7 ms·

I lived in Santa Cruz for over 10 years and grew up in the area. The tech industry has had hugely negative effects on Santa Cruz. It's a long but doable commute

by kaikai 7y ago

I lived in Santa Cruz for over 10 years and grew up in the area. The tech industry has had hugely negative effects on Santa Cruz. It's a long but doable commute to the south bay (including Netflix), and there's shuttles to many of the larger tech companies. The job market in Santa Cruz is dismal; the university is a major source of jobs but other than that it's mostly small town service jobs. Trying to live in Santa Cruz AND work in Santa Cruz is very difficult. Home ownership is out of reach for the vast majority of people who work in the area, and the rental market is dominated by students living off of student loans or family support rather than supported by local jobs. There is no easy answer, because as others have noted, Santa Cruz is surrounded by ocean and greenspace, and full of NIMBYs who want to limit development. I can't blame them; the city is cute and many of the neighborhoods are lovely. It's just a shame that it's becoming a bedroom community for Silicon Valley rather than a self-sustaining town in its own right.

ng12 7y ago
> There is no easy answer, because as others have noted, Santa Cruz is surrounded by ocean and greenspace California's coastline is over 800 miles long and most of it is equally as picturesque as Santa Cruz. Driving down the 1 you'll pass through a hundred small towns with relatively affordable homes and plenty of oceanfront scenery. The primary value of SC is that it's close to the Bay Area and that's what it should be optimized for.
- thedance 7y ago
  Most of California's coastline is sheer cliffs. There are reasons why our cities are where they are.
  - Retric 7y ago
    For the average person, ocean temperature is a bigger issue than cliffs. With plenty of examples of popular beaches globally next to giant cliffs.
  - nostrademons 7y ago
    The GP is largely correct though. There are tons of incredibly beautiful small coastal towns in California - Crescent City, Fort Bragg, Gualala, the whole Point Reyes region from Bodega Bay to Stinson Beach, Pacifica, Half Moon Bay, Pescadero, Watsonville/Moss Landing, the Carmel/Monterey area, Morro Bay, Santa Barbara, etc. Cliffs or not, there are real settlements there, and they're gorgeous, even prettier than Santa Cruz. What they don't have is easy proximity to the jobs and tech wealth in the Bay Area.
    - selimthegrim 7y ago
      And exactly how affordable is Morro Bay these days?
      - strbean 7y ago
        Too expensive, guess I'll have to settle for a cheap place in Carmel! /s
      - nostrademons 7y ago
        When it comes to CA real estate it's all relative. You can get a 3BR with ocean views in Morro Bay for about $775K these days, while an equivalent property in Santa Cruz is about $1M. You can also get roughly equivalent (2BR) places in Santa Cruz for about $750-$800K, but they're in the flats, without much of a view. What I don't understand is why people who aren't tied down to a metro area would buy in CA instead of elsewhere on the Pacific Coast. Equivalent places in Astoria, OR go for $300K. Weather and politics, I guess: you can also get places like that in Crescent City for $300K or even less, but the fog is a lot heavier than the Central CA coastline, it's colder, and the politics are a lot more red-state.
        kelnos 7y ago
        I'd guess that many, maybe even most, people are tied down to a metro area. Job, social circles, family... after you've been in a place for a few years, many people find it hard to leave. I think about my own situation. I'm happy at my job, but I could feasibly go remote and still work for the same company. I don't have any family in the area (they're all on the east coast). But my social circles are here. I do have good friends who live elsewhere (somewhat scattered, though), but the thought of "starting over" in that regard just sounds like a hill I don't feel like climbing. I'm not exactly the type of person you're talking about, because I do want to live in a city. But when I look at Seattle, Portland, LA, San Diego, Honolulu, Austin, Chicago, Boston, NYC, DC... while I could see myself living in some of those places, the thought of actually making that leap gives me pause. I'm nearing 40, and I'm not sure I have the appetite to rebuild the relationships I've been building in the bay area over the last 16 years.
- Balgair 7y ago
  Or we could just pull a L. Bob Rife and finally collect/build The Raft out in Monterey Bay. The commute, even by kayak, would be shorter. I'm torn, are BMW drivers or great whites are more dangerous?
  - throwaway17_17 7y ago
    Both your joke and the Snowcrash reference are worthy of more karma than I can tell you. You just made my morning.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
