What people seem to miss is how awesome UCSC is. In typical HN fashion I see multiple comments talking dryly about college selection like it's a business decision. People flock to UCSC for its exceptional natural beauty, idiosyncratic culture and slightly unorthodox academics. Not because of a cost-benefit analysis. For people like me, it offered a big-campus college experience without the emphasis on sports and the Greek system. And it offered it in a culturally bizarre and incredibly beautiful corner of the country. That draw isn't going away anytime soon, especially since students can subsidize those crazy-high rents with student debt as I once did.
Beautiful, idyllic, all that. All of HN would love to live there and 98% of them would probably join all the UCSC admin/students/alumni masses in fighting new housing on the campus the day they got there, or at least when the jackhammers started during their study period.
And then they'd blame the city for not having more housing for those not lucky enough.
Sure, I'd blame the city for not building a series of 100 story apartment buildings and not connecting them to San Jose and San Francisco by monorail - or least for not extending BART to San Jose forty years and thus not extending it to Santa Cruz twenty years ago.
Also for not giving me a flying car.
I mean, some portion of hn readers are technological optimists still in starry days of imagining massively productive technology would vast dividends for humankind. And why shouldn't they be. The world of today where progress somehow becomes the reason the average person gets less is fricken miserable and I make no excuses for not imagining it as normal.
That's the issue isn't it? Students flock to it not after doing a cost-benefit analysis but because it's an upscale seaside resort where they can have a great time for four years. But then why complain about the cost of living there? Should it be affordable? And should the town have to support this?
> But then why complain about the cost of living there?
For the obvious reason that we all want to live where we want to live and be able to afford it. That's not a crazy concept, and it's often achievable if we support politicians and policies that support rational urban growth.
Santa Cruz native here: I can understand the author's frustrations coming to Santa Cruz from the outside but there's more to it. He's describing a UCSC problem because the university is expanding without building enough dormitories and relying on development in the city instead. This is causing unrest among the natives who resent 5 story huge San Jose style apartment blocks going up in their beautiful city.
The second problem is Santa Cruz by the sea is a very desirable place to live and within commuting distance from Silicon Valley, so wealthy tech workers can buy up or build very expensive first or second homes here. However, Santa Cruz since the 70's has been a very environmentally conscious no-growth city that recognized that San Jose style growth would ruin the city. This means demand far outstrips supply.
With the lack of supply, natives and others who work in services and support Santa Cruz's biggest industry (tourism) can't afford to live here. It's a dark joke among family and friends that once you leave Santa Cruz you can never afford to move back. I have family that have moved away and the next generation like my kids and nieces and nephews will never be able to afford to buy a house there like my father did.
Homeless is a problem but Santa Cruz tries to handle it a progressive way, for example, by setting up the homeless camp next to the courthouse and providing it with services
Lastly, long time Santa Cruz residents are generally are not sympathetic to complaints from students that come here from the outside, because they consider UCSC to be a big part of the problem. People considering UCSC would be advised to secure housing beforehand or choose another university. I hear they opened a new nice one in Merced, which has more affordable housing.
> Santa Cruz since the 70's has been a very environmentally conscious no-growth city
Dense construction with high-quality public transport is a significantly more environmentally-friendly city design than a sea of single-family homes with mandatory car ownership. The latter may be more superficially "natural" - green swaths of suburbia vs. concrete jungles - but it really is only superficial.
> San Jose style growth
San Jose, like the entire Bay Area, is crippled by the exact same rampant NIMBYism and suburban sprawl as Santa Cruz. Not only would a densely constructed San Jose be more environmentally friendly, its economic growth would be _significantly_ higher.
Underneath all the posturing about the environment and "the feel of the community", the only thing NIMBYism protects is high property values and rents.
EDIT:
> natives who resent 5 story huge San Jose style apartment blocks going up in their beautiful city
I'm sorry, _what_? In what universe is a 5 story apartment building huge or unreasonable in one of the most desirable areas to live in the country?
Most people who live (and vote) in Santa Cruz prefer to be in a low density area. While I understand that some people actually like to live in denser cities, the majority prefer some space and privacy. This is not unreasonable.
Places like Santa Cruz have never had any real intentional urban planning, so building a lot of additional housing is going to overload the infrastructure. They would need to upgrade all the utilities, build more schools, and completely revamp the transportation system. Good luck convincing any long-term Santa Cruz residents that they should sacrifice their quality of life and live in the middle of a construction zone for years for the sake of reducing someone else's rent.
