James Weller, a local housing advocate, thinks he has an answer to our community’s most vexing issue, the fact that most of us cannot afford to pay the exorbitant cost of housing. The state has mandated Santa Cruz County build more, Weller writes, but developers won’t build unless they can make a profit by charging high rents. “But what if we had a public subsidization fund so we could pay developers some fraction of their marginal cost per unit” so that more units could be low-rent dwellings, he asks.”Maybe we could pay them enough to make a profit on the deal.”
Opinion from Community Voices
Posted inOpinion from Community Voices
New housing is coming to our communities — be part of the process
The next six months will be transformative for Santa Cruz County. In that time, each city council and the county board of supervisors (for the unincorporated areas) will be adopting “housing elements” that will serve as a blueprint of how each community meets its state-mandated housing needs. The process is complex, write housing advocates Don Lane and Elizabeth Madrigal. But the decisions will affect everyone. It’s in everyone’s interest, they say, to get involved now.
Posted inOpinion from Community Voices
I’m a Mexican-American UCSC student and I’m sick of the performative activism in Santa Cruz County
Sebastián Valdez crossed the U.S-Mexico border every day starting at age 13 to go to school in the U.S. It cost him time and took a toll on his mental health. It also made him wonder what made a successful future hard to find at home. Now a sophomore at UCSC, he is frustrated with the “performative activism” he sees in Santa Cruz and with how misunderstood people like him are. “I want to be a catalyst,” he writes. “I want to encourage others to use their own voices and tell their own stories. An accurate historical record, told by those who lived it, is the only way to reinstate dignity in our communities and break racist misconceptions about who we are.”
Posted inOpinion from Community Voices
I’m a health care worker in Watsonville with four kids to feed: We need a $25/hour minimum wage
Nathaly Rodriguez is a lactation consultant in Watsonville and is tired of seeing her colleagues leave for better jobs and higher pay. People in our community need more services, she says. The answer is simple: higher wages. She advocates for the passage of state Senate Bill 525.
Posted inOpinion from Community Voices
Don’t trust the city: Oversized vehicle ordinance poses an existential threat to the unhoused
Reggie Meisler, an advocate for the unhoused, has a simple message for the California Coastal Commission members set to vote Thursday on the validity of Santa Cruz’s contentious oversized vehicle ordinance: Be wary. The city, he writes, has “had numerous opportunities to practice restraint” in ticketing and towing vulnerable people and has repeatedly proved itself untrustworthy. He says the ordinance is “discriminatory” and makes the lives of needy people worse.
Posted inOpinion from Community Voices
Where in the Bible does it say, ‘and thou shalt have guns?’
Lookout columnist Claudia Sternbach is outraged at the latest spate of gun violence gripping our nation. She blames the National Rifle Association and its hold on Republican politicians. “Can someone please tell me what the endgame is here?” she asks. “Can someone tell me when gun proponents and the NRA will say enough is enough?”
Posted inOpinion from Community Voices
Minority farmers on the Central Coast need relief now!
Small, mostly Latinx farmers across the Central Coast need more help than they are getting, write farmworker advocates Josefina Lara Chavez, Ronnie Lipschutz and Ann Lopez. These small farmers provide vegetables to local markets, including New Leaf, Staff of Life and our local farmers markets, but most lost their livelihoods in the winter storms and still remain unable to grow and sell crops. That has potentially left up to 750 farms with little or no income to cover their families’ and farms’ needs. “In the past, these farmers might have been able to return to fieldwork on larger farms, but even those have postponed planting due to storm damage,” the advocates argue. They need our attention and help now.
Posted inOpinion from Community Voices
The key to environmental stability for Santa Cruz County? Reliable, frequent public transit
A nearly $40 million infusion of state funding for public transit and transit-oriented housing is good news for our community, says Lookout politics columnist Mike Rotkin. It will kick-start needed climate-friendly improvements, including a push to make our buses carbon-neutral and establish a “bus on shoulder” lane for Highway 1. Transit is the biggest cause of greenhouse gasses locally, so getting more people to ride buses and bikes is key. But we can’t be the national leader we want to be — on par with cities like Boulder and Portland — without even more money, he says. He suggests a small sales-tax increase to get us there.
Posted inOpinion from Community Voices
The political is personal: Teen mental health and why it feels like ‘the end of the world’
Ami Chen Mills is worried about our planet, our youth — including her own daughters — and our politicians and leaders, who she feels are not taking up the biggest issues of our day. “Where are our leaders,” she writes, “on the threat of rising fascism and loss of women’s rights, which are girls’ rights, loss of history and loss of rights and belonging for LGBTQ+ people and Black people across the country?” Chen Mills leans on Buddhist teaching and her experience as a wellness teacher to reframe what it means to be an activist today and to push us to express our fears about climate change and other pressing issues more openly.
Posted inOpinion from Community Voices
Undocumented families in Pajaro need support: FEMA should not operate like an insurance company
Watsonville resident Takashi Mizuno is worried about his neighbors in Pajaro, many of whom lost everything to the storms and flooding. He doesn’t speak Spanish, but has been bringing his neighbors lemons from his tree as a gesture of goodwill and solidarity. “Lemons are my way of connecting,” he says. He also is trying to deliver an important message to undocumented Pajaro families with a child born in the U.S.: Apply for FEMA help. Apply again if you get rejected. And FEMA, he insists, is “mistreating” people by not handling applications fairly.