matchbok 7y ago
Blaming the tech industry is both not fair and not correct. In the grand scheme of themes they are a tiny fraction of total employment.
- mistrial9 7y ago
  except you are wrong -- I personally know a CA-17 commuter and there are many, many others, for decades... long ago, it started in Scotts Valley and then moving further South.
  - pengaru 7y ago
    You don't even need to personally know CA-17 commuters, just try drive CA-17 during commute hours. Over last 10-15 years it's become very congested. And this doesn't even capture the many tech folks who have the luxury of working either 100% remote or commute to the office once a week.
  - epistasis 7y ago
    The numbers I have heard are 30,000 going from Santa Cruz north for work, daily, and 20,000 coming in to Santa Cruz for work, daily. Working in tech and living in Santa Cruz is not new, a good chunk of the Gen X and Boomer crowd in Santa Cruz did that or does that. I don't think its nearly as much of a problem as Santa Cruz refusing to allow any sort of density. The complaints I hear about tiny changes, like a hotel replacing two stories with three stories, are the real cause of Santa Cruz's woes. SC has tried to be exclusionary for the past four decades, which means landowners get rich and there's no room for anybody who isn't rich. Tech has little to do with this. San Luis Obispo is going through the same stuff, and they can't blame Silicon Valley for that at all. The problem is not new people, the problem is refusing to share.
- BonnieBrown 7y ago
  Yah you are entirely wrong. I lived in Santa Cruz for 4 years while going to school. If you dont think the residual wealth from just over the hill raises housing prices and drives out lower cost-of-living housing the same way that it happened in SF proper you are willingly deluding yourself of the truth. In my 4 years at Santa Cruz I was not aware of one low-rent housing development being built. There was one developed on West Cliff near the boardwalk but it was like 3.5k for a 2 bedroom apartment and that was the only one I was aware of.
atarian 7y ago
If only we could build more houses where people work so they wouldn't have to commute from Santa Cruz..
- epistasis 7y ago
  Santa Cruz's city council has opposed any sort of state level action that would let more people live close to the jobs, ironically.
  - rsync 7y ago
    Your parent is suggesting, correctly, that the place to add housing density is inside the city (of San Francisco) itself. It is neither noteworthy, nor harmful, that Santa Cruz maintains itself as a "bedroom community" if there is plenty of density where it belongs: in the city.
    - epistasis 7y ago
      It is noteworthy that Santa Cruz has opposed legislation at the state level that would place density in the cities, despite leading political figures demagoguing the evils of being a bedroom community, and the evils of letting people live in Santa Cruz while they work over the hill. It is also failing to build the density that would allow affordable housing for its own workforce, instead maintaining luxury zoning which means that only mansions will be built for out of towners that visit sometimes but not often. This means big profits for the working class homeowners that are now retired, but exclusion of any opportunity for working class people today.
- deepakhj 7y ago
  Build more office space and dense housing so people can afford to start companies in Santa Cruz.
- kelnos 7y ago
  As much as I'm uncomfortable with the idea of taking housing policy from local control and moving some of it to the state, I think this is the only way to get communities to "cooperate". I do think Santa Cruz should do some building of its own, but relieving some of the pressure there and making it more feasible for people to live in larger cities with higher density needs to happen. On the other hand, I do know several people who work on the peninsula or in south bay who have chosen to live in Santa Cruz because they actually like Santa Cruz. Not because of cost or availability or housing policy in the rest of the bay area.
jmspring 7y ago
Santa Cruz had a healthier tech ecosystem prior to Bubble-1 (2000s) than it has had since. Sure, there are companies and Amazon and Google have a foot hold not to mention the shuttles. But actual companies, there are fewer than there were back then.
jseliger 7y ago
and full of NIMBYs who want to limit development There is an easy solution: move most land-use regulation to the state level, not the local level. CA's legislature is making some noises in that direction. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-01-06/sb-50-changes-single-family-zoning-california https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-01-06/sb-50-ch...
- hedora 7y ago
