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Santa Cruz is a Housing Nightmare

darrellowens.substack.com

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Re: Santa Cruz is a Housing Nightmare

#61

Post by michaelwww »

Analemma_ wrote: post #53
michaelwww wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect you don't understand the difference between Santa Cruz and San Jose. Have you been to Santa Cruz?

"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.

Re: Santa Cruz is a Housing Nightmare

#62

Post by foogazi »

millimeterman wrote: post #49
foogazi wrote: post #42

When does growth stop ? What’s the end-game ? As a techie, Santa Cruz renter and UCSC parent, I sympathize with the author But living here and going to school here are choices, UC Davis, Merced & Berkeley exist I’m sure someone can complain that I outbid them to rent a house But driving up from Berkeley, seeing the housing issue, the homeless problem, and then saying “this sucks, but make room for me” strikes me as n…

> When does growth stop ? What’s the end-game ? 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.

> People are clearly demonstrating a desire to move to these cities.

Yes, they demonstrate a desire to move into these cities in their current non-hypergrowth form

Then you follow up and make that desire a reality by putting a down payment on a property

Talk is cheap

Re: Santa Cruz is a Housing Nightmare

#63

Post by rcpt »

michaelwww wrote: post #34
paxys wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 c…

> 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... What's your solution?

Example of Santa Cruz progressive homeless solution

https://www.reddit.com/r/santacruz/comments/blxiye/drone_foo...

Re: Santa Cruz is a Housing Nightmare

#64

Post by boringg »

aclatuts wrote: post #50
boringg wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Santa Cruz is small. Vancouver is a large with significant land. Very different except they are both on the west coast.

A 4Ghz CPU is faster than a 1Ghz CPU. If you wanted to scale the best you would want faster algorithms and faster hardware. Not just faster hardware. Not being able to do something because of size for a human behaviour problem is almost always the smooth brain argument.

Your comparison is marginal at best. Effort for using smooth brain to strengthen your argument undermines any fleeting validity of your criticism.

Re: Santa Cruz is a Housing Nightmare

#65

Post by michaelwww »

jltsiren wrote: post #43
michaelwww wrote: post #16

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 secon…

Not a local, but I've been here for a while. 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 notic…

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.

Re: Santa Cruz is a Housing Nightmare

#66

Post by michaelwww »

slavapestov wrote: post #59
michaelwww wrote: post #16

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 secon…

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".

I repeat, the University should build dorms on their land up on the hill. They have plenty of it, but they want to preserve it's natural beauty

Re: Santa Cruz is a Housing Nightmare

#67

Post by Melatonic »

michaelwww wrote: post #16

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 secon…

...........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.

Re: Santa Cruz is a Housing Nightmare

#68

Post by millimeterman »

uup wrote: post #54
millimeterman wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

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.

Re: Santa Cruz is a Housing Nightmare

#69

Post by rcpt »

millimeterman wrote: post #13
ramesh31 wrote: post #2

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.

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.

Right. You could drop the center of Barcelona right on top Santa Cruz and have a vastly improved city.

Re: Santa Cruz is a Housing Nightmare

#70

Post by vineyardmike »

yuan43 wrote: post #58

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…

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.

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