More About All of Those Buildings

More About All of Those Buildings

Continuing the conversation…STILL talking about those tall buildings going up around town and the thousands of new housing “units” that are on their way and what it all means for a place that has so stubbornly opposed any growth for the last fifty years.

So what happened? Who opened the floodgates? How do we respond? 

Looking through the lens of our local, no/slow growth past, it’s tempting to see those new buildings as extensions of the longstanding battle between good and evil, local vs. out-of-towners, neighborhood vs. big monied interests. It has always been us against them and somehow, those greedy developers who’ve gathered at the gates since the 1970s, finally found a way to breach our defenses and start paving over paradise.   

We could also point the fickle finger of blame at the state and say that it’s their fault for enacting new laws that override local zoning, speed up approvals, enforce mandated housing targets and make it much easier for builders to build. And for good measure we could say that any local elected official that declares themself helpless in the face of the state’s “builders remedy” must secretly be in league with the out-of-town developers.  

OR ….(and this is a big or for a place that has slow growth in its DNA)…we can just decide to ditch the party line altogether and accept the fact that what we’ve fashioned over the last fifty years doesn’t work (for enough people) anymore. And then we can try to lean into the shift that’s underway, whether we like it or not.

We don’t have to oppose all the new buildings just because that’s what we’re used to doing. We can resist our deepest NIMBY urges to be self-righteously angry and hate all new buildings for being too big, too tall, too ugly and for having too few parking spaces, too few affordable units and too few below-market rents. 

And we can (hopefully) stop proclaiming that any new housing project going in where the Catalyst is “will rip the heart out of” a Downtown that has successfully withstood flood and earthquake and the threat of digital commerce.

This is a transformational moment for Santa Cruz, a bigger, more inclusive, generational shift backed by a deep realization that there’s no logical way for slow growth to manifest into enough local housing. 

While we were working hard to restrict growth, deny permits, control the planning process and limit infrastructure capacity: the gap between rich and poor, homeowners and renters, north county and south county, privileged seniors and millennial children has been growing.

Think of it as a true-up for the housing supply that’s running about thirty years behind schedule.