  I have personal experience with this. Your analysis is exactly right, and taking local control away from state and county governments is a partial solution. There should also be financial implications to local governments if they take too long to turn around permit applications. (1.5x actual damages incurred after a cutoff date, paid directly to the home owner, no lawyer required, seems reasonable to me). In particular, some local planning offices are notoriously obstructionist. In the best case (no zoning exceptions, no objections from neighbors, sympathetic bureaucrats in the office itself), they still needlessly delay the project, and compliance with questionable local regulations with bloat the budget. A San Jose builders association estimates that 25% of the cost of new construction goes to this — I don’t think that includes finance costs due to delay, and it still seems low. Individual homeowners probably pay more as a percentage than well-connected development firms. Alternatively, maybe SJ is more developer-friendly than most places around here. Over the decades, NIMBYs have passed a set of onerous laws, and created numerous new county offices to enforce them. Of course, the offices are woefully understaffed. There can be a dozen, and they are all backlogged. To resubmit, you have to wait for the slowest office to respond, and with 12 offices, you’ll definitely be resubmitting. There has been some action at the state level for ADUs (nanny units). Basically, local governments had to remove a bunch of restrictions that were designed to make ADU development impossible, and impose an SLA (of many months, which is lightning fast by CA standards) on permit application processing. If the governments didn’t comply, the law temporarily voided the entirety of their local zoning laws. Sadly, it only applied to ADU’s, which are limited to being the second house on a lot, with a max square footage of 1200 sq ft. That’s intentionally too small for families with kids, especially in areas with weird lot shape constraints. I guess this protects affluent schools from poor kids. Also, they can’t be sold separately from the main house, only rented. Presumably this is to prevent lower class people from owning houses. (If this seems implausible to you, search for “palo alto redlining“ to get an idea of the historical behavior of the city governments around here.) On the bright side for owners of ADUs, the state-wide rent control laws that were recently passed don’t apply to them (though the anti-eviction clauses might) so home owners can use them to extract extra money from students (and therefore UC), as rent control restricts construction of higher density housing.
pcwalton 7y ago
The tech industry has also undoubtedly injected a lot of wealth into the area. Be careful what you wish for.
chuckcode 7y ago
As convenient as it would be to have a single scapegoat to hang the problems on like the dreaded "tech industry" my experience is that housing shortages in Santa Cruz is a complex multi factor problem. Some example contributing factors: - UC Santa Cruz has increased enrollment to 19,500 students with only just around half of them living on campus. Living on campus is relatively expensive at $1940 for room & board to share a room [1,2] - Considering Santa Cruz itself has just around 65,000 residents the half of students living off campus make up 15% of population - Certainly people commute over to tech for higher pay, but according to HUD that number has climbed just 4% from 26-30% between 2005 to 2015 [3] - Santa Cruz itself greatly limits development with annual permits averaging around 250 for the past 10 years and almost all single family homes and townhomes rather than higher density [4] - California's entire real estate market has been warped by Prop 13 which fixes real estate taxes to the time property was purchased with limited increases [5]. This incentivizes companies and people to stay on a property longer than other real estate markets as they have lower taxes. It also dissuades towns from building housing as long term the costs such as schools, services, etc. go up with market, but not tax revenues. The availability and cost of housing in California and Santa Cruz is a real problem for many people. I've seen a lot of finger pointing with people's favorite scapegoats. I'd like to see the same energy go into the difficult work of city planning for construction, transportation, schools, etc. [1] https://admissions.ucsc.edu/why-ucsc/faq/housing.html https://admissions.ucsc.edu/why-ucsc/faq/housing.html [2] https://housing.ucsc.edu/rates/index.html https://housing.ucsc.edu/rates/index.html [3] https://www.huduser.gov/portal/publications https://www.huduser.gov/portal/publications /pdf/SantaCruzCA-CHMA-19.pdf (page 7) [4] https://www.huduser.gov/portal/publications https://www.huduser.gov/portal/publications /pdf/SantaCruzCA-CHMA-19.pdf (page 14) [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13 [edited for formatting]

