As a Santa Cruz homeowner, I wholly support building more and making Santa Cruz more affordable. It's incredible how expensive it is to live here - renting or buying. I'd love to see more young people and young families be able to enjoy this wonderful area - its truly lovely here and I don't see any reason that the great culture of Santa Cruz and responsible, tasteful and affordable housing can't co-exist.
As a fellow Santa Cruz resident, thank you! There's been a massive change in opinion over the past few years, and we need to speak up to make that clear to the town.
The typical NIMBYs that have a ballot proposition coming up were only able to turn out a sad four people at the Christmas parade this year. We need to defeat that.
From what I’ve seen happen in Long Beach, these high density housing developments are rarely affordable. Most new developments cater to the higher end of the market. Long Beach became much more unaffordable after the density increased.
What used to be "affordable" in Santa Cruz now exclusively caters to the wealthy. Saying we shouldn't build more because of that is simply nonsensical, because it makes this previously affordable housing even more unaffordable.
Additionally, in Santa Cruz, there are requirements on construction of large multi unit residential buildings that put deed restrictions on rent or purchase price of at least 20% of the units (unless they upped it since I last checked.)
These restrictions fall into a standard system of income bands that are based off of the median income of the area.
This new construction is the only source of affordable housing. Yet we have plenty of people opposing it because "it won't be affordable"
But where? Therein lies the rub. Would you go up the North Coast? There's plenty of farmland there. Would you go into the forest, requiring felling a lot of trees? Please don't say you want to build out Lighthouse Field.
Everywhere there's currently a building, that's where more housing should go.
The only problem is that it's currently illegal to do that. Building a massive mansion is by-right, building apartments triggers a discretionary process that can be derailed by only a few motivated people.
I'm 66, born and raised in Santa Cruz with family there and it's bizarre when your sleepy surf town turns into the hottest real estate market in California, which might make it the hottest market in the world, and none of your children, nieces and nephews can afford to live there. There's a adage in Santa Cruz that we all know well "Once you move from Santa Cruz you'll never be able to afford to move back." Many small towns across America are experiencing depopulation and poverty. Santa Cruz is the opposite, experiencing wealth and luxury. I have no further comment except to say it seems unusual.
Edit: I'm not living there. I'm over the hill in San Jose where rents are more affordable and I can't move back.
Edit2: The locals blame giving UCSC students a vote in local politics on our woes, because they are transients, progressive and don't understand local issues, preferring to preserve greenspace and the environment over growth. I'm happy with the greenspace and acccept the cost of maintaining it - I'm not complaining, merely sharing how strange it is to be priced out of your home town.
This was the explicit plan for Santa Cruz, to stop all housing after the 70s and 80s and see a massive rise in property values.
It's all there in the opinion articles and letters to the editor from the time, this future was predicted. It was the plan that was accepted by leaders at the time.
I'm not aware of any such plan. The plan was always to preserve open space such as Lighthouse Field and the green belt around Santa Cruz. I'm grateful for both of those. Property values would have risen even if they had built on Lighthouse field and the green belt. It just occured to me that I could think of them as the equivalent of NYC's Central Park or SF's Golden Gate Park.
Santa Cruz is certainly an outlier, but we're definitely seeing it all over the country.
I'm in a small town in southeast AK. Most of the buildable land has already been claimed. Tourism is growing faster than local people can support the industry, so there's all kinds of pressures: housing for summer employees, an increased temptation to do short term rentals to tourists instead of long term rentals to locals, and people buying second and third homes that they don't use most of the year.
Many of us watch our young people leave to go find their place in the world, and then find they can't move back even if they wanted to. The ones who do are paid really well, or have their housing largely subsidized by being given property their family bought a long time ago, or some similar assistance that isn't generally available to everyone.
For the past several years, multiple schools in our town have been unable to fill empty teaching positions because the people who are hired spend all spring and half the summer looking for housing, and simply can't find it. They bail and go somewhere that's willing to hire them and has some kind of housing available.
The most obvious answer seem to be around population density. What is the population density of your small town? Why would the developers not build multi-story apartments/condos?
Why is there no supply of multi-family buildings anywhere outside of cities? If everyone wants a single family home with a yard, you are going to run into space limitations.
I feel a certain kind of sadness about it. There's not a word for the loss of your home town in English that I'm aware of, but there's a song that comes close to it.
