Beautiful, idyllic, all that. All of HN would love to live there and 98% of them would probably join all the UCSC admin/students/alumni masses in fighting new housing on the campus the day they got there, or at least when the jackhammers started during their study period.
And then they'd blame the city for not having more housing for those not lucky enough.
Also for not giving me a flying car.
I mean, some portion of hn readers are technological optimists still in starry days of imagining massively productive technology would vast dividends for humankind. And why shouldn't they be. The world of today where progress somehow becomes the reason the average person gets less is fricken miserable and I make no excuses for not imagining it as normal.
For the obvious reason that we all want to live where we want to live and be able to afford it. That's not a crazy concept, and it's often achievable if we support politicians and policies that support rational urban growth.
The second problem is Santa Cruz by the sea is a very desirable place to live and within commuting distance from Silicon Valley, so wealthy tech workers can buy up or build very expensive first or second homes here. However, Santa Cruz since the 70's has been a very environmentally conscious no-growth city that recognized that San Jose style growth would ruin the city. This means demand far outstrips supply.
With the lack of supply, natives and others who work in services and support Santa Cruz's biggest industry (tourism) can't afford to live here. It's a dark joke among family and friends that once you leave Santa Cruz you can never afford to move back. I have family that have moved away and the next generation like my kids and nieces and nephews will never be able to afford to buy a house there like my father did.
Homeless is a problem but Santa Cruz tries to handle it a progressive way, for example, by setting up the homeless camp next to the courthouse and providing it with services
Lastly, long time Santa Cruz residents are generally are not sympathetic to complaints from students that come here from the outside, because they consider UCSC to be a big part of the problem. People considering UCSC would be advised to secure housing beforehand or choose another university. I hear they opened a new nice one in Merced, which has more affordable housing.
Dense construction with high-quality public transport is a significantly more environmentally-friendly city design than a sea of single-family homes with mandatory car ownership. The latter may be more superficially "natural" - green swaths of suburbia vs. concrete jungles - but it really is only superficial.
> San Jose style growth
San Jose, like the entire Bay Area, is crippled by the exact same rampant NIMBYism and suburban sprawl as Santa Cruz. Not only would a densely constructed San Jose be more environmentally friendly, its economic growth would be _significantly_ higher.
Underneath all the posturing about the environment and "the feel of the community", the only thing NIMBYism protects is high property values and rents.
EDIT:
> natives who resent 5 story huge San Jose style apartment blocks going up in their beautiful city
I'm sorry, _what_? In what universe is a 5 story apartment building huge or unreasonable in one of the most desirable areas to live in the country?
Places like Santa Cruz have never had any real intentional urban planning, so building a lot of additional housing is going to overload the infrastructure. They would need to upgrade all the utilities, build more schools, and completely revamp the transportation system. Good luck convincing any long-term Santa Cruz residents that they should sacrifice their quality of life and live in the middle of a construction zone for years for the sake of reducing someone else's rent.
For students at UCSC, housing is somewhat cheaper and more available about 20 miles away in the Watsonville area. There are public bus routes. Of course, Watsonville isn't as fashionable. You can't walk to the beach and go surfing before class.
Here we have it ^, the opposition to housing solutions. Not pitchfork wielding homeowners, but polite good citizens who are NIMBY and disguised as environmentally friendly people who really care for the city's character, as well as blaming the UC.
Please tell me how the massive meth-filled homeless encampment behind the courthouse is being handled in a "progressive" way. By the way they were forcibly evicted 2 weeks ago. The fact that there is any homeless encampment is an inexcusable embarrassment.
Increased density is coming to everywhere in California, like it or not. Thankfully the governor occasionally passes laws removing some NIMBY arguments - though too little too late.
I'm writing this from a converted garage in Santa Cruz that I'm paying nearly $3k/month for. There are a couple ADUs and a zillion AirBnBs, but no multi-family homes around me for miles.