For students at UCSC, housing is somewhat cheaper and more available about 20 miles away in the Watsonville area. There are public bus routes. Of course, Watsonville isn't as fashionable. You can't walk to the beach and go surfing before class.
> Most people who live (and vote) in Santa Cruz prefer to be in a low density area. While I understand that some people actually like to live in denser cities, the majority prefer some space and privacy.
Sure, there's nothing wrong with that. What _is_ unreasonable is fighting tooth and nail to prevent anyone without a sufficiently large bag of money from moving to Santa Cruz to try and preserve that low density.
> Places like Santa Cruz have never had any real intentional urban planning, so building a lot of additional housing is going to overload the infrastructure. They would need to upgrade all the utilities, build more schools, and completely revamp the transportation system.
I don't see how this is a valid argument against densification. It's not as if the current infrastructure in Santa Cruz was just lying around when people got there. Every growing population center has had to deal with expanding infrastructure to match. This isn't some novel, unsolvable problem.
> Good luck convincing any long-term Santa Cruz residents that they should sacrifice their quality of life and live in the middle of a construction zone for years for the sake of reducing someone else's rent.
Why should they get to decide? Why are their preferences so much more important than those of poorer or newer residents?
>What _is_ unreasonable is fighting tooth and nail to prevent anyone without a sufficiently large bag of money from moving to Santa Cruz to try and preserve that low density.
Why? Why shouldn't locals be allowed to set development restrictions to their liking? Even if their desire is to intentionally stop population growth.
Because there are major societal losses incurred by preventing development. I see no reason why governments should enable locals to enjoy the benefits of high property values and low density while externalizing the costs of that behavior onto others.
"You don't understand why we're unique and special and therefore need special housing rules that just so happen to be identical to the ones in every other town" is also a bog-standard NIMBY argument. You're really ticking every single checkbox here.
Ok, I'm NIMBY. So? I'm sure you would too if they were to build a 5 story apartment building overlooking your backyard. My point is that Santa Cruz and San Jose are very different. Santa Cruz is a spot of natural beauty worth preserving. There really aren't many beach towns like it on the coast. The closest one to the North is probably Pacifica 50 miles north. Santa Cruz doesn't have much more land available while San Jose has a lot of land. Also it makes sense to build up in San Jose, which it's doing. San Jose has a lot of room for growth, Santa Cruz does not. San Jose is a like many other California cities, Santa Cruz is unique, which is why massive amounts of tourists come from the Central Valley and Santa Clara Valley to enjoy a day at the beach at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk.
Didn't get a big nimby vibe from your first post, just sounded like you were explaining the local situation.
But now you've mentioned it, nimby is the reason your nieces and nephs won't be able to live there. The richest folks always win when there is a refusal to build.
Here we have it ^, the opposition to housing solutions. Not pitchfork wielding homeowners, but polite good citizens who are NIMBY and disguised as environmentally friendly people who really care for the city's character, as well as blaming the UC.
Please tell me how the massive meth-filled homeless encampment behind the courthouse is being handled in a "progressive" way. By the way they were forcibly evicted 2 weeks ago. The fact that there is any homeless encampment is an inexcusable embarrassment.
Increased density is coming to everywhere in California, like it or not. Thankfully the governor occasionally passes laws removing some NIMBY arguments - though too little too late.
I'm writing this from a converted garage in Santa Cruz that I'm paying nearly $3k/month for. There are a couple ADUs and a zillion AirBnBs, but no multi-family homes around me for miles.
> Increased density is coming to everywhere in California, like it or not.
If you're hoping to have a well intentioned, successful argument with NIMBY folks, this is _not_ the way to do so.
People who own the land & houses in an area are saying they do not want this. No matter how much you say "but I _really_ want it, and it's going to happen" is not going to change that.
And they've been winning for _decades_....hoping for yet another election to somehow change that is not a winning strategy.
There are thousands of other colleges in the US - if you make the choice to go to a school that did not have the foresight nor ability to house the students they let in, that is not the problem of the Santa Cruz property owners and tax payers.
Disclosure: I'm not taking sides on this, because I don't live in California (anymore) and bought in a pro-growth city...largely because I evaluated my options and made the choice to live in that type of environment that was more welcoming.
If you're hoping to have a well intentioned, successful argument with NIMBY folks, this is _not_ the way to do so.
The problem is that the entire regulator framework produces self-serving bad faith on the part of NIMBYs, making argument impossible despite these people seeming like nice, reasonable types.
