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.