If you're hoping to have a well intentioned, successful argument with NIMBY folks, this is _not_ the way to do so.
People who own the land & houses in an area are saying they do not want this. No matter how much you say "but I _really_ want it, and it's going to happen" is not going to change that.
And they've been winning for _decades_....hoping for yet another election to somehow change that is not a winning strategy.
There are thousands of other colleges in the US - if you make the choice to go to a school that did not have the foresight nor ability to house the students they let in, that is not the problem of the Santa Cruz property owners and tax payers.
Disclosure: I'm not taking sides on this, because I don't live in California (anymore) and bought in a pro-growth city...largely because I evaluated my options and made the choice to live in that type of environment that was more welcoming.
I mean UCSC is to blame (for the most part). UCSC keeps increasing enrollment without any concern as to where these students are going to live, knowing full well there isn't any housing available in the city.
Meanwhile the entity which holds the most undeveloped land in the area is UCSC itself!
UCSC has open land to build housing for all the students and then some.
Soon followed by
"We can't afford to live in our city because rich people are outbidding us for the very limited housing."
Same story as everywhere else. You make your bed, you sleep in it.
And this part is hilarious but telling:
> Homeless is a problem but Santa Cruz tries to handle it a progressive way, for example, by setting up the homeless camp next to the courthouse and providing it with services
Setting up slum cities is now the standard of progressiveness in America.
The alternative was to continue to let people live in the surrounding forests while shooting up heroin with dirty needles, trashing the woods and causing lengthy service calls for police and ambulance. This way they are all in one spot and are serviced by clean needle program, etc...
What's your solution?
Santa Cruz was already ridiculously unaffordable before the pandemic. Then the pandemic hit, the students went away, and other people moved in. The CZU Fire destroyed many homes in the mountains. Wealthy people from the Bay Area realized that Santa Cruz could be a nice place to live in if they want to work remotely while having the option to visit the office on short notice. Now the students are back, and there is much less housing available for them than there used to be.
The university shares the blame, but it's at least trying to build new housing. The NIMBYs are simply doing their best to prevent that. There is a wide coalition consisting of students, alumni, locals, landlords, and so on that opposes building anything new on university lands.
I came here to work at UCSC, but I've pretty much given up on the city and the university. Santa Cruz is not even particularly nice for its price. It feels more like a missed opportunity than a desirable area.
Claims of "progressive approaches" are simply bogus here. Santa Cruz' response has been typical for any and every city with a homeless problem. Santa Cruz has never established a well-ordered, permanent tent city. Like just about everywhere with a huge homeless problem, they tolerate homeless camps for bit and then tear them down, destroy people possessions and move them on 'till a new camp appears. [1]
Just as much, Santa Cruz closed all institutional free food distribution locations at the start of Covid (Saint Francis Soup Kitchen may or may not have reopen but if it has, it is all). This left the anarchist group Food Not Bomb as the only source of food for homeless and Food Not Bombs has been repeatedly criminalized by the city of Santa Cruz. [2]
In the context of what cities provide, one has to keep in mind a broad court decision that essentially cities can't evict people from public areas without providing them some sort of housing - which has meant that every city has formally given housing to the homeless in terms of shelters and camps but every city makes that housing as miserable as possible since they really want to push the home out since every city thinks of this as a "local problem".
[1] https://www.santacruzsentinel.com/2022/09/08/first-zone-of-s...
[2] https://www.cityofsantacruz.com/home/showpublisheddocument/8...
ANd then to claim that your homeless problem is fine because you put them in a slum tent city with "services" is truly the icing on the cake lol
This is the largest root cause of the problem.
Population of Santa Cruz is ~64K people. Enrollment in UCSC is nearly 20K. That's a lot of incoming students for a small town.
Combine with the geography of being surrounded by steep mountains and the ocean, there is very little area to the city.
City of Santa Cruz is ~8000 acres, all of it pretty much built already.
