What people seem to miss is how awesome UCSC is. In typical HN fashion I see multiple comments talking dryly about college selection like it's a business decision. People flock to UCSC for its exceptional natural beauty, idiosyncratic culture and slightly unorthodox academics. Not because of a cost-benefit analysis. For people like me, it offered a big-campus college experience without the emphasis on sports and the Greek system. And it offered it in a culturally bizarre and incredibly beautiful corner of the country. That draw isn't going away anytime soon, especially since students can subsidize those crazy-high rents with student debt as I once did.
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.
That's the issue isn't it? Students flock to it not after doing a cost-benefit analysis but because it's an upscale seaside resort where they can have a great time for four years. But then why complain about the cost of living there? Should it be affordable? And should the town have to support this?
Santa Cruz native here: I can understand the author's frustrations coming to Santa Cruz from the outside but there's more to it. He's describing a UCSC problem because the university is expanding without building enough dormitories and relying on development in the city instead. This is causing unrest among the natives who resent 5 story huge San Jose style apartment blocks going up in their beautiful city.
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.
> Santa Cruz since the 70's has been a very environmentally conscious no-growth city
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?
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.
"We like our city as it is and don't want it to grow."
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.
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.
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
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".
Really amazing to try and offer perspective of a "native" with some unique insights about a community only to offer up the same tired NIMBY arguments you hear in every housing-starved city.
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
> UCSC problem because the university is expanding without building enough dormitories and relying on development in the city instead
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.
I feel like higher education and housing for students should be a higher priority than turning the city into a museum frozen in time for aging "locals".
...........building MORE housing is the one thing that would make the city more affordable no? Odd take. And UCSC is (comparatively) and a very small school.
My son just went through this and got super lucky to find a place, but out in Capitola.
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.
The university wants to build new student housing, but many people in the university and many locals don't. There are concrete plans to build housing for a few thousand additional students on campus, but the plans have been on hold for years as people oppose them for environmental and aesthetic reasons.
It is situated in such a beautiful place. I fondly remember the surf, the woods, the jazz club, and the anarchist literary scene. It's really a shame about the lack of diversity and the racist, anti-homeless natives/long-term residents. I left after having a couple fascist landlords.
So, I have to agree there is a major shortage of affordable housing.
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?
> In 20 years, did the population suddenly increase by 20%?
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)
While some comments have pointed out that the population has increased, that doesn't actually matter. Because what's being discussed here is an increase in demand for housing in a specific city.
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.
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.
100s? Try thousands of applicants. Multiple landlords have indicated that they get 1000s of applications in hours/minutes after posting an ad. The situation is dire and the government is doing nothing about it, even on land that they have the power to build on. The green party is famous for blocking any and all housing projects, the left and right both agree that people don't deserve affordable housing.
Sad to say but the only way to get administration to take these issues seriously is to transfer out. Santa Cruz is the bottom feeder of the UC system. The only reason people take it seriously is because of the prestigious "University of California" tag. There are plenty of better schools nearby (including non-UC ones like Cal Poly and several CSUs) that are more worth your money.
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.
Unless housing is built and controlled by UCSC the housing will be snapped up by more of the same and not change the equation that much IMO. If growth is wanted and accepted by the majority of voters (which I don’t believe it is) then a unified plan that involves significant transport investment is needed. Traffic on highway 1 in both directions or mission street are clear indications of this.
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.
The recipe for what Santa Cruz is experiencing seems to be:
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.
I mostly agree with your sentiment, but I don’t think you’re being very fair to students, and i don’t think this issue is particularly about the students. (and I’m not convinced Prop13 needs to be repealed to solve problems). Students and loans are a different issue and it seems cruel to label them as wannabe UC students who aren’t good enough. All UCs are respectable.
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.
Any idea what % of the rental market is students vs UCSC staff vs non-UCSC?
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).
> Any idea what % of the rental market is students vs UCSC staff vs non-UCSC?
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.