The idea is that a developer offers a design and the locals lodge their objections and if the developer can satisfy these objections, the development proceeds. But when the real goal of the homeowner is no develop at all 'cause any development reduces the value of their home (via supply and demand) then the homeowner learns to offer a wide series of unmeetable demands. This means the only change that's going to happen is change that's imposed by an outside entity like The State of California (if that does happen).
But the GP is right: state law is now forcing these places to increase their density. This isn't wishful thinking, it's the result of a dozen or so state bills which remove density limitations and give teeth to the Housing Element law. I think there's a good argument to be made that the correct people have already been convinced, and the NIMBYs are not winning any longer.
If your plan for living in California is ruined by lots of new construction in the next 5 years, you'd be well advised to brace yourself.
There are cities that are pro-growth in the sense of not having NIMBY zoning but that have awful urban planning from a transportation perspective. Houston and Atlanta come to mind. Pro-growth perhaps, but certainly not pro-density. I don't know of any city that has both pro-growth housing policy and decent investment in public transportation.
Call it what you want, but the goal was to keep Santa Cruz from turning into Waikiki, Hawaii with high rise apartment buildings lining the ocean. We fought to keep Lighthouse Field from being developed. I think it was worth it even if I can't afford to live there. I'm leaving behind a city that is as nice as when I grew up there, except now there are far too many surfers to make going out enjoyable.
I mean UCSC is to blame (for the most part). UCSC keeps increasing enrollment without any concern as to where these students are going to live, knowing full well there isn't any housing available in the city.
Meanwhile the entity which holds the most undeveloped land in the area is UCSC itself!
UCSC has open land to build housing for all the students and then some.
"We like our city as it is and don't want it to grow."
Soon followed by
"We can't afford to live in our city because rich people are outbidding us for the very limited housing."
Same story as everywhere else. You make your bed, you sleep in it.
And this part is hilarious but telling:
> Homeless is a problem but Santa Cruz tries to handle it a progressive way, for example, by setting up the homeless camp next to the courthouse and providing it with services
Setting up slum cities is now the standard of progressiveness in America.
> Setting up slum cities is now the standard of progressiveness in America
The alternative was to continue to let people live in the surrounding forests while shooting up heroin with dirty needles, trashing the woods and causing lengthy service calls for police and ambulance. This way they are all in one spot and are serviced by clean needle program, etc...
Okay great, let’s build housing for addicts. What do you think happens next?
We are talking about people that get kicked out of shelters because they are dangerous and can’t act coherently.
Why is the solution everything else but the obvious: arrest drug dealers, outlaw drug use in open air drug scenes, offer real recovery and/or jail time for those that refuse.
These people are here for drugs: outlaw drugs (for real) and they will leave, and just like that, no more housing crisis.
They are... several huge apartment blocks downtown that are ugly as sin but necessary. The homeless problem in Santa Cruz is mostly about drugs and mental illness. People who couldn't keep an apartment if you provided them with one.
Maybe the progressives of Santa Cruz could have figured out a progressive way to build housing before the ways with the most money won. Or maybe they could have imposed at least the requirement that large apartment buildings be attractive or maybe to NIMBYs all apartment buildings are ugly sin.
Santa Cruz was already ridiculously unaffordable before the pandemic. Then the pandemic hit, the students went away, and other people moved in. The CZU Fire destroyed many homes in the mountains. Wealthy people from the Bay Area realized that Santa Cruz could be a nice place to live in if they want to work remotely while having the option to visit the office on short notice. Now the students are back, and there is much less housing available for them than there used to be.
The university shares the blame, but it's at least trying to build new housing. The NIMBYs are simply doing their best to prevent that. There is a wide coalition consisting of students, alumni, locals, landlords, and so on that opposes building anything new on university lands.
I came here to work at UCSC, but I've pretty much given up on the city and the university. Santa Cruz is not even particularly nice for its price. It feels more like a missed opportunity than a desirable area.
The locals wonder why UCSC doesn't build housing on their land? Admittedly, it's a beautiful spot up on the hill and housing blocks in the meadow would be a crying shame from an aesthetic standpoint. So don't expand the university to preserve the meadow.
Homeless is a problem but Santa Cruz tries to handle it a progressive way, for example, by setting up the homeless camp next to the courthouse and providing it with services
Claims of "progressive approaches" are simply bogus here. Santa Cruz' response has been typical for any and every city with a homeless problem. Santa Cruz has never established a well-ordered, permanent tent city. Like just about everywhere with a huge homeless problem, they tolerate homeless camps for bit and then tear them down, destroy people possessions and move them on 'till a new camp appears. [1]
Just as much, Santa Cruz closed all institutional free food distribution locations at the start of Covid (Saint Francis Soup Kitchen may or may not have reopen but if it has, it is all). This left the anarchist group Food Not Bomb as the only source of food for homeless and Food Not Bombs has been repeatedly criminalized by the city of Santa Cruz. [2]
In the context of what cities provide, one has to keep in mind a broad court decision that essentially cities can't evict people from public areas without providing them some sort of housing - which has meant that every city has formally given housing to the homeless in terms of shelters and camps but every city makes that housing as miserable as possible since they really want to push the home out since every city thinks of this as a "local problem".
