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I'm 66, born and raised in Santa Cruz with family there and it's bizarre when your sleepy surf town turns into the hottest real estate market in California, whi

• cafard 3y ago
  Back in the early 1970s, Boulder, Colorado, had a referendum on restricting housing starts. It was pitched as an environmental thing, and it probably got help from the students at the University of Colorado. The referendum passed with absolutely massive turnout--precincts ran out of ballots.
• jareklupinski 3y ago
  > I'm 66, born and raised in Santa Cruz... and none of your children, nieces and nephews can afford to live there i mean, you're still living there too... where did you expect them to be? two objects can't occupy the same space at the same time since we can't 'make land' (unless we dredge), the only logical place to put living habitats is up in the sky (we don't like living in holes in the ground)
  • radicaldreamer 3y ago
    There’s a ton of land that can be developed around Santa Cruz, it just can’t be developed due to public policy and local opposition. Huge empty tracts all over and especially around Ben Lomond etc. The flip side of all this is that a lot of long term residents love that their 100-200k houses are now worth a million+ with their property taxes capped at essentially nothing. They don’t want to give that up to allow their nieces and nephews to afford to grow their families in Santa Cruz.
    • JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > There’s a ton of land that can be developed around Santa Cruz, it just can’t be developed due to public policy and local opposition This is how we get urban sprawl and habitat destruction.
      • bcrosby95 3y ago
        Yes, up is better than out. I'm happy the Santa Cruz planning commission has sanely decided to start by building downtown up.
    • mwattsun 3y ago
      You forgot to mention that UCSC sits on a huge tract of land that they refuse to build student housing on for reasons I can't fathom.
      • dekhn 3y ago
        The original plan was to build out UCSC a lot more. I think the regents lost their motivation after building colleges 9 and 10 and also I think if they built more student housing, they'd have to build more parking lots (so many students have cars) and the traffic in the city would increase tremendously.
        • JumpCrisscross 3y ago
          > if they built more student housing, they'd have to build more parking lots There is another solution to this!
          • dekhn 3y ago
            If you think you can solve CA's addiction to cars, I'm all ears.
            • JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  • deleted 3y ago
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• epistasis 3y ago
  This was the explicit plan for Santa Cruz, to stop all housing after the 70s and 80s and see a massive rise in property values. It's all there in the opinion articles and letters to the editor from the time, this future was predicted. It was the plan that was accepted by leaders at the time.
  • baron816 3y ago
    Yes, people flooded in and then firmly shut the door behind them.
  • gen220 3y ago
    You could go further and say this was the plan for California writ large. This is the natural conclusion of Prop 13 (1978).
  • mwattsun 3y ago
    I'm not aware of any such plan. The plan was always to preserve open space such as Lighthouse Field and the green belt around Santa Cruz. I'm grateful for both of those. Property values would have risen even if they had built on Lighthouse field and the green belt. It just occured to me that I could think of them as the equivalent of NYC's Central Park or SF's Golden Gate Park.
    • epistasis 3y ago
      I love the green belt! But talk to the Greenbelt's original proponents, like Primack, and you will find that the city left out the other part of the green belt proposal that was necessary for environmental protection: allow apartments to be built up. So instead of building taller, we have decades of people living further out, building into the urban wild land interface outside of the greenbelt. That results in massive ecosystem destruction, more car pollution, and of course tons of traffic everywhere. The solution is to merely allow apartments and 3-4 story buildings. It only takes three four story buildings to equal that 12 story building, for example.
      • mwattsun 3y ago
• givemeethekeys 3y ago
  Who do you blame if the big industry in town that has been growing for decades is projected to keep growing but the locals decide to not take advantage of it? The best universities, community colleges, amazing tool libraries to learn the trades, yet.. all these people who move half way around the world to settle with no credit and hardly any savings to start end up buying a home, yet the locals can’t figure it out. Decade after decade.
  • eastbound 3y ago
    Are you saying the unis in Santa Cruz are sufficient to raise yourself to millionaire, and the local high schools sufficient to get into those unis? I’m not from the US, genuinely asking. But I have often seen unis have a far-distance preference, just for the social mix, while letting down the locals.
    • epistasis 3y ago
      Lots of entrepreneurs got their education at UCSC, but typically they put their companies outside of town (not many employees want to move to town. There are some exceptions...) Santa Cruz students have no more difficulty getting into UCSC than other parts of the state. But the UC has gotten extremely selective due to the same reason housing is short in Santa Cruz: it's not been properly sized to allow for standard population growth in the US.
    • fragmede 3y ago
      I went to UCSC, the Santa Cruz uni, as a California resident that went to high school 30-40 mins north of Santa Cruz, got a BS in computer engineering, and managed to do a couple of years at Google, so I've some money, though they didn't make me a millionaire. They would have if I'd stayed longer though.