by kaikai 7y ago

ng12 7y ago

> There is no easy answer, because as others have noted, Santa Cruz is surrounded by ocean and greenspace California's coastline is over 800 miles long and most of it is equally as picturesque as Santa Cruz. Driving down the 1 you'll pass through a hundred small towns with relatively affordable homes and plenty of oceanfront scenery. The primary value of SC is that it's close to the Bay Area and that's what it should be optimized for.

thedance 7y ago
Most of California's coastline is sheer cliffs. There are reasons why our cities are where they are.
- Retric 7y ago
  For the average person, ocean temperature is a bigger issue than cliffs. With plenty of examples of popular beaches globally next to giant cliffs.
- nostrademons 7y ago
  The GP is largely correct though. There are tons of incredibly beautiful small coastal towns in California - Crescent City, Fort Bragg, Gualala, the whole Point Reyes region from Bodega Bay to Stinson Beach, Pacifica, Half Moon Bay, Pescadero, Watsonville/Moss Landing, the Carmel/Monterey area, Morro Bay, Santa Barbara, etc. Cliffs or not, there are real settlements there, and they're gorgeous, even prettier than Santa Cruz. What they don't have is easy proximity to the jobs and tech wealth in the Bay Area.
  - selimthegrim 7y ago
    And exactly how affordable is Morro Bay these days?
    - strbean 7y ago
      Too expensive, guess I'll have to settle for a cheap place in Carmel! /s
    - nostrademons 7y ago
      When it comes to CA real estate it's all relative. You can get a 3BR with ocean views in Morro Bay for about $775K these days, while an equivalent property in Santa Cruz is about $1M. You can also get roughly equivalent (2BR) places in Santa Cruz for about $750-$800K, but they're in the flats, without much of a view. What I don't understand is why people who aren't tied down to a metro area would buy in CA instead of elsewhere on the Pacific Coast. Equivalent places in Astoria, OR go for $300K. Weather and politics, I guess: you can also get places like that in Crescent City for $300K or even less, but the fog is a lot heavier than the Central CA coastline, it's colder, and the politics are a lot more red-state.
      - kelnos 7y ago
        I'd guess that many, maybe even most, people are tied down to a metro area. Job, social circles, family... after you've been in a place for a few years, many people find it hard to leave. I think about my own situation. I'm happy at my job, but I could feasibly go remote and still work for the same company. I don't have any family in the area (they're all on the east coast). But my social circles are here. I do have good friends who live elsewhere (somewhat scattered, though), but the thought of "starting over" in that regard just sounds like a hill I don't feel like climbing. I'm not exactly the type of person you're talking about, because I do want to live in a city. But when I look at Seattle, Portland, LA, San Diego, Honolulu, Austin, Chicago, Boston, NYC, DC... while I could see myself living in some of those places, the thought of actually making that leap gives me pause. I'm nearing 40, and I'm not sure I have the appetite to rebuild the relationships I've been building in the bay area over the last 16 years.
Balgair 7y ago
Or we could just pull a L. Bob Rife and finally collect/build The Raft out in Monterey Bay. The commute, even by kayak, would be shorter. I'm torn, are BMW drivers or great whites are more dangerous?
- throwaway17_17 7y ago
  Both your joke and the Snowcrash reference are worthy of more karma than I can tell you. You just made my morning.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

matchbok 7y ago

Blaming the tech industry is both not fair and not correct. In the grand scheme of themes they are a tiny fraction of total employment.