Really amazing to try and offer perspective of a "native" with some unique insights about a community only to offer up the same tired NIMBY arguments you hear in every housing-starved city.
ANd then to claim that your homeless problem is fine because you put them in a slum tent city with "services" is truly the icing on the cake lol
> UCSC problem because the university is expanding without building enough dormitories and relying on development in the city instead
This is the largest root cause of the problem.
Population of Santa Cruz is ~64K people. Enrollment in UCSC is nearly 20K. That's a lot of incoming students for a small town.
Combine with the geography of being surrounded by steep mountains and the ocean, there is very little area to the city.
City of Santa Cruz is ~8000 acres, all of it pretty much built already.
UCSC campus is ~2000 acres, a large part of it (couldn't find percentage) is forest and open land.
So while UCSC owns most of the undeveloped land in the area, they keep increasing enrollment but don't provide housing. Where are students going to go?
There should be a law that UCSC can only enroll as many students as they have housing for. They have plenty of land to build it.
I feel like higher education and housing for students should be a higher priority than turning the city into a museum frozen in time for aging "locals".
We all should build. In case you forgot the acronym, "Not In My Back Yard" means a tragedy of the commons in which everyone points their fingers the other way, and we end up in this terrible situation.
To be fair, the only entity who owns very large amounts of undeveloped land in the area is ... UCSC itself.
The worst NIMBY in the area is UCSC. They want to bring in all the students but not provide enough housing even though they own tons of open land in which they could build such housing.
...........building MORE housing is the one thing that would make the city more affordable no? Odd take. And UCSC is (comparatively) and a very small school.
LOL. The self-righteous hyperbole is just downright use-net circa 1996 adorable, but it doesn't make your statements any more compelling, nor does it show that you grasped the point very well.
My son just went through this and got super lucky to find a place, but out in Capitola.
UCSC's campus is absolutely massive with huge areas of unused, unforested land [1]. There is more than enough space for more dorms and apartment houses as well as the accompanying utility systems needed. If they're going to continue to increase enrollment, they need to bite the bullet and put up some goddamn buildings. They simply don't want to.
The university wants to build new student housing, but many people in the university and many locals don't. There are concrete plans to build housing for a few thousand additional students on campus, but the plans have been on hold for years as people oppose them for environmental and aesthetic reasons.
I think we both know how many legal and political levers can be brought to bear by large government institutions when they wish. This is a priority and the NIMBYs in this case are being absurd. In the 1950s Santa Cruz actively campaigned to have the campus there with widespread support from residents. They signed up for it and that huge chunk of land was granted with the idea of having plenty of space to have all the students on campus, and for future growth. The residents were repaid by the skyrocketing values of their homes. The current residents either grew up with that knowledge, or chose to move there despite it. The city can't just decide 60 years into its existence that they've changed their minds and want to limit the university's growth. That's what the plan was from the beginning.
Anyways, when the UC finally decides it has to be done, Santa Cruz will have little power to stop them short of an outright legal war. Like I said, they simply don't want to.
It's not enough to own the land and have the political permission from the relevant entity. You also need all kinds of legal permits before you can start construction. And each of those permits provides opportunities for people who don't like the project to sue you to delay or prevent the construction.
In my home country, those lawsuits are cheap and their outcomes are predictable, because they are handled by the administrative court system. The judges are not allowed to consider the substance of the argument. They can only determine if the decisions were made according to the proper processes. Matters of substance are left to politicans to decide.
Here in the US, the lawsuits are handled by civil courts, where judges have more latitude to choose which factors to consider. That makes the lawsuits more expensive and their outcomes unpredictable, which is a major reason why NIMBYism is so effective in the US.
It is situated in such a beautiful place. I fondly remember the surf, the woods, the jazz club, and the anarchist literary scene. It's really a shame about the lack of diversity and the racist, anti-homeless natives/long-term residents. I left after having a couple fascist landlords.
So, I have to agree there is a major shortage of affordable housing.
But, I have to disagree that this is due to a lack of building.
20 years ago, there was no housing crisis. Period.