The thing I read in there that was disappointing was the administration response. However it is a state school so I imagine they don't have the same funding for development of housing on site / not to mention they are located between the SC mountains / protected forest and the ocean. It's a small area without much development space and that land is at a premium.
For a long time now, the UC system's spirit has been "hey, our total lack of concern about our students' well-being is feature, not a bug. If you graduate here, you've shown you're a survivor (or that you have money to soften the blows)". I felt that ethos at UC Berkeley forty years ago.
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.
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.
It will be a very, very long time before we run out of usable land in this country. The problem really is that 50% of the population wants to live on the same 0.1% of land.
Ever since humanity started being able to build upward, I'm not sure this is so relevant. There's more than enough developed land to comfortably house the human race. We're just using it comically inefficiently.
California can't support as many people as you wish it could and replacing its SFH suburbs with cramped mixed income efficiency apartments would be an aesthetic, ecological, and socioeconomic disaster.
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.
Santa Cruz is a tiny dot of land between the mountains and ocean. The only crisis is in overpopulation, brought about by the tiered UC/CSU credentialism.
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).
As someone who went to a CSU and works at a FAANG, I don't really agree about the credentialism thing, but I do agree about the overpopulation thing.
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.
There's nothing inherently impossible about building a dense, thriving city on "a tiny dot of land". I fail to see how the issue is overpopulation and not an abject failure to construct housing in line with the number of people who want to live there.
>Santa Cruz is a tiny dot of land between the mountains and ocean
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.
I'm sympathetic to this viewpoint, but (a) Boomers aren't dying quickly enough and (b) we're talking about student housing. A litter fewer than 20k students attend UCSC:
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.
standardUser|3 years ago
hindsightbias|3 years ago
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.
paxys|3 years ago
michaelwww|3 years ago
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.
millimeterman|3 years ago
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?
seahorserocker|3 years ago
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.
paxys|3 years ago
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.
jltsiren|3 years ago
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.
joe_the_user|3 years ago
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...
jwlstn|3 years ago
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
jjav|3 years ago
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.
slavapestov|3 years ago
Melatonic|3 years ago
rcpt|3 years ago
> growth would ruin the city
So I take it you'll be doing your part and packing your bags?
newaccount2021|3 years ago
[deleted]
russellbeattie|3 years ago
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.
1. https://maps.app.goo.gl/qocsUGwbhcZaKbdX7
jltsiren|3 years ago
rcpt|3 years ago
And then there's this https://www.surfertoday.com/surf-movies/the-westsiders
Anyway, end Prop 13 now.
50|3 years ago
johnea|3 years ago
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?
fragmede|3 years ago
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)
millimeterman|3 years ago
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.
bombcar|3 years ago
ChuckNorris89|3 years ago
Also in the Netherlands, several collage towns have students sleep in tents and container buildings or with university staff.
lame-robot-hoax|3 years ago
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.
llampx|3 years ago
paxys|3 years ago
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.
llampx|3 years ago
btbuilder|3 years ago
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.
bombcar|3 years ago
yuan43|3 years ago
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.
vineyardmike|3 years ago
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.
alistairSH|3 years ago
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).
foogazi|3 years ago
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
jjav|3 years ago
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.
unknown|3 years ago
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unknown|3 years ago
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boringg|3 years ago
Feel for the students though.
joe_the_user|3 years ago
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.
foogazi|3 years ago
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
RhysU|3 years ago
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.
millimeterman|3 years ago
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.
rasz|3 years ago
>As a ... parent
Why did you contribute to the growth?
uup|3 years ago
I think there is a certain amount of delusion in expecting any static resource to meet monotonically increasing amounts of demand.
paxys|3 years ago
millimeterman|3 years ago
Tr3nton|3 years ago
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wikitopian|3 years ago
vineyardmike|3 years ago
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.
ramesh31|3 years ago
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.
borroka|3 years ago
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).
Dig1t|3 years ago
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.
millimeterman|3 years ago
ChuckNorris89|3 years ago
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.
KerrAvon|3 years ago
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.
bena|3 years ago