With housing at the heart of Santa Cruz’s election wrangling, a question: How do we make room for others?

I don’t complain about traffic anymore. Same goes for crowded beaches or long lines at Safeway or the chaos of the Trader Joe’s parking lot.

Cue my wife spit-taking double spice chai all over the kitchen. OK, fair enough. Let me amend that — I don’t like to complain about such things. It feels, and forgive the technical term here, icky. 

Griping about some things — the Supreme Court, the Dodgers, boomers, the electoral college — that can be enjoyable in a cathartic way, especially over adult beverages with others who share your frustrations and don’t mind if you “work blue,” as the old comedians used to say.

But traffic and crowds, that belongs in a different category. You don’t have anywhere to stand, morally speaking, in that case. Getting peeved at traffic and long lines is to judge others solely for the crime of being in the same place at the same time as you. How dare someone else who is probably very similar to you try to do the same thing that you are doing.

You’ve probably heard it said before — “You’re not in traffic; you are traffic.” But a part of you doesn’t quite believe it. Deep down, you really feel that there should be a diamond lane with your name on it, until that better angel on your shoulder reminds you, “You’re not special, Jack. How about shut up and wait your turn?”

This confounding conundrum is on my mind as we are all again sucked into yet another election-year vortex. The battle for the soul of democracy can wait for the November election, but the California primary, arriving on Tuesday, has a different cast to it. Particularly on the local level, not all issues are created equal. One dominates our conversations and our arguments: housing … the lack of, the cost of, the location of. 

You can argue that Measure M, the ballot measure that seeks to put up for a public vote any housing project in the city of Santa Cruz that goes above a certain height, is about many things: standing up to the remorseless greed of big real-estate money, mindless panic about big new buildings popping up everywhere, giving Santa Cruz residents a say in what their city becomes, NIMBYs flexing the power their privilege affords them, saving the proudly granola-and-sandals vibe of Santa Cruz. Strip all that away, however, and you’re left with one vexing question. It’s at the heart of not just the Measure M debate, but of many of the various races for public office: How do we provide decent and affordable housing for our friends and neighbors who need it? And where? And, maybe even more difficult to grok, why?

The housing dilemma is related to the crowds-and-traffic problem because it is not, unlike the prevailing national political debate, a clash of irreconcilable values. It is rather an issue of distributing resources among mostly people who value the same things, or at least say they do. Local housing issues are not red/blue; they’re more about the green. 

What makes it all the more thorny is that there is no simple supply/demand solution to this problem. Demand is high, yes. But, at the same time, in recent years California generally has been losing population, for the first time ever (locally, since the pandemic, Santa Cruz County has fallen back to 2010 population levels), and housing prices, though they are mostly the cause of that outflux, have yet to dip to reflect that fact. Many people I know in Santa Cruz County can point to any number of homes in their neighborhoods that are unoccupied, used as a second home or investment property. Yet an empty homes tax on the ballot in the city of Santa Cruz in 2022 was defeated. The city has worked to include a certain percentage of new units built to be set aside for affordable housing, but the higher that percentage goes, the more likely that developers will balk at projects that don’t “pencil out,” to use the euphemism du jour for making a profit. The economic and political formulas to provide good housing are complex and treacherous.

What’s more, we’re all constantly on the lookout for categorizations that make for easy rationalizations for our own attitudes and actions — generations making assumptions about each other, privileged people having no clue what struggling people are facing, accusations of hypocrisy fire-hosed in every direction, and a pernicious impulse to paint a monolithic picture of haves vs. have-nots. My own situation argues for a third category — my wife and I are homeowners with stable housing, for which we’re grateful. But, to make that possible, I live 27 miles from where I work. 

Ultimately, there’s a moral calculus at work in the great affordable housing debate that the most conscientious among us will confront alone in that voting booth. We all want plenty of personal space and we all want quiet neighborhoods and easy-to-navigate communities. To the degree that you have those things, how much are you willing to sacrifice to help the people behind you in the grocery line?

More available housing units means more crowds to negotiate, more traffic to endure, more lines to stand in. It means unpredictable and often uncontrollable change. It means living among more people, probably in taller buildings. It’s difficult to be honest with others about whether you’re willing to tolerate those things. But it’s more critical than ever to be honest with yourself. 

So many people in Santa Cruz County, on either side of this divide, are doing the best they can do in accepting change and fighting for a humane response to the affordability crisis. But we are all running into the limits — legal, political, economic — of how much we are willing to move over on the bench to make room for someone else. Privilege allows you the illusion that this isn’t your problem. But it will remain a frustrating issue that will shape all our lives in so many unforeseen ways until that moment when even the most fortunate of us arrive at that one revelation that may make us all reach deeper for a workable solution:

You’re not in an affordable housing crisis. You are the affordable housing crisis. 

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