UCSC campus is ~2000 acres, a large part of it (couldn't find percentage) is forest and open land.
So while UCSC owns most of the undeveloped land in the area, they keep increasing enrollment but don't provide housing. Where are students going to go?
There should be a law that UCSC can only enroll as many students as they have housing for. They have plenty of land to build it.
The worst NIMBY in the area is UCSC. They want to bring in all the students but not provide enough housing even though they own tons of open land in which they could build such housing.
> growth would ruin the city
So I take it you'll be doing your part and packing your bags?
UCSC's campus is absolutely massive with huge areas of unused, unforested land [1]. There is more than enough space for more dorms and apartment houses as well as the accompanying utility systems needed. If they're going to continue to increase enrollment, they need to bite the bullet and put up some goddamn buildings. They simply don't want to.
Anyways, when the UC finally decides it has to be done, Santa Cruz will have little power to stop them short of an outright legal war. Like I said, they simply don't want to.
UC is an independent entity from the city and they can build housing on their plentiful land whether locals like it or not.
UCSC just doesn't want to solve the problem and prefers to look the other way and dump the students onto a town that has no space.
And then there's this https://www.surfertoday.com/surf-movies/the-westsiders
Anyway, end Prop 13 now.
But, I have to disagree that this is due to a lack of building.
20 years ago, there was no housing crisis. Period.
In 20 years, did the population suddenly increase by 20%?
No, of course it didn't. In fact the US population is very flat in recent decades.
What changed?
Short term rental!!! A huge portion of the housing stock purchased, much by corporate buyers, and converted to AirBnB or VRBO.
The housing crisis is 100% created by the rise of "short term rentals", a phrase that really means: "convert a significant portion of the housing stock into unlicensed hotels".
People paying per night to rent houses are never going to be out-bid by people who want to rent by the month.
This whole BS about "not building enough", is really "not building enough to make up for all the houses now run as hotels".
There has NOT been a population boom. Ask yourself: Why were there enough houses a decade or 2 ago, but not now?
I hate to break it to you, but let's say the population grew a measly 1% per year. Thanks to the way compounding interest grows, after 20 years, that is about a 20% increase compared to 20 years ago. (1.01^20 = 1.22)
Even if the country's population stayed the same, an increase of people wanting to move to Santa Cruz will drive up demand for housing in Santa Cruz. When you have sustained increases in demand over multiple decades but local governments that block any and all attempts at constructing housing supply to match, you get the ballooning prices you see now. That there is plenty of housing supply in Nowheresville, Nebraska is of little use to the people who can't afford to live in Santa Cruz.
Not to mention the other factors such as compounding of population growth, short-term rentals, housing stock being destroyed or serving fewer people than before (widows, empty nesters.)
Also in the Netherlands, several collage towns have students sleep in tents and container buildings or with university staff.
Relevant:
Supply side effects of the Berlin rent freeze
Abstract - We find rent decreases accompanied by decreases in supply five times as large. We further investigate spillover effects on the purchase market, regionally heterogeneous effects as well as different effects by dwelling characteristics. We find the rent freeze did not have spillover effects on dwellings for sale which point to a ‘wait-and-see-attitude’ on the investors’ side. We make use of a rich dataset of real estate advertisements and employ hedonic difference-in-difference and triple-difference estimation strategies.
If you want something completely FUBAR, you can always trust your local German bureaucrats to do a good job at it, especially in Berlin.
I wonder why they haven't tried increasing building supply and limiting external illegal immigration first? Also, why haven't they tried preventing these tax dodging stock market listed real estate mega conglomerates from owing a large proportion of the housing stock, as for them it's an investment for rent seeking that must make a return for their shareholders, rather than just shelter for someone. Crazy that Germans/Berliners let this happened yet see no issue with this and instead though that artificially capping rents was somehow magically gonna fix this. I guess most citizens don't really grasp the function of the housing market or the economics of it and instead will just vote for a quick handout. "Give them bread and games."
