Who Is Going to Live in All of Those Places Part 9

Who Is Going to Live in All of Those Places Part 9

Continuing the conversation…talking about all those big buildings going up Downtown and along the County’s major transportation corridors. And what a strange thing it is to see so many new housing projects being built at the same time in Santa Cruz, a place where not long ago, a small house addition might have taken years to complete.

With numerous new projects in the queue, lots getting scraped, huge cranes over Cabrillo College and UC’s upper campus, eight story buildings rising along Downtown streetscapes and thousands of new housing “units” on the way, it suddenly feels like there’s way too much growth, happening way too fast.

The worm has definitely turned and for a community as committed to the slow growth ethos, as Santa Cruz has been for the last fifty years, the scope of the transformation that’s taking place, right before our eyes, is stunning.  

As a town, there’s been very little in our previous experience to prepare us for the present paradigm shift, except perhaps for the cooperative response that grew out of the destructive force of the 1989 earthquake. Outside of that, we’ve been a role model for resisting change and discouraging growth, how to prevent it from happening rather than planning for it and finding ways to weave it into our hometown fabric.  

Over the decades, we’ve fought stubbornly against every development, big and small and any new project that smacked of uncontrolled growth, urban sprawl or profit-driven gentrification. Most of the slow growth tactics we pioneered, were later adopted by other cities/counties around the state when they too, decided to limit their own housing growth. 

The winning strategy was hardwired into local politics, back in the early 1970s. That’s when a handful of westside residents rose up to protest efforts to turn Lighthouse Field into an ill-conceived New England style conference center. It was a battle that pitted neighbors, small homeowners, surfers, teachers and everyday community members against out of town developers, monied interests, local conservative politicians and (gasp) the Santa Cruz Chamber of Commerce! 

And it became the foundation for all our subsequent efforts to fight the forces of evil development for the next fifty years. Along the way, we got incredibly good at shooting projects down, delaying them for decades, stranding them on the drawing board and making the process so arcane and expensive that promoters finally gave up. 

Every time a new residential, retail, hotel or infrastructure project was proposed, it was framed in black and white terms, as a battle between: rich vs poor, neighborhood vs. out-of-town, small homeowner vs. big business, local character vs. crass commercialism, environmental concern vs. urban sprawl.   

Next Week:  Who opened the floodgates?