In 20 years, did the population suddenly increase by 20%?
No, of course it didn't. In fact the US population is very flat in recent decades.
What changed?
Short term rental!!! A huge portion of the housing stock purchased, much by corporate buyers, and converted to AirBnB or VRBO.
The housing crisis is 100% created by the rise of "short term rentals", a phrase that really means: "convert a significant portion of the housing stock into unlicensed hotels".
People paying per night to rent houses are never going to be out-bid by people who want to rent by the month.
This whole BS about "not building enough", is really "not building enough to make up for all the houses now run as hotels".
There has NOT been a population boom. Ask yourself: Why were there enough houses a decade or 2 ago, but not now?
> In 20 years, did the population suddenly increase by 20%?
I hate to break it to you, but let's say the population grew a measly 1% per year. Thanks to the way compounding interest grows, after 20 years, that is about a 20% increase compared to 20 years ago. (1.01^20 = 1.22)
While some comments have pointed out that the population has increased, that doesn't actually matter. Because what's being discussed here is an increase in demand for housing in a specific city.
Even if the country's population stayed the same, an increase of people wanting to move to Santa Cruz will drive up demand for housing in Santa Cruz. When you have sustained increases in demand over multiple decades but local governments that block any and all attempts at constructing housing supply to match, you get the ballooning prices you see now. That there is plenty of housing supply in Nowheresville, Nebraska is of little use to the people who can't afford to live in Santa Cruz.
THIS. Housing is very local. Even within a city or metropolitan area, you can have areas which have increased demand.
Not to mention the other factors such as compounding of population growth, short-term rentals, housing stock being destroyed or serving fewer people than before (widows, empty nesters.)
Abstract - We find rent decreases accompanied by decreases in supply five times as large. We further investigate spillover effects on the purchase market, regionally heterogeneous effects as well as different effects by dwelling characteristics. We find the rent freeze did not have spillover effects on dwellings for sale which point to a ‘wait-and-see-attitude’ on the investors’ side. We make use of a rich dataset of real estate advertisements and employ hedonic difference-in-difference and triple-difference estimation strategies.
> We find rent decreases accompanied by decreases in supply five times as large.
If you want something completely FUBAR, you can always trust your local German bureaucrats to do a good job at it, especially in Berlin.
I wonder why they haven't tried increasing building supply and limiting external illegal immigration first? Also, why haven't they tried preventing these tax dodging stock market listed real estate mega conglomerates from owing a large proportion of the housing stock, as for them it's an investment for rent seeking that must make a return for their shareholders, rather than just shelter for someone. Crazy that Germans/Berliners let this happened yet see no issue with this and instead though that artificially capping rents was somehow magically gonna fix this. I guess most citizens don't really grasp the function of the housing market or the economics of it and instead will just vote for a quick handout. "Give them bread and games."
Exactly. People actually argue against increasing housing stock, or building new apartment. They say only new luxury apartments are being built. What do they want, that the builders build old rickety apartments with standards from the 1960s? Any apartment with decent construction is lambasted as being luxury, when a large part of the standards comes from the government itself - they would not give a permit for an apartment to be constructed to 1960 standards in terms of energy efficiency and insulation, windows etc.
When the government is extremely picky about how many permits to give, it is no surprise that only expensive apartments are built first.
100s? Try thousands of applicants. Multiple landlords have indicated that they get 1000s of applications in hours/minutes after posting an ad. The situation is dire and the government is doing nothing about it, even on land that they have the power to build on. The green party is famous for blocking any and all housing projects, the left and right both agree that people don't deserve affordable housing.
Sad to say but the only way to get administration to take these issues seriously is to transfer out. Santa Cruz is the bottom feeder of the UC system. The only reason people take it seriously is because of the prestigious "University of California" tag. There are plenty of better schools nearby (including non-UC ones like Cal Poly and several CSUs) that are more worth your money.
Or think even beyond that. I went to a top 10 school in the midwest and paid $300/mo for my own apartment. After graduating I got a job working next to people from Berkeley, MIT and Stanford with the same career trajectory as them but a tiny fraction of the debt.
Unless housing is built and controlled by UCSC the housing will be snapped up by more of the same and not change the equation that much IMO. If growth is wanted and accepted by the majority of voters (which I don’t believe it is) then a unified plan that involves significant transport investment is needed. Traffic on highway 1 in both directions or mission street are clear indications of this.
I believe the university should be making sure it’s students are fully aware of the situation. Especially new foreign students who have no credit or even guarantors to fall back on for private rentals.