Or think even beyond that. I went to a top 10 school in the midwest and paid $300/mo for my own apartment. After graduating I got a job working next to people from Berkeley, MIT and Stanford with the same career trajectory as them but a tiny fraction of the debt.
I believe the university should be making sure it’s students are fully aware of the situation. Especially new foreign students who have no credit or even guarantors to fall back on for private rentals.
1. Locate the city in a geographically isolated, but beautiful area close to a major employment hub.
2. Institute strong anti-growth policies.
3. Invite a UC into town.
4. Allow the UC to expand without the matching requirement to build one market-rate housing unit per admitted student.
5. Wait a few decades.
What's great about this is how everyone is trying to get something for nothing. The students are trying to get a "UC" brand without the highly-selective entry requirements of other UCs, and largely bringing in loans to pay for it. The university is growing the student population without building sufficient student housing. Property owners benefit from skyrocketing values without experiencing the pain of finding a place to live, or proportionally exploding property taxes. The city benefits from the money the students bring with them in the form of debt.
I suspect this process would go into reverse rather quickly by taking a single step. Cut the federal loans program by 50%, then 10% per year for every year thereafter.
For extra bang, repeal Proposition 13.
I think this issue can be generalized a lot…
1. Locate a city with geographic limits.
2. Institute anti-growth policies.
3. Invite anything that may attract more people into town.
4. Allow 3 to continue/repeat without an increase in market rate housing.
5. Wait.
6. Landlords profit
Prop 13 has a good goal - prevent property tax increases from displacing long term residents. If you allow growth in housing supply then this can be a good thing, but the incentives ruin it. A balanced law or requirement that requires more housing to maintain prop13 would likely solve this mismatched incentive issue (if you vote against more housing, you could experience cost increases). Maybe tack a “breakpoint” in tax stability to rent-rates-beyond-inflation stability.
Prop 13 is wholly unnecessary. It could be removed entirely overnight and grandma wouldn't need to pay a dime.
It seems like the college shouldn't be allowed to enroll more students than the city has capacity to house. At minimum, it should be building more dorms on campus (I have no idea if that's feasible based on town layout).
Unconscionable that they off-load student housing onto the city of Santa Cruz
Gavin Newsom should lead by example and guarantee that no UC student will go homeless
And the entire campus is far less dense than UVA (for whatever that's worth - another small city campus that's extremely picturesque albeit for different reasons). 60% of UVA students live off-campus, but there doesn't seem to be the same problem with obtaining it. Prices are higher than you'd expect in a non-college town, because it's a captive market.
It’s unconscionable that the city would be so un-accommodating to students while exploiting them for rent money and economic gain.
Don't know numbers on rental market, but total population of Santa Cruz is ~64K people and UCSC has nearly 20K students. So it's a huge amount of students for a small town which already has very little housing for anyone (student or not).
> It seems like the college shouldn't be allowed to enroll more students than the city has capacity to house.
This is ultimately the only solution.
> At minimum, it should be building more dorms on campus (I have no idea if that's feasible based on town layout).
UCSC is the only entity who has very large amounts of undeveloped land in the area. They have all the space to build more than enough housing, they just don't want to.
Feel for the students though.
And sure, if UC solved the housing problem for their students, it might solve things for non-students, which might reduce house values and no one wants housing prices to decline.
The turn in the story is ... let's revisit this next year and see how the housing situation is .. I think it's about to melt down a lot. I suspect this blog post represents an unfortunate temporary thing.
As a techie, Santa Cruz renter and UCSC parent, I sympathize with the author
But living here and going to school here are choices, UC Davis, Merced & Berkeley exist
I’m sure someone can complain that I outbid them to rent a house
But driving up from Berkeley, seeing the housing issue, the homeless problem, and then saying “this sucks, but make room for me” strikes me as naive
Step 1: Move somewhere affordable.
