unhoused.
On Thursday, the state’s powerful coastal land-use agency will determine whether the City of Santa Cruz can expand its street-sweeping program in a way that local homeless advocates say targets houseless people who live in their cars.
In August, the Santa Cruz City Council agreed to pilot a new way of conducting its street-sweeping program on the lower and upper Westside and in Seabright. Between 5 and 7 a.m. on Tuesday, the city would prohibit parking on one side of the street, and on Thursday the opposite side, so a sweeper vehicle could access curbs where trash and debris often collect. Cars that don’t move could be towed and ticketed.
The city’s existing street sweeping program does not require a curb cleared of cars, nor does it threaten any sort of towing.
Soon after the city council’s approval, Reggie Meisler of homeless advocacy outfit Santa Cruz Cares appealed the decision to the California Coastal Commission, which has authority over only the lower Westside streets touched by the program: stretches of Mission Street Extension, Natural Bridges Drive, Delaware Avenue and Swanton Boulevard.
Meisler argued, as he and his group have since this proposal went before Santa Cruz’s Transportation and Public Works Commission in February, that the program overwhelmingly affects unhoused people living in their cars. He said the new rules create a “hostile architecture” for a vulnerable population, and that the program fails to protect coastal access, one of the principal responsibilities of the Coastal Commission.
However, the state agency’s staff is recommending the 12-member Coastal Commission reject the appeal, arguing that the city’s street sweeping program does not raise any substantial issues for the commission to consider.
‘The project, at its core, is a basic municipal street sweeping function, designed to be carried out in a manner that does not raise any significant public coastal access problems,” Coastal Commission analyst Kiana Ford wrote in her report, emphasizing, too, that the program is only a one-year pilot meant to “assess its efficacy at reducing trash and protecting the environment.”
However, the Coastal Commission has shown some skepticism about the city’s programs and their impact on the unhoused in the past. In May, led by Coastal Commissioner Justin Cummings, a former mayor of Santa Cruz and current District 3 Santa Cruz County supervisor, the Coastal Commission slowed the city’s contested ban on overnight parking for oversized vehicles.
Critics of the parking ban said it targets unhoused people who live in their vehicles. After years of lawsuits and back and forth, the Coastal Commission in May 2023 granted the city a one-year coastal permit so the city could pilot the program. As the one-year pilot was about to expire, the city requested a five-year extension of the program. Instead, the commission voted 8-1 to give the city a two-year extension, saying Santa Cruz did not yet have enough data to determine whether it had been a success deserving of such a lengthy extension.
The city has already partially watered down its street sweeping tow-away proposal. Originally, the parking enforcement was supposed to stretch between 5 and 9 a.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but is now only 5 to 7 a.m.
The Coastal Commission will meet at 9 a.m. on Thursday in San Francisco. You can stream the meeting here.
Have something to say? Lookout welcomes letters to the editor, within our policies, from readers. Guidelines here.