If there are 5 houses in an area, populated by 1 family each for a total of 5 families, and those families have 1 child each (50% below population replacement rate), then with no new houses, there is no way for any of those children to have a house of their own until their parents die. But when their parents die, they get to have a home of their own.
At 2 children, the population replacement rate, only one child can have a house of their own after their parents die, if no new houses are constructed.
That assumes that the children stay single as they grow up. If they all get a partner it is no longer one house - one person. You literally only need half as many houses.
That's what happens when the low-income job market is dominated by the service industry. When wealth gets geographically concentrated, low-income workers have to follow it, and can't.
The worst part is that the wealth isn't getting concentrated into the hands of people: it's getting concentrated into the hands of landowners.
* If you are poor and pay rent, you're fucked
* If you are poor, but own your home, you are just OK; but would be better off if services were cheaper and more available (as a result of poor renters not being fucked)
* If you are rich, but pay rent, you are just OK, but would be better off if rent was lower (and poor renters wouldn't be fucked. Win-win!)
*If you are rich and own your home, then you are lucky enough to be the problem. Even so, you would be better off if rent was lower, because services would become more available, and your community would be safer and happier.
There's a fifth category; rich, own your home, and a couple more. If you're a landlord, high rents mean more money in your pocket and who doesn't want more money? The broader community effects of high rents are secondary to being able to afford a new car and a foreign vacation every few years.
Who do you blame if the big industry in town that has been growing for decades is projected to keep growing but the locals decide to not take advantage of it?
The best universities, community colleges, amazing tool libraries to learn the trades, yet.. all these people who move half way around the world to settle with no credit and hardly any savings to start end up buying a home, yet the locals can’t figure it out. Decade after decade.
> all these people who move half way around the world to settle with no credit and hardly any savings to start end up buying a home, yet the locals can’t figure it out.
That's because it's brain drain on the rest of the world. You're importing some of the world's most educated people in and of course they outcompete the locals.
Are you saying the unis in Santa Cruz are sufficient to raise yourself to millionaire, and the local high schools sufficient to get into those unis? I’m not from the US, genuinely asking. But I have often seen unis have a far-distance preference, just for the social mix, while letting down the locals.
I mean, if you're saying the locals (a population of what? a million?) should be able to compete with the best and brightest from the entire planet (9 billion?) or move, then I have to disagree.
Places change and grow. It's interesting that my kids have found places that speak to them (not the SF Bay Area) and they are growing with their towns as well. One wonders if your nieces and nephews will have the same situation.
There are clearly young families moving in around me, and the real estate market is brisk with houses changing hands quickly, but we've also added about 1500 higher density homes in the area which have afforded even more opportunities for where to live for these folks moving here. Certainly some of them prefer not doing maintenance etc which comes with home ownership.
Looking back at the city's decision to increase high density housing it has been a solid improvement.
Back in the early 1970s, Boulder, Colorado, had a referendum on restricting housing starts. It was pitched as an environmental thing, and it probably got help from the students at the University of Colorado. The referendum passed with absolutely massive turnout--precincts ran out of ballots.
This is pretty common across a number of smaller cities in California, especially beach cities. I moved into current home in Southern California 10 years back and probably not in a position to move in to any home in the city now, even with total family income increasing over this time.
Its practically everywhere in the world. Every city i mean. Maybe in SC on a extreme level, but even where I live in Amsterdam its 1.000.000 for an apartment. Which results in 4000 euros per month. Impossible for starters.
> I'm 66, born and raised in Santa Cruz... and none of your children, nieces and nephews can afford to live there
i mean, you're still living there too... where did you expect them to be? two objects can't occupy the same space at the same time
since we can't 'make land' (unless we dredge), the only logical place to put living habitats is up in the sky (we don't like living in holes in the ground)
There’s a ton of land that can be developed around Santa Cruz, it just can’t be developed due to public policy and local opposition.
Huge empty tracts all over and especially around Ben Lomond etc.
The flip side of all this is that a lot of long term residents love that their 100-200k houses are now worth a million+ with their property taxes capped at essentially nothing. They don’t want to give that up to allow their nieces and nephews to afford to grow their families in Santa Cruz.
I sympathize with folks worried about changing their neighborhood. At the same time there's really no magic solution to high housing costs outside increasing supply.
