Quick Take
Have we built too much housing in Santa Cruz or not nearly enough? Housing activist and former Santa Cruz mayor Don Lane reminds us that Santa Cruz spent decades limiting growth. That, he insists, is the real cause of the crisis today. Fixing it will require more building, not less. He urges us to get our history and facts straight before the June and November elections.
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One of the big refrains I am hearing in local debates and which matters as we edge toward elections in June is: Haven’t we built enough already?
The short answer is no. The longer answer requires looking honestly at our past.
For decades, Santa Cruz and much of California stifled the construction of housing, especially rental housing. Over the past 40 years, Santa Cruz County’s population grew by roughly 80,000 people, but we blocked many housing projects and created a housing shortage. I use the word “we” because I spent many years on the Santa Cruz City Council (1988 to 1992 and 2008 to 2016), including several as mayor, and I was part of our community’s efforts to slow growth.
Our county fell about 5,000 housing units short of meeting our housing needs during this period, based on population growth in relation to housing units developed. And those of us who were here in 1980 remember that our housing market had an unusually low rental housing vacancy rate. Low vacancy rates are a prime indicator of a rental housing shortage.
Today, we are making real progress in catching up – but 40 years of shortage by community choice will take more than a few years to correct.
That won’t happen overnight.
Some of the discourse I am hearing in the community raises a fair point: Shouldn’t more of the county share the responsibility for new housing, rather than concentrating it in Santa Cruz and Watsonville?
Yes. But that shouldn’t become an argument for slowing down where building is already happening. Santa Cruz has long prioritized protecting open space and agricultural land, a value most residents strongly support. We need to keep doing that. On that, we all agree.
But that commitment comes with trade-offs. It means we need to place our new housing in areas that are already developed to some extent and in locations that reduce car dependence (transit hubs and areas where one can walk to basic services such as food stores and medical facilities) and close to where people work.
This means the best approach is to build most of our housing in Watsonville and Santa Cruz.
An important historical note for the city of Santa Cruz: Our voters adopted our Greenbelt measure – the original Measure O – in 1979 with several stated objectives. The first was to protect natural open space on the perimeter of the city. The second was to encourage affordable housing development, and the third was to encourage development that does occur in developed areas rather than on the perimeter.
This was a great idea – but the community truly embraced only the first item and neglected the second and third items. What we are seeing now is, in many ways, a delayed effort to fulfill that original vision.
If we are true to our greenbelt protection goals, we need to focus our housing growth downtown and along urbanized streets. We’re belatedly fulfilling a commitment our community made long ago when we adopted the Greenbelt measure.
Now comes the controversial part. State housing laws have accelerated this shift by limiting the ability of local governments to block development. These changes remain controversial. Some see them as an overreach that erodes local control. Others view them as a necessary response to a statewide housing crisis that local jurisdictions – including Santa Cruz – helped create.
I think it’s also fair to say the state did this because many communities – including Santa Cruz – had put up many obstacles to building and had followed the wishes of homeowners who believed community “character” needed preserving. While this was an understandable position, it had the consequence (sometimes intended and sometimes unintended) of leaving lower-income renters/workers/families out of a community.
I think the state’s action was an appropriate move toward housing justice and creating more balanced, inclusive communities. I understand that many are of the strong alternative opinion that the state went too far in removing local control of housing development and changing communities in negative ways.
Reasonable people can disagree on that balance. But the underlying problem is not in dispute: We do not have enough low- and middle-income housing.
Aesthetics, too, is a source of intense debate.
New buildings are often described as too tall or unattractive. These are subjective judgments, and opinions vary widely. What’s less subjective is that these buildings become homes – places where people who work in our schools, hospitals, restaurants and public services can live.
It’s also worth remembering that construction sites rarely inspire admiration. Buildings that look imposing or unfinished today often settle more comfortably into the landscape once completed, landscaped and occupied.
I would encourage folks to take a breath and try to withhold judgment on a new building until it’s finished. Like so many others, I hate how a seven-story building looks when it’s just a bunch of beams and scaffolding and hammering, but I’ve seen some of those buildings turn out quite nicely when fully painted and landscaped and the fences are gone.
Finally, no discussion of housing in Santa Cruz is complete without addressing the word “gentrification.”
Some argue that new development accelerates gentrification by bringing in wealthier residents. That concern would be more compelling if new housing were primarily replacing older, lower-cost units or if affordable housing weren’t being built alongside market-rate projects. In Santa Cruz today, neither is broadly the case.
There is, however, a different way to understand gentrification – one that turns the usual narrative on its head.
When housing supply is constrained over long periods, prices rise. Homes that once housed working- and middle-class families become accessible only to higher-income buyers. Over time, that process reshapes the entire community.
By that definition, decades of limiting housing development played a significant role in Santa Cruz’s rising exclusivity.
The one area of concern that seems more real is that the social and economic environment in the area around all these new buildings could change as more wealthy folks move into the market-rate apartments. Some hold the opinion that this will be a big problem. I think downtown Santa Cruz has always had a mix of businesses and services for the full economic spectrum, and it seems like the addition of higher-income, middle-income and lower-income households will simply maintain that nicely balanced reality.
If we want a more economically diverse community, we need more housing at all income levels. That includes subsidized affordable units and market-rate housing that reduce pressure on older, more modest homes that would be particularly suitable for younger families.
My larger view of the gentrification issue is that many of my old guard, “progressive” anti-development friends and peers have it backward.
They see the new building as gentrification. On the other hand, I see their (and sometimes my own) work to minimize housing development over a few decades as the real driver of Santa Cruz’s gentrification.
I believe our new housing push will reverse that long-term trend. We’ve seen so many homes that used to be the housing for our middle- and low-income workforce turn into homes for the upper-middle class and upper class over the past 40 or 50 years. This is classic gentrification: less and less housing for those on the lower end of the economic scale.
This begs the question: Is it OK to be part of the gentrification process as long as all you do is hold onto your single-family home while it at least quadruples in value and also vote for anti-development candidates and policies? (You didn’t really mean to make your house so valuable, did you?)
As voters consider housing in the months ahead, the most important step is not choosing a side – it’s understanding the issues and getting the facts right. From there, we can have a more honest conversation about the kind of Santa Cruz we want to be, and who gets to call it home.
Don Lane is a former mayor of Santa Cruz. He serves on the governing boards of Housing Santa Cruz County and Housing Matters and has been a homeowner for 40 years.
