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Santa Cruz is a Housing Nightmare

darrellowens.substack.com

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Re: Santa Cruz is a Housing Nightmare

#81

Post by btbuilder »

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.

Re: Santa Cruz is a Housing Nightmare

#82

Post by reducesuffering »

michaelwww wrote: post #66
slavapestov wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Re: Santa Cruz is a Housing Nightmare

#83

Post by nradov »

millimeterman wrote: post #24
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…

> 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…

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.

Re: Santa Cruz is a Housing Nightmare

#84

Post by xvedejas »

s3r3nity wrote: post #46
seahorserocker wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excellent article. 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 forcib…

> 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_....hop…

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.

Re: Santa Cruz is a Housing Nightmare

#85

Post by nradov »

vineyardmike wrote: post #76
wikitopian wrote: post #20

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.

> aesthetic 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 e…

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.

https://www.sfgate.com/expensive-san-francisco/article/peter...

Re: Santa Cruz is a Housing Nightmare

#86

Post by joe_the_user »

hindsightbias wrote: post #73
standardUser wrote: post #38

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…

This is the campus: https://www.ucsc.edu/campus/colleges.html 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.

Re: Santa Cruz is a Housing Nightmare

#87

Post by joe_the_user »

s3r3nity wrote: post #46
seahorserocker wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excellent article. 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 forcib…

> 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_....hop…

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).

Re: Santa Cruz is a Housing Nightmare

#88

Post by joe_the_user »

michaelwww wrote: post #44
seahorserocker wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... build housing.

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.

Re: Santa Cruz is a Housing Nightmare

#89

Post by foogazi »

vineyardmike wrote: post #74
foogazi wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UCSC sits on 2,000 acres Unconscionable that they off-load student housing onto the city of Santa Cruz Gavin Newsom should lead by example and guarantee that no UC student will go homeless

Plenty of students want to live off campus, as adults, instead of being on campus. It’s unconscionable that the city would be so un-accommodating to students while exploiting them for rent money and economic gain.

> Plenty of students want to live off campus, as adults, instead of being on campus.

Sounds like an adult choice to me then

> It’s unconscionable that the city would be so un-accommodating to students while exploiting them for rent money and economic gain.

How can they be both un-accommodating and yet get rent payments, by definition they are being accommodated

Re: Santa Cruz is a Housing Nightmare

#90

Post by foogazi »

alistairSH wrote: post #51
foogazi wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UCSC sits on 2,000 acres Unconscionable that they off-load student housing onto the city of Santa Cruz Gavin Newsom should lead by example and guarantee that no UC student will go homeless

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 highe…

There are cow pastures right on campus

They have tried building more, but I think someone found an endangered frog or bird living on a creek by the new development site

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