I guess I'm not very inclined to believe that there is more primary residential demand than there is real estate. I think the renter population is the most str

I guess I'm not very inclined to believe that there is more primary residential demand than there is real estate. I think the renter population is the most straightforward proxy for primary residential demand. Those are people who are actually paying to live there. Because they go to UCSC, work, have kids, whatever. We know the rental population is 60% of the actual SC housed population. Of that, maybe 80% have primary residential demand (students, etc. might make up the balancing 20%). So that's ~50% primary residential demand. I'm sure that some proportion of the housing stock that belongs to non-renting people belongs to people who are residents, but I'm relatively bearish on that. Even if only 25% are vacation homes, second homes, etc. that leaves us with a marginal 30% primary residential demand and a cumulative primary residential demand of 80%. So for every 100 homes there's demand for 80. On surging. I'd say if you want to move your family to Santa Cruz as resident owners, we would love to have you. If you can afford to pay more than the people who already live here and are paying rent, I agree that's a shit situation. I guess you could ban nonresident buyers for the first N years or something? That might be one degree of complexity too far, but I agree that's a shortcoming that one should have a plan for. I think it's really difficult to enact these kinds of programs at the municipal level – it really has to be done at the state level. You'd still end up with weird border scenarios, where you have a 80% resident homeowner utopia on one side of the border with nevada, where all the labor for that town reside in 80% renter dystopia on the other side.