The recipe for what Santa Cruz is experiencing seems to be:
1. Locate the city in a geographically isolated, but beautiful area close to a major employment hub.
2. Institute strong anti-growth policies.
3. Invite a UC into town.
4. Allow the UC to expand without the matching requirement to build one market-rate housing unit per admitted student.
5. Wait a few decades.
What's great about this is how everyone is trying to get something for nothing. The students are trying to get a "UC" brand without the highly-selective entry requirements of other UCs, and largely bringing in loans to pay for it. The university is growing the student population without building sufficient student housing. Property owners benefit from skyrocketing values without experiencing the pain of finding a place to live, or proportionally exploding property taxes. The city benefits from the money the students bring with them in the form of debt.
I suspect this process would go into reverse rather quickly by taking a single step. Cut the federal loans program by 50%, then 10% per year for every year thereafter.
I mostly agree with your sentiment, but I don’t think you’re being very fair to students, and i don’t think this issue is particularly about the students. (and I’m not convinced Prop13 needs to be repealed to solve problems). Students and loans are a different issue and it seems cruel to label them as wannabe UC students who aren’t good enough. All UCs are respectable.
I think this issue can be generalized a lot…
1. Locate a city with geographic limits.
2. Institute anti-growth policies.
3. Invite anything that may attract more people into town.
4. Allow 3 to continue/repeat without an increase in market rate housing.
5. Wait.
6. Landlords profit
Prop 13 has a good goal - prevent property tax increases from displacing long term residents. If you allow growth in housing supply then this can be a good thing, but the incentives ruin it. A balanced law or requirement that requires more housing to maintain prop13 would likely solve this mismatched incentive issue (if you vote against more housing, you could experience cost increases). Maybe tack a “breakpoint” in tax stability to rent-rates-beyond-inflation stability.
Since 1977 California has had the California Tax Postponement Program to protect low income seniors from the economy. If you're a low income senior and own your house in California you can defer property taxes indefinitely so that no matter what happens to housing prices you'll never feel pressured to move. Several states have something similar (eg. NJ senior freeze) but I think California is the most aggressive.
Prop 13 is wholly unnecessary. It could be removed entirely overnight and grandma wouldn't need to pay a dime.
Any idea what % of the rental market is students vs UCSC staff vs non-UCSC?
It seems like the college shouldn't be allowed to enroll more students than the city has capacity to house. At minimum, it should be building more dorms on campus (I have no idea if that's feasible based on town layout).
Looking at the satellite view in Google Maps, there appears to be massive plots of open space dead center on campus and also to the east?
And the entire campus is far less dense than UVA (for whatever that's worth - another small city campus that's extremely picturesque albeit for different reasons). 60% of UVA students live off-campus, but there doesn't seem to be the same problem with obtaining it. Prices are higher than you'd expect in a non-college town, because it's a captive market.
> Any idea what % of the rental market is students vs UCSC staff vs non-UCSC?
Don't know numbers on rental market, but total population of Santa Cruz is ~64K people and UCSC has nearly 20K students. So it's a huge amount of students for a small town which already has very little housing for anyone (student or not).
> It seems like the college shouldn't be allowed to enroll more students than the city has capacity to house.
This is ultimately the only solution.
> At minimum, it should be building more dorms on campus (I have no idea if that's feasible based on town layout).
UCSC is the only entity who has very large amounts of undeveloped land in the area. They have all the space to build more than enough housing, they just don't want to.
The thing I read in there that was disappointing was the administration response. However it is a state school so I imagine they don't have the same funding for development of housing on site / not to mention they are located between the SC mountains / protected forest and the ocean. It's a small area without much development space and that land is at a premium.
For a long time now, the UC system's spirit has been "hey, our total lack of concern about our students' well-being is feature, not a bug. If you graduate here, you've shown you're a survivor (or that you have money to soften the blows)". I felt that ethos at UC Berkeley forty years ago.
And sure, if UC solved the housing problem for their students, it might solve things for non-students, which might reduce house values and no one wants housing prices to decline.
I don't think improving housing for UC students solves the problem for the area. I was just referring to them building more on campus housing. Might take a bit of heat off the rental market.
The turn in the story is ... let's revisit this next year and see how the housing situation is .. I think it's about to melt down a lot. I suspect this blog post represents an unfortunate temporary thing.
Step 2: Spend years building an awesome community because you personally endeavor to make it what you want.
Step 3: Profit.
Notice this is the same process for a fixer upper house. It's just a buying into a fixer upper community. Labor intensive. Higher variability in the outcome but notice much more upside than flipping houses.