There aren't any magic solutions, but I think there are a lot of ideas that could incentivize affordable housing for people who actually live here.
A number of my neighbors are Prop 13 'princelings'. Their parents snapped up a bunch of housing, have next to 0 annual cost, and extract fantastic wealth renting them out, all while receiving a huge tax subsidy. This position passes to the next generation, who essentially become absentee landlords and are heavily incentivized to prevent more housing.
A number of places in Santa Cruz and the rest of the county are completely underutilized because these families prefer to do absolutely nothing and collect insane rents on dilapidated properties to the detriment of everybody else who lives here.
You could limit over-consumption of the existing supply by differentially property-taxing nonresident homeowners. That would lower property values + rents real quick.
According to this site [1] the percentage of renters in SC in 2017 was 60%.
Not sure if this is being facetious, but California has prop 13 which means your property taxes cannot go up more than 2% per year. It would be great if a new prop was passed which reversed it, but polling on reversing it is always very unpopular since homeowners are very consistent voters.
Are you trying to kill rentals, or are you trying to kill empty houses.
Killing rentals is bad for anyone who find owning is not the best option for them. To own a house/condo you need a large down payment, then you need to pay maintenance fees (some of this can be personal labor if you are able), and worse if you move soon you need to sell. Buying a place can be a great idea for some, but for others it is wrong. Most of us will go through different phases in life and odds are until you are 25 or 30 years old renting is clearly the best decision, but after that many of us settle down in a location where we are likely to live for the rest of our life and buying starts to make sense for many.
There are a few houses in the world when some rich foreigner has bought the house and leaves it vacant. However so far all data I've seen suggests the number of people doing this is tiny (it is generally a stupid investment)
Another way of looking at it is that single family houses "over-consume" land. There are vacancies in the vertical space above most homes that far exceeds the vacancies created by absentee owners.
That's backwards because it would torpedo the economy of building and operating rental apartments. You really want the opposite: a special tax for owner-occupiers.
This is already a thing. Santa Cruz (and I think a bunch of places in CA?) have an a rule that lowers the assessed value of your property for tax purposes if it is your primary residence.
However:
- the size of the benefit is small
- my understanding is there is very little effort to confirm these for small owners
> by differentially property-taxing nonresident homeowners. That would lower property values + rents real quick.
Need to find the case study, but the precedent for this is rents go up. There are more barriers to housing than the price. Better strategy is taxing unoccupied housing.
I have less sympathy for people afraid of neighborhood change after having been pushed out of a neighborhood that changed (gentrified) anyway.
In any case, I tend to think that outlawing for-profit ownership of multiple SFHs or multifamily units would actually go a long way toward increasing supply and dropping costs without building. Reduced centralized ownership means lowered capacity to play pricing and vacancy games.
The real enemy of affordable housing is that so many people benefit from housing being unaffordable. Tell them to kick rocks and find another source of income at the federal/constitutional level, please.
"Not in my city, in that other city," says every city, everywhere. Hence NIMBY: they aren't saying "no", just Not In My BackYard.
The problem is everyone is saying this. So you have nowhere to build. Santa Cruz should not get special treatment - it will be offered the same deal as everyone else: build what is required to house people in the way you want, or build what is required to house people in the ways other people want.
As a resident of Santa Cruz, we need a looooot more housing in Santa Cruz. And elsewhere too. But my concern is for the future of Santa Cruz and having some place for my children to live in the future, in an environmentally sustainable way.
This entire country once decided they could just build stuff outside of the city and it led to endless bland sprawl, nightmare commutes and environmental devastation. Transitionally, Santa Cruzians don't like any of those things.
As a Santa Cruz homeowner who has lived in other dense and sparse places, I love this. I can't wait for this to happen and wish I could do more to make it happen more quickly.
With the introduction of the rail trail, Santa Cruz has the potential to become one of the most livable places in the United States
I think San Francisco is an easy lesson in the politics of building - You get to choose density or destitution, and you don't get to opt out.
I lived in SF for 10 years and Boston for 5. SF is a worse place for the time, and Boston has only gotten better. I'm a firm believer that development is the reason.
They’ve been talking about this stuff for decades now. I recall the trailer park suing the hotel over their view being obstructed. And then there’s the CCC, who I imagine will get engaged when a 12 story luxury high rise gets planted at the south end of pacific avenue. It’s the perfect solution if you want to ensure nothing actually happens.
