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Community Voices
Posted inOpinion from Community Voices
Letter to the editor: Law-and-order response to homelessness? I want no part of it.
Have something to say? Lookout welcomes letters to the editor, within our policies, from readers. Guidelines here. I am writing in response to an email I received regarding a new “law and order” approach to homelessness in Santa Cruz. Is this to be the new normal? Because if this city is going the way of […]
Posted inOpinion from Community Voices
We are planning commissioners: Santa Cruz can and should do better on affordable housing
Two veteran planning commissioners want Santa Cruz decision-makers to require more affordable housing. The city council, Cyndi Dawson and Sean Maxwell say, is too often more aligned with developers.
Posted inOpinion from Community Voices
Letter to the editor: Why do we keep enacting laws that punish the poor?
Have something to say? Lookout welcomes letters to the editor, within our policies, from readers. Guidelines here. To the editor:
Posted inOpinion from Community Voices
Stop the inflammatory comments at county fair board meetings; let’s ‘right the fairgrounds ship’
Misinformation is causing “the recent, inflammatory public behavior at the fair board meetings,” says longtime Santa Cruz County Fair volunteer Becky Steinbruner, who has attended meetings regularly since 2020. She insists new president Don Dietrich is doing a good job and has tough work to clean up years of neglect and lack of oversight. The fairgrounds has to follow state regulations, she writes — something she believes Dave Kegebein, the ousted fair manager and CEO, never did.
Posted inOpinion from Community Voices
Jazmine’s story: Where did the unhoused from the Benchlands go?
Lookout has been wondering what happened to the 250-300 people who lived in Santa Cruz’s largest homeless encampment, known as the Benchlands, after the city closed it in the fall. Most are untracked and untrackable, as they didn’t utilize city services. But we kept asking and looking. In this video, Community Voices talks to Jazmine, a massage therapist, whom we interviewed in August when she lived in a tent in the Benchlands. She now lives in a small trailer in the Santa Cruz Mountains. She tells us her post-Benchlands experience, talks about what it feels like to be unhoused, how easy it is to fall and how hard it is to get back up.
Posted inOpinion from Community Voices
Community Voices: Pajaro after the flood
In a video for Lookout’s Community Voices opinion section, photojournalist Kevin Painchaud talks to residents who have stayed behind in Pajaro after the small agricultural town was flooded when a levee along the swollen Pajaro River failed. If they leave Pajaro, to seek medicine or medical treatment, for example, they say they won’t be able to return.
Posted inOpinion from Community Voices
Happy Supreme Court anniversary, Mr. Gideon! Now let’s address the causes of mass incarceration
Do you know who Clarence Earl Gideon was? Heather Rogers, Santa Cruz County’s first public defender, reminds us why we should all celebrate an unhoused drifter who 60 years ago changed the American legal system by standing up for his right to a fair trial. She walks us through her first seven months on the job, supplies some statistics on our prison system and pushes us to take a hard look at mass incarceration: “I urge you to question whether prosecution and incarceration are the answer for conduct related to mental illness … where treatment is more likely to get better results,” she writes.
Posted inOpinion from Community Voices
Storm injustice: Pajaro residents deserve more than to be ‘penciled out’
Lookout columnist Claudia Sternbach is horrified by the mud, water and sludge oozing into her husband’s longtime Pajaro tractor business. But she is furious at the human impact of the floods. “People with low incomes and lesser means, who have so much stacked against them, continue to lose out in our society,” she writes. “Someone took a good look at the price of creating a levee that was much less likely to fail and weighed that against actual human lives and decided money was more important than the lives of those living right across the county line.”
Posted inOpinion from Community Voices
They say getting older isn’t for the weak, so I’m gonna need to get tough
Lookout columnist Claudia Sternbach has a succinct message: “Aging sucks.” Here, she humorously guides us through her sadness at the changes she’s noticed now that she’s a septuagenarian and offers a few bits of inspiration for those who, like her, struggle to hear in loud restaurants and order food on a computer, not via a human.