Why should the growth stop? People are clearly demonstrating a desire to move to these cities. I see no reason why NIMBYs should be allowed to artificially decide that newcomers are not allowed. Growth will simply continue as long as people keep moving in.
I think humans have demonstrated time and time again that densely constructed cities are a desirable place to live. Are there some people that would leave if these cities started loosening zoning and allowing dense construction? Sure - not everyone wants to live in a big city. But I would argue that the net change in population would still be massively positive.
Besides, why should existing homeowners get a monopoly on deciding what kind of city Santa Cruz should be? If there is a desire for dense housing, then dense housing will get filled. If you're right that people moving to these cities want suburbia then one would expect new multi-story apartments to go empty. But that's clearly not what happens.
It will be a very, very long time before we run out of usable land in this country. The problem really is that 50% of the population wants to live on the same 0.1% of land.
Ever since humanity started being able to build upward, I'm not sure this is so relevant. There's more than enough developed land to comfortably house the human race. We're just using it comically inefficiently.
Let's saying the average human values shelter at $X. Even if it were always possible to arbitrarily build upwards, it still makes sense to buy land because the value of the land would be $X * number of people who want to live on the land. As long as the number of people who want to live on your land keeps growing, as seems to be the case in Santa Cruz, it makes sense to own land.
And of course, once you own the land, you may decide that maybe you don't want so many people around. The value of your land is based on desirability, not the actual density, after all. So instead of building an arbitrarily tall building, you band together with the other land owners and implement something called zoning that restricts how high buildings can be.
I'm not making a moral claim that this is right or wrong. I'm simply pointing out that this incentive structure is inherent to land ownership in our country.
I'm not disagreeing that land can be a good investment for that reason (though psychically knowing which bits of land will increase in desirability in the future is not trivial).
I _am_ disagreeing with your assertion that "there is a certain amount of delusion in expecting any static resource to meet monotonically increasing amounts of demand". Increasing the efficiency with which you use a resource is, in fact, an excellent way to make a static resource meet an increasing amount of demand.
> instead of building an arbitrarily tall building, you band together with the other land owners and implement something called zoning that restricts how high buildings can be
AFAIK this isn't the actual origin of restrictive American zoning policy, but yes I see your point. However, effective NIMBYism requires that small groups of zealous locals be able to control construction in the first place. If zoning policy was restructured to be controlled primarily by the federal or state government, it would be impossible for local councils to zone away dense construction the way they do now. Japan is a practical example of a country that does zoning in exactly this way.
California can't support as many people as you wish it could and replacing its SFH suburbs with cramped mixed income efficiency apartments would be an aesthetic, ecological, and socioeconomic disaster.
Most people find European cities more beautiful. SC is an ugly city. Even SF is much more pretty.
> ecological
It’s pretty well established that cities are ecological superior to suburbs.
> socioeconomic
Money extracted from the economy by landlords is money not flowing and being used to spur economic activity. VC firms have lamented that they have to invest in bigger rounds because growing headcount in expensive-rent cities is their greatest expense.
People don't choose to live in cities like Santa Cruz for the architecture. That's kind of missing the point. No one cares what the buildings look like.
Noted VC Peter Thiel reduced his investments in the SF Bay Area because housing got too expensive. Most of the funding just flows to landlords.
You are effectively just proposing an enormous tax (read: price increase) on renters, which seems like the exact opposite of what needs to be achieved. I would support completely repealing prop 13 though.
Demonizing landlords, developers, and property investment firms at best does nothing and at worst actively makes the housing situation worse by further restricting supply. No amount of disincentives to property ownership will solve the core, fundamental problem that _there is not enough housing_. Any solution that doesn't increase supply is no solution at all.
Santa Cruz is a tiny dot of land between the mountains and ocean. The only crisis is in overpopulation, brought about by the tiered UC/CSU credentialism.
Does anyone really think UCSC provides a better undergrad education than the average CSU? They literally have the exact same state mandated curriculum. But FAANG will hire someone with a UC degree over a CSU, thus the system is overflowing.
Just to give two examples, both Soquel Avenue and Lower Ocean have some of the ugliest buildings and lots in the history of architecture and urbanism. Why multi-story building can take their place?
Aside from NIMBYsm and the incompetence of local administrators, the main problems for bigger and better urbanism in SC are water (apparently, then who knows) and transit. Regarding the latter, there are virtually no public transportation options between Santa Cruz-Aptos and Santa Cruz-San Jose. That is, there is only one bus.