mistrial9 7y ago
except you are wrong -- I personally know a CA-17 commuter and there are many, many others, for decades... long ago, it started in Scotts Valley and then moving further South.
- pengaru 7y ago
  You don't even need to personally know CA-17 commuters, just try drive CA-17 during commute hours. Over last 10-15 years it's become very congested. And this doesn't even capture the many tech folks who have the luxury of working either 100% remote or commute to the office once a week.
- epistasis 7y ago
  The numbers I have heard are 30,000 going from Santa Cruz north for work, daily, and 20,000 coming in to Santa Cruz for work, daily. Working in tech and living in Santa Cruz is not new, a good chunk of the Gen X and Boomer crowd in Santa Cruz did that or does that. I don't think its nearly as much of a problem as Santa Cruz refusing to allow any sort of density. The complaints I hear about tiny changes, like a hotel replacing two stories with three stories, are the real cause of Santa Cruz's woes. SC has tried to be exclusionary for the past four decades, which means landowners get rich and there's no room for anybody who isn't rich. Tech has little to do with this. San Luis Obispo is going through the same stuff, and they can't blame Silicon Valley for that at all. The problem is not new people, the problem is refusing to share.
BonnieBrown 7y ago
Yah you are entirely wrong. I lived in Santa Cruz for 4 years while going to school. If you dont think the residual wealth from just over the hill raises housing prices and drives out lower cost-of-living housing the same way that it happened in SF proper you are willingly deluding yourself of the truth. In my 4 years at Santa Cruz I was not aware of one low-rent housing development being built. There was one developed on West Cliff near the boardwalk but it was like 3.5k for a 2 bedroom apartment and that was the only one I was aware of.

atarian 7y ago

If only we could build more houses where people work so they wouldn't have to commute from Santa Cruz..

epistasis 7y ago
Santa Cruz's city council has opposed any sort of state level action that would let more people live close to the jobs, ironically.
- rsync 7y ago
  Your parent is suggesting, correctly, that the place to add housing density is inside the city (of San Francisco) itself. It is neither noteworthy, nor harmful, that Santa Cruz maintains itself as a "bedroom community" if there is plenty of density where it belongs: in the city.
  - epistasis 7y ago
    It is noteworthy that Santa Cruz has opposed legislation at the state level that would place density in the cities, despite leading political figures demagoguing the evils of being a bedroom community, and the evils of letting people live in Santa Cruz while they work over the hill. It is also failing to build the density that would allow affordable housing for its own workforce, instead maintaining luxury zoning which means that only mansions will be built for out of towners that visit sometimes but not often. This means big profits for the working class homeowners that are now retired, but exclusion of any opportunity for working class people today.
deepakhj 7y ago
Build more office space and dense housing so people can afford to start companies in Santa Cruz.
kelnos 7y ago
As much as I'm uncomfortable with the idea of taking housing policy from local control and moving some of it to the state, I think this is the only way to get communities to "cooperate". I do think Santa Cruz should do some building of its own, but relieving some of the pressure there and making it more feasible for people to live in larger cities with higher density needs to happen. On the other hand, I do know several people who work on the peninsula or in south bay who have chosen to live in Santa Cruz because they actually like Santa Cruz. Not because of cost or availability or housing policy in the rest of the bay area.

jmspring 7y ago

Santa Cruz had a healthier tech ecosystem prior to Bubble-1 (2000s) than it has had since. Sure, there are companies and Amazon and Google have a foot hold not to mention the shuttles. But actual companies, there are fewer than there were back then.

jseliger 7y ago

and full of NIMBYs who want to limit development There is an easy solution: move most land-use regulation to the state level, not the local level. CA's legislature is making some noises in that direction. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-01-06/sb-50-changes-single-family-zoning-california https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-01-06/sb-50-ch...

