Who is Going To Live in All of Those Places? Part 7

Who is Going To Live in All of Those Places? Part 7

Continuing the conversation…talking about all those big buildings going up around town and how, in addition to changing the landscape, they may also transform some of the ways we think about ourselves as a community.

So why here and why now? Why after four decades of stubborn resistance to more housing are we seeing such a flood of new buildings spouting up? Depending on who you are and how long you’ve been here and which publications, websites or Facebook pages you read, there are lots of opinions about who’s responsible for flipping our former no/slow growth stance on its head. 

At the top of the short list of suspects there are the old reliables: greedy out of town developers and inept local officials (who are also probably in the pocket of the greedy developers).  But if one is really looking to assign blame, the easiest place to start is with the State, which has enacted a series of laws designed to override local zoning, speed up approvals, enforce mandated housing targets and in general, make it much easier (and presumably less expensive) for builders to build. 

It seems that the entire State, not just Santa Cruz, is facing a severe housing shortage, due as we are told, to the lingering effects of the Great Recession, the widespread growth of restrictive ordinances, the increased cost of building and labor and new pressures brought on by the pandemic. 

Of course, Santa Cruz has been treading water in the deep end of the housing shortage for quite a while…In recent years, we even reached a notorious new high/low point of being named the #1 most expensive place to rent and the #2 most expensive place to buy in the entire U.S. (out of a whopping 3,244 counties!!) That’s pretty stunning and hard to ignore. 

And while that may be rewarding fact for locals who own a few rentals and/or for those who have owned their homes long enough to rack up some serious equity, it’s a dubious distinction and a huge hurdle for everyone else who is living here, who wants to live here and/or who  hopes to try to stay here.

Why is housing so hard to scale in Santa Cruz? On the demand side, our beaches, beautiful environment, world-class weather and proximity to higher paying jobs in Silicon Valley will always represent a huge draw. On the supply side, our unique geography acts as a natural constraint to efficient housing growth, limiting it to a narrow band of flat land perched between the ocean and the mountains – a zone that’s already populated by older single family tracts with very few buildable lots remaining.

More Next Week…