As someone who lived in SC for many years and for some inexplicable reason still lives there, what I can say is that the town could be 10 times more beautiful. I can't understand why the areas closest to the water have been "sold" to rich people instead of being used by the public, Mission Street (the main vehicular artery) is as ugly and dangerous as it can be for pedestrians and cyclists, West Cliff has been planted with ugly grass that you can't even tell if it's natural or turf-like, and the shoreline between the San Lorenzo River and the end of Seabright, man, it's so ugly, full of concrete, no trees, with rusting infrastructure that it's hard to believe nobody in ten+ years has done anything to make it decent-looking.
Then, "A pretty white town that only looks somewhat Latino in the daytime because the service workers who keep this town running commute in from Watsonville and Salinas.", is a deeply misguided observation. The town itself is not pretty at all. Only looks somewhat Latino? I live in a neighborhood in Santa Cruz proper that is around, according to my visual estimate, 80% latino, and the 20% estimate for the whole town is fair (more than 30% at the county level).
As someone who went to a CSU and works at a FAANG, I don't really agree about the credentialism thing, but I do agree about the overpopulation thing.
The only real solution IMO is just to build more housing in California. For that to happen though, we need increased density which requires relaxed zoning, but NIMBY's want to preserve their city in its exact state forever, so we end up with this craziness.
There's nothing inherently impossible about building a dense, thriving city on "a tiny dot of land". I fail to see how the issue is overpopulation and not an abject failure to construct housing in line with the number of people who want to live there.
I've wondered about this myself, many many times. It's either a complete failure to understand the basic supply/demand equation which underpins all resource scarcity OR somehow voters feel it's in their interest to not change things.
> voters feel it's in their interest to not change things
I mean, in a sense it is. NIMBY-dominated suburbia might be a disaster for the environment, economic growth, and the well-being of newer and poorer residents, but it does an excellent job of keeping homeowners' property values sky-high.
The problem is the people who live and vote there want the city to remain as it is - certainly it would be a successful city if it were as dense as Paris, but it wouldn’t be Santa Cruz anymore, but Paris West or something.
> The problem is the people who live and vote there want the city to remain as it is
There's no good reason that Santa Cruz should specifically stay the way it was 50 years ago or whatever. Personally, I would have liked for Santa Cruz to remain the way it was before people came and tore up all the nature to build a bunch of suburbs, but I can't get what I want either. Culture is inherently ever-changing; Santa Cruz may be _different_ in 50 years if densification and growth was allowed but I don't see how it would be somehow not be Santa Cruz.
There are real, severe economic effects from trying to freeze a city in an arbitrary point in time. At some point the well-being of real actual people needs to be prioritized over the aesthetic preferences and property values of a few NIMBYs. Especially when those aesthetic preferences essentially boil down to hating multi-story apartments and public transit.
Which brings us full circle to the whole question of government and local government in particular; Californians in general and certainly Santa Crucians would be directly opposed to Texas voting to redevelop Santa Cruz into a highrise metropolis - so who has the say and who gets to make that decision? Obviously the people who want to live there don't live there, but should it be a county decision? State? Federal? World?
Even many of the people who are rabidly pro-transit will be at least mildly against "transit right through my bedroom"; most people don't like being eminently domained.
This usually results in the solution being "motion" of some sort; a city that is run down or out of the limelight begins to modernize and upgrade, and it becomes the new center, and the towns that don't chance ossify and eventually die off.
It may be that the "California problem" is solved because everyone eventually moves away.
Why should development be a matter of formal voting and government mandates? Why should it be any more complex than private entities buying land and then constructing what they want on that land? (Within reason - zoning is still important to keep housing away from industrial waste or garbage dumps. But the externalities of disallowing dense and mixed-use development are profoundly negative.)
That's likely to be involved in at least part of the solution, but you could still have the situation where everyone refuses to sell to developers (or enacts HOA-like contracts that forbid it).
> you could still have the situation where everyone refuses to sell to developers
There's nothing wrong with this - no one is obligated to sell their land to developers. But considering that NIMBYs have to fight hard and continuously to block new development that would have otherwise proceeded, clearly that's not the case.
>Santa Cruz is a tiny dot of land between the mountains and ocean
Which is probably why so many people want to live there in the first place. Just like Vancouver or other such vibrant cities with great nature, pretty views and many amenities.
I'm sympathetic to this viewpoint, but (a) Boomers aren't dying quickly enough and (b) we're talking about student housing. A litter fewer than 20k students attend UCSC:
Which suggests UCSC should either cut enrollment or build housing. They have suitable land for the latter. If they can't build housing due to legal restrictions, they could cut enrollment. Those are the realistic options.