There's another piece that isn't discussed in this article and desperately needs technological solutions -
Our permitting and building processes are completely broken. People who lost their homes in the CZU complex fires are giving up and donating their land because of the difficulty of rebuilding. Even applying for something as simple as rooftop solar is extremely onerous and time consuming.
Every piece of the permitting process would benefit from new tech to enable the county and developers to get moving. Plans are rejected for tiny reasons "No fire testing data sheets were attached for the aluminum rails that every neighbor has already used on their roof."
A recent real estate listing described years of frustration trying to build an appropriate multifamily on their correctly zoned land, and eventually giving up to sell the house.
Outdated building codes require 2 stairs, making smaller multi-story housing infeasible. So only larger (whole block) projects pencil out, but people don’t like them because they don’t fit in well.
I wonder if smaller (the size of 1-2 normal lots) 4-6 floor buildings spread out more would face less resistance.
Building more is a temporary fix. Within a few years the prices will be just as bad as now, if not worse, but now your city is full of ugly buildings and a ton of new people have occupied your roads, schools, beaches and forests. And then will come the calls to build even more housing.
Readit News
The typical NIMBYs that have a ballot proposition coming up were only able to turn out a sad four people at the Christmas parade this year. We need to defeat that.
Additionally, in Santa Cruz, there are requirements on construction of large multi unit residential buildings that put deed restrictions on rent or purchase price of at least 20% of the units (unless they upped it since I last checked.)
These restrictions fall into a standard system of income bands that are based off of the median income of the area.
This new construction is the only source of affordable housing. Yet we have plenty of people opposing it because "it won't be affordable"
The only problem is that it's currently illegal to do that. Building a massive mansion is by-right, building apartments triggers a discretionary process that can be derailed by only a few motivated people.
Edit: I'm not living there. I'm over the hill in San Jose where rents are more affordable and I can't move back.
Edit2: The locals blame giving UCSC students a vote in local politics on our woes, because they are transients, progressive and don't understand local issues, preferring to preserve greenspace and the environment over growth. I'm happy with the greenspace and acccept the cost of maintaining it - I'm not complaining, merely sharing how strange it is to be priced out of your home town.
It's all there in the opinion articles and letters to the editor from the time, this future was predicted. It was the plan that was accepted by leaders at the time.
I'm in a small town in southeast AK. Most of the buildable land has already been claimed. Tourism is growing faster than local people can support the industry, so there's all kinds of pressures: housing for summer employees, an increased temptation to do short term rentals to tourists instead of long term rentals to locals, and people buying second and third homes that they don't use most of the year.
Many of us watch our young people leave to go find their place in the world, and then find they can't move back even if they wanted to. The ones who do are paid really well, or have their housing largely subsidized by being given property their family bought a long time ago, or some similar assistance that isn't generally available to everyone.
For the past several years, multiple schools in our town have been unable to fill empty teaching positions because the people who are hired spend all spring and half the summer looking for housing, and simply can't find it. They bail and go somewhere that's willing to hire them and has some kind of housing available.
It's really a mess.
Why is there no supply of multi-family buildings anywhere outside of cities? If everyone wants a single family home with a yard, you are going to run into space limitations.
Pretenders - My City Was Gone
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thu8DWsirJo
At 2 children, the population replacement rate, only one child can have a house of their own after their parents die, if no new houses are constructed.
The worst part is that the wealth isn't getting concentrated into the hands of people: it's getting concentrated into the hands of landowners.
* If you are poor and pay rent, you're fucked
* If you are poor, but own your home, you are just OK; but would be better off if services were cheaper and more available (as a result of poor renters not being fucked)
* If you are rich, but pay rent, you are just OK, but would be better off if rent was lower (and poor renters wouldn't be fucked. Win-win!)
*If you are rich and own your home, then you are lucky enough to be the problem. Even so, you would be better off if rent was lower, because services would become more available, and your community would be safer and happier.
The best universities, community colleges, amazing tool libraries to learn the trades, yet.. all these people who move half way around the world to settle with no credit and hardly any savings to start end up buying a home, yet the locals can’t figure it out. Decade after decade.
That's because it's brain drain on the rest of the world. You're importing some of the world's most educated people in and of course they outcompete the locals.
