The Big Question

The Big Question

Launching the new year…putting the finishing touches on my upcoming series of talks for  homeowners. Now in its fifth year, it’s called: When it Comes to Your Home, There are No Stupid Questions, and it will offer a kinder/gentler venue for people to ask questions about their largest asset and the centering place for their lives  – i.e. their homes! Stay tuned for details.

As a variation on the theme, today’s column is called: When It Comes to Your Hometown, There are No Stupid Questions… and it highlights the one question, above all others, that I’ve consistently heard in countless conversations over the past year. Everyone has been asking but  no one has offered up an answer.

It’s about all those new buildings and proposals for more, that are sprouting up Downtown and along some of the County’s main transportation corridors. That question du jour? Who is going to live in all of those places?  

The querists are divided into two camps. The first is made up mostly of people who have lived in town for a while, for whom the question itself isn’t really a question but more of an all-inclusive lament that expresses their displeasure. It comes with a ready-made checklist of all the reasons why those new buildings are a terrible idea. 

The familiar litany includes building height, density, style, design, disappearing viewsheds, future shadows cast over surrounding streetscapes and of course the usual projected worries about traffic, parking, water, rents, etc –  basically anything loathsome that has ever been attributed to growth in Santa Cruz.  

“Who is going to even live in those buildings anyway?”  is a shorthand rejection of it all, as a foregone conclusion. For a County so committed to no/slow growth policies the new buildings are quite a shock to the system. Over the last forty years, we’ve grown quite adept at saying what we don’t want to see but not very good at visualizing what we do want. The result has been growth by default and change without smart planning.  

It begs the question…if we’d been a little more welcoming to moderate forms of growth these past decades, say ADUs and midrise development, would the pendulum be swinging back so far, now that the state has unleashed the so-called “builders remedy” to drive housing density?

The other camp of querists are those who are genuinely, but guardedly optimistic about the arrival of those buildings, in large part because change needed to happen and at least now, something is actually happening. Even so, they still have the same question everyone else does’: Who is going to live in all those buildings?

More next week…