Step 2: Spend years building an awesome community because you personally endeavor to make it what you want.
Step 3: Profit.
Notice this is the same process for a fixer upper house. It's just a buying into a fixer upper community. Labor intensive. Higher variability in the outcome but notice much more upside than flipping houses.
Why should the growth stop? People are clearly demonstrating a desire to move to these cities. I see no reason why NIMBYs should be allowed to artificially decide that newcomers are not allowed. Growth will simply continue as long as people keep moving in.
Yes, they demonstrate a desire to move into these cities in their current non-hypergrowth form
Then you follow up and make that desire a reality by putting a down payment on a property
Talk is cheap
>As a ... parent
Why did you contribute to the growth?
I think there is a certain amount of delusion in expecting any static resource to meet monotonically increasing amounts of demand.
And of course, once you own the land, you may decide that maybe you don't want so many people around. The value of your land is based on desirability, not the actual density, after all. So instead of building an arbitrarily tall building, you band together with the other land owners and implement something called zoning that restricts how high buildings can be.
I'm not making a moral claim that this is right or wrong. I'm simply pointing out that this incentive structure is inherent to land ownership in our country.
Most people find European cities more beautiful. SC is an ugly city. Even SF is much more pretty.
> ecological
It’s pretty well established that cities are ecological superior to suburbs.
> socioeconomic
Money extracted from the economy by landlords is money not flowing and being used to spur economic activity. VC firms have lamented that they have to invest in bigger rounds because growing headcount in expensive-rent cities is their greatest expense.
Noted VC Peter Thiel reduced his investments in the SF Bay Area because housing got too expensive. Most of the funding just flows to landlords.
https://www.sfgate.com/expensive-san-francisco/article/peter...
Does anyone really think UCSC provides a better undergrad education than the average CSU? They literally have the exact same state mandated curriculum. But FAANG will hire someone with a UC degree over a CSU, thus the system is overflowing.
Just to give two examples, both Soquel Avenue and Lower Ocean have some of the ugliest buildings and lots in the history of architecture and urbanism. Why multi-story building can take their place?
Aside from NIMBYsm and the incompetence of local administrators, the main problems for bigger and better urbanism in SC are water (apparently, then who knows) and transit. Regarding the latter, there are virtually no public transportation options between Santa Cruz-Aptos and Santa Cruz-San Jose. That is, there is only one bus.
As someone who lived in SC for many years and for some inexplicable reason still lives there, what I can say is that the town could be 10 times more beautiful. I can't understand why the areas closest to the water have been "sold" to rich people instead of being used by the public, Mission Street (the main vehicular artery) is as ugly and dangerous as it can be for pedestrians and cyclists, West Cliff has been planted with ugly grass that you can't even tell if it's natural or turf-like, and the shoreline between the San Lorenzo River and the end of Seabright, man, it's so ugly, full of concrete, no trees, with rusting infrastructure that it's hard to believe nobody in ten+ years has done anything to make it decent-looking.
Then, "A pretty white town that only looks somewhat Latino in the daytime because the service workers who keep this town running commute in from Watsonville and Salinas.", is a deeply misguided observation. The town itself is not pretty at all. Only looks somewhat Latino? I live in a neighborhood in Santa Cruz proper that is around, according to my visual estimate, 80% latino, and the 20% estimate for the whole town is fair (more than 30% at the county level).
The only real solution IMO is just to build more housing in California. For that to happen though, we need increased density which requires relaxed zoning, but NIMBY's want to preserve their city in its exact state forever, so we end up with this craziness.
Which is probably why so many people want to live there in the first place. Just like Vancouver or other such vibrant cities with great nature, pretty views and many amenities.
https://www.ucsc.edu/about/facts-figures.html
Which suggests UCSC should either cut enrollment or build housing. They have suitable land for the latter. If they can't build housing due to legal restrictions, they could cut enrollment. Those are the realistic options.