There are clearly young families moving in around me, and the real estate market is brisk with houses changing hands quickly, but we've also added about 1500 higher density homes in the area which have afforded even more opportunities for where to live for these folks moving here. Certainly some of them prefer not doing maintenance etc which comes with home ownership.
Looking back at the city's decision to increase high density housing it has been a solid improvement.
i mean, you're still living there too... where did you expect them to be? two objects can't occupy the same space at the same time
since we can't 'make land' (unless we dredge), the only logical place to put living habitats is up in the sky (we don't like living in holes in the ground)
Huge empty tracts all over and especially around Ben Lomond etc.
The flip side of all this is that a lot of long term residents love that their 100-200k houses are now worth a million+ with their property taxes capped at essentially nothing. They don’t want to give that up to allow their nieces and nephews to afford to grow their families in Santa Cruz.
Deleted Comment
I sympathize with folks worried about changing their neighborhood. At the same time there's really no magic solution to high housing costs outside increasing supply.
A number of my neighbors are Prop 13 'princelings'. Their parents snapped up a bunch of housing, have next to 0 annual cost, and extract fantastic wealth renting them out, all while receiving a huge tax subsidy. This position passes to the next generation, who essentially become absentee landlords and are heavily incentivized to prevent more housing.
A number of places in Santa Cruz and the rest of the county are completely underutilized because these families prefer to do absolutely nothing and collect insane rents on dilapidated properties to the detriment of everybody else who lives here.
According to this site [1] the percentage of renters in SC in 2017 was 60%.
[1]: https://noplacelikehome.ucsc.edu/makings-of-a-crisis/
Killing rentals is bad for anyone who find owning is not the best option for them. To own a house/condo you need a large down payment, then you need to pay maintenance fees (some of this can be personal labor if you are able), and worse if you move soon you need to sell. Buying a place can be a great idea for some, but for others it is wrong. Most of us will go through different phases in life and odds are until you are 25 or 30 years old renting is clearly the best decision, but after that many of us settle down in a location where we are likely to live for the rest of our life and buying starts to make sense for many.
There are a few houses in the world when some rich foreigner has bought the house and leaves it vacant. However so far all data I've seen suggests the number of people doing this is tiny (it is generally a stupid investment)
However:
- the size of the benefit is small
- my understanding is there is very little effort to confirm these for small owners
https://www.santacruzcountyca.gov/Departments/AssessorsOffic...
Need to find the case study, but the precedent for this is rents go up. There are more barriers to housing than the price. Better strategy is taxing unoccupied housing.
In any case, I tend to think that outlawing for-profit ownership of multiple SFHs or multifamily units would actually go a long way toward increasing supply and dropping costs without building. Reduced centralized ownership means lowered capacity to play pricing and vacancy games.
The real enemy of affordable housing is that so many people benefit from housing being unaffordable. Tell them to kick rocks and find another source of income at the federal/constitutional level, please.
The problem is everyone is saying this. So you have nowhere to build. Santa Cruz should not get special treatment - it will be offered the same deal as everyone else: build what is required to house people in the way you want, or build what is required to house people in the ways other people want.
With the introduction of the rail trail, Santa Cruz has the potential to become one of the most livable places in the United States
I think San Francisco is an easy lesson in the politics of building - You get to choose density or destitution, and you don't get to opt out.
I lived in SF for 10 years and Boston for 5. SF is a worse place for the time, and Boston has only gotten better. I'm a firm believer that development is the reason.
Our permitting and building processes are completely broken. People who lost their homes in the CZU complex fires are giving up and donating their land because of the difficulty of rebuilding. Even applying for something as simple as rooftop solar is extremely onerous and time consuming.
Every piece of the permitting process would benefit from new tech to enable the county and developers to get moving. Plans are rejected for tiny reasons "No fire testing data sheets were attached for the aluminum rails that every neighbor has already used on their roof."
A recent real estate listing described years of frustration trying to build an appropriate multifamily on their correctly zoned land, and eventually giving up to sell the house.
https://youtu.be/iRdwXQb7CfM?si=j6g6TAm2uEw5aRb2
Outdated building codes require 2 stairs, making smaller multi-story housing infeasible. So only larger (whole block) projects pencil out, but people don’t like them because they don’t fit in well.
I wonder if smaller (the size of 1-2 normal lots) 4-6 floor buildings spread out more would face less resistance.
The data I have seen: Other countries without two stair requirements have better fire safety records than the US.