hedora 7y ago
I have personal experience with this. Your analysis is exactly right, and taking local control away from state and county governments is a partial solution. There should also be financial implications to local governments if they take too long to turn around permit applications. (1.5x actual damages incurred after a cutoff date, paid directly to the home owner, no lawyer required, seems reasonable to me). In particular, some local planning offices are notoriously obstructionist. In the best case (no zoning exceptions, no objections from neighbors, sympathetic bureaucrats in the office itself), they still needlessly delay the project, and compliance with questionable local regulations with bloat the budget. A San Jose builders association estimates that 25% of the cost of new construction goes to this — I don’t think that includes finance costs due to delay, and it still seems low. Individual homeowners probably pay more as a percentage than well-connected development firms. Alternatively, maybe SJ is more developer-friendly than most places around here. Over the decades, NIMBYs have passed a set of onerous laws, and created numerous new county offices to enforce them. Of course, the offices are woefully understaffed. There can be a dozen, and they are all backlogged. To resubmit, you have to wait for the slowest office to respond, and with 12 offices, you’ll definitely be resubmitting. There has been some action at the state level for ADUs (nanny units). Basically, local governments had to remove a bunch of restrictions that were designed to make ADU development impossible, and impose an SLA (of many months, which is lightning fast by CA standards) on permit application processing. If the governments didn’t comply, the law temporarily voided the entirety of their local zoning laws. Sadly, it only applied to ADU’s, which are limited to being the second house on a lot, with a max square footage of 1200 sq ft. That’s intentionally too small for families with kids, especially in areas with weird lot shape constraints. I guess this protects affluent schools from poor kids. Also, they can’t be sold separately from the main house, only rented. Presumably this is to prevent lower class people from owning houses. (If this seems implausible to you, search for “palo alto redlining“ to get an idea of the historical behavior of the city governments around here.) On the bright side for owners of ADUs, the state-wide rent control laws that were recently passed don’t apply to them (though the anti-eviction clauses might) so home owners can use them to extract extra money from students (and therefore UC), as rent control restricts construction of higher density housing.

pcwalton 7y ago

The tech industry has also undoubtedly injected a lot of wealth into the area. Be careful what you wish for.

chuckcode 7y ago

As convenient as it would be to have a single scapegoat to hang the problems on like the dreaded "tech industry" my experience is that housing shortages in Santa Cruz is a complex multi factor problem. Some example contributing factors: - UC Santa Cruz has increased enrollment to 19,500 students with only just around half of them living on campus. Living on campus is relatively expensive at $1940 for room & board to share a room [1,2] - Considering Santa Cruz itself has just around 65,000 residents the half of students living off campus make up 15% of population - Certainly people commute over to tech for higher pay, but according to HUD that number has climbed just 4% from 26-30% between 2005 to 2015 [3] - Santa Cruz itself greatly limits development with annual permits averaging around 250 for the past 10 years and almost all single family homes and townhomes rather than higher density [4] - California's entire real estate market has been warped by Prop 13 which fixes real estate taxes to the time property was purchased with limited increases [5]. This incentivizes companies and people to stay on a property longer than other real estate markets as they have lower taxes. It also dissuades towns from building housing as long term the costs such as schools, services, etc. go up with market, but not tax revenues. The availability and cost of housing in California and Santa Cruz is a real problem for many people. I've seen a lot of finger pointing with people's favorite scapegoats. I'd like to see the same energy go into the difficult work of city planning for construction, transportation, schools, etc. [1] https://admissions.ucsc.edu/why-ucsc/faq/housing.html https://admissions.ucsc.edu/why-ucsc/faq/housing.html [2] https://housing.ucsc.edu/rates/index.html https://housing.ucsc.edu/rates/index.html [3] https://www.huduser.gov/portal/publications https://www.huduser.gov/portal/publications /pdf/SantaCruzCA-CHMA-19.pdf (page 7) [4] https://www.huduser.gov/portal/publications https://www.huduser.gov/portal/publications /pdf/SantaCruzCA-CHMA-19.pdf (page 14) [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13 [edited for formatting]