    • dekhn 3y ago
      I guess it really depends on how you count your monies, but if you apply yourself at UCSC you can definitely do quite well. At least, that was true for my generation- I graduated from there in '95, missed out on the first tech recession by hiding in grad school, and then eventually moved to industry when I felt educated enough. Since my industry is tech, I've generally been paid well, with an especially profitable stint at Google. Nearly all that money got reinvested (not in housing) and continues to grow quite well. Realistically, though, everything about CS changed and so now, I don't know that somebody could get a degree from UCSC and even afford to be a grad student or junior programmer here unless they're willing to give up a lot of niceties.
• ChuckMcM 3y ago
  Places change and grow. It's interesting that my kids have found places that speak to them (not the SF Bay Area) and they are growing with their towns as well. One wonders if your nieces and nephews will have the same situation. There are clearly young families moving in around me, and the real estate market is brisk with houses changing hands quickly, but we've also added about 1500 higher density homes in the area which have afforded even more opportunities for where to live for these folks moving here. Certainly some of them prefer not doing maintenance etc which comes with home ownership. Looking back at the city's decision to increase high density housing it has been a solid improvement.
• japhyr 3y ago
  Santa Cruz is certainly an outlier, but we're definitely seeing it all over the country. I'm in a small town in southeast AK. Most of the buildable land has already been claimed. Tourism is growing faster than local people can support the industry, so there's all kinds of pressures: housing for summer employees, an increased temptation to do short term rentals to tourists instead of long term rentals to locals, and people buying second and third homes that they don't use most of the year. Many of us watch our young people leave to go find their place in the world, and then find they can't move back even if they wanted to. The ones who do are paid really well, or have their housing largely subsidized by being given property their family bought a long time ago, or some similar assistance that isn't generally available to everyone. For the past several years, multiple schools in our town have been unable to fill empty teaching positions because the people who are hired spend all spring and half the summer looking for housing, and simply can't find it. They bail and go somewhere that's willing to hire them and has some kind of housing available. It's really a mess.
  • mwattsun 3y ago
    I feel a certain kind of sadness about it. There's not a word for the loss of your home town in English that I'm aware of, but there's a song that comes close to it. Pretenders - My City Was Gone https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thu8DWsirJo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thu8DWsirJo
    • fragmede 3y ago
      "Gentrification-induced displacement" doesn't roll off the tongue very well, unfortunately.
  • vaidhy 3y ago
    The most obvious answer seem to be around population density. What is the population density of your small town? Why would the developers not build multi-story apartments/condos? Why is there no supply of multi-family buildings anywhere outside of cities? If everyone wants a single family home with a yard, you are going to run into space limitations.
• greedo 3y ago
  This has happened where I grew up. All the coastal California towns have priced out the majority of people who grew up there.
• terminous 3y ago
  If there are 5 houses in an area, populated by 1 family each for a total of 5 families, and those families have 1 child each (50% below population replacement rate), then with no new houses, there is no way for any of those children to have a house of their own until their parents die. But when their parents die, they get to have a home of their own. At 2 children, the population replacement rate, only one child can have a house of their own after their parents die, if no new houses are constructed.
  • BobaFloutist 3y ago
    That's assuming that none of the children marry children from other families and consolidate back into one household.
  • jinjin2 3y ago
    That assumes that the children stay single as they grow up. If they all get a partner it is no longer one house - one person. You literally only need half as many houses.
• mleo 3y ago
  This is pretty common across a number of smaller cities in California, especially beach cities. I moved into current home in Southern California 10 years back and probably not in a position to move in to any home in the city now, even with total family income increasing over this time.
• holoduke 3y ago
  Its practically everywhere in the world. Every city i mean. Maybe in SC on a extreme level, but even where I live in Amsterdam its 1.000.000 for an apartment. Which results in 4000 euros per month. Impossible for starters.
• thomastjeffery 3y ago
  That's what happens when the low-income job market is dominated by the service industry. When wealth gets geographically concentrated, low-income workers have to follow it, and can't. The worst part is that the wealth isn't getting concentrated into the hands of people: it's getting concentrated into the hands of landowners. * If you are poor and pay rent, you're fucked * If you are poor, but own your home, you are just OK; but would be better off if services were cheaper and more available (as a result of poor renters not being fucked) * If you are rich, but pay rent, you are just OK, but would be better off if rent was lower (and poor renters wouldn't be fucked. Win-win!) *If you are rich and own your home, then you are lucky enough to be the problem. Even so, you would be better off if rent was lower, because services would become more available, and your community would be safer and happier.
  • fragmede 3y ago
    There's a fifth category; rich, own your home, and a couple more. If you're a landlord, high rents mean more money in your pocket and who doesn't want more money? The broader community effects of high rents are secondary to being able to afford a new car and a foreign vacation every few years.
    • thomastjeffery 3y ago
      The other version of that is a landowner who doesn't live in the area. If you are an exec at a property management corporation, then you get to buy your own ignorance.