Santa Cruz plans high-rise living as a fix for sky-high housing costs
latimes.com
latimes.com
The typical NIMBYs that have a ballot proposition coming up were only able to turn out a sad four people at the Christmas parade this year. We need to defeat that.
The only problem is that it's currently illegal to do that. Building a massive mansion is by-right, building apartments triggers a discretionary process that can be derailed by only a few motivated people.
Additionally, in Santa Cruz, there are requirements on construction of large multi unit residential buildings that put deed restrictions on rent or purchase price of at least 20% of the units (unless they upped it since I last checked.)
These restrictions fall into a standard system of income bands that are based off of the median income of the area.
This new construction is the only source of affordable housing. Yet we have plenty of people opposing it because "it won't be affordable"
Edit: I'm not living there. I'm over the hill in San Jose where rents are more affordable and I can't move back.
Edit2: The locals blame giving UCSC students a vote in local politics on our woes, because they are transients, progressive and don't understand local issues, preferring to preserve greenspace and the environment over growth. I'm happy with the greenspace and acccept the cost of maintaining it - I'm not complaining, merely sharing how strange it is to be priced out of your home town.
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)
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.
This is how we get urban sprawl and habitat destruction.
There is another solution to this!
No need. We're solving a narrow problem: students' need to park on campus. Out-of-town commuter and part-time students will need a car. But everyone else is solvable.
Stop trying to solve the problem for California. Focus on the narrow problem. Universities everywhere operate as a parallel population.
UCSC is an enclave on a hill with limited transport routes to downtown or the rest of the world. And the UCSC leadership has its hands tied by many different things; they can't just say "OK no cars on campus except if you are a commuter".
Right, this is how you solve it. (Most students don’t need a car parked on campus to get to the rest of the world from Santa Cruz.)
Fortunately there have been modifications to CEQA last year to prevent these abuses of the law that result in worse environmental outcomes (students driving long distances rather than living on campus)
In short, lots of houses would be great. (I'm a Santa Cruz resident, for the record)
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.
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.
But that's the "plan" I was talking about: all other areas are banned from having apartments. It's right there in the city general plan. No more housing, except for a few tiny areas.
A few years ago we proposed housing along Soquel in the commercial area, and millionaire homeowners bemoaned that we were destroying their poor "working class" neighborhood by allowing apartments and affordable housing. Meanwhile these same wealthy homeowners would never consider selling their homes to anyone who is not extremely wealthy or with an astronomical income. They cater to the wealthy while blocking more affordable housing.
This is the plan continuing its execution.
Recent state law will change this, slowly, over the coming decades by making such unfair plans illegal. More housing must be allowed in city general plans, and it can't all be stuck in the poor areas, or that will violate the states interpretation of Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing provisions, as enforced by state HCD.
The city will delay as long as possible, and block as much as possible, but it will happen eventually. And if the city delays too long in updating the plan to allow for more housing, the Builders Remedy will allow developers to build without city having any discretionary approval.
Probably a typo, but I have to note that it's Greek "Logos", not possessive or plural English.
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.
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.
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.
Even if they were the brightest, are the thousands of people working at Bay Area companies the brightest from back home? Having worked with quite a few of them, I assure you that there are plenty of brighter people where they come from.
That's because it's brain drain on the rest of the world. You're importing some of the world's most educated people in and of course they outcompete the locals.
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.
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.
Pretenders - My City Was Gone
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.
> Why would the developers not build multi-story apartments/condos?
Most of the same reasons as many places, with the added issue of not much undeveloped land to build on. Who wants to build a multi-story building when you can build an expensive house and deal with a single buyer? Zoning laws are controlled by people who already have homes, and don't prioritize accessible housing. People don't want to see the value of their home drop. People don't want their views blocked by tall buildings.
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.
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.
I sympathize with folks worried about changing their neighborhood. At the same time there's really no magic solution to high housing costs outside increasing supply.
The problem is everyone is saying this. So you have nowhere to build. Santa Cruz should not get special treatment - it will be offered the same deal as everyone else: build what is required to house people in the way you want, or build what is required to house people in the ways other people want.
According to this site [1] the percentage of renters in SC in 2017 was 60%.
What it would do is reduce the property value of existing real estate supply (by making expected cash flow from renting far less profitable), effectively forcing nonresident owners to sell their buildings to would-be renters, who would now be able to afford a mortgage on their homes.
My thesis, fwiw, is that there's actually a sufficient supply of housing, it's just cornered with artificially inflated prices by people who treat housing as an investment vehicle rather than, well, housing.
I'm a bit bitter because there's so much of this around where I live, and it's just sad they're systemically incentivized to keep the next generations renting forever.
FWIW, as more and more California homeowners become non-residents of California (moving to other states such as Florida, Nevada in retirement is fairly common), I think Prop 13 will gradually become less popular among the actual voting-eligible population of CA. But this will take decades, I imagine.
It just benefits far too few at the expense of too many to stay law forever.
Eventually the older/wealthier people pass away and the younger people wonder why they can't afford a home, even though they work the same job that their landlord's grandma did.
The demographics of prop 13 support are pretty interesting. The slope for prop 13 support is overall trending negative as time goes on, but the "intercept" is still quite high. Hence my statement that I think we're still a few decades away from it becoming a common rally cry for voters – whereas today it's a third rail.
FWIW this tax would also explicitly not affect "ordinary" homeowners. I think the main issue is that people are not imaginative enough to dream of a progressive property tax, since it's not progressive today.
It's probably untenable alongside local democracy. Instead, zero real appreciation seems like a reasonable target.
Even in very low demand small towns though there is demand for some density - a 3 story apartment will often exist in those towns and have no problem renting to people who want/need to live in the small town but don't want a single family for whatever reason. These smaller low rise buildings are the cheapest housing possible - they are small enough that they don't need expensive elevators and the like, though of course they don't make sense in high property value areas.
Which is to say that even on the low end of property value density can be justified to some extent.
You also want the natural increase (well, Prop 13 permitting) in tax revenue for city amenities.
It would be a not-minor hiccup for the segment of retirees and near-retirees who depend on rental cash flow for their retirement. They could sell their 2nd and 3rd properties for reduced values, buy an annuity, and live an appropriately downscaled lifestyle.
IDK, my main goal is to restore our communities with 70+% residential homeownership. I think the emergent socioeconomic & cultural effects of communities where the majority of people are long-term committed to their locale are more valuable to society than the effects of rent-seeking.
If you're concerned about what it will cost someone to acquire someplace to live, come out and say that. Don't couch it in language that opens the conversation for devaluing what we already have.
I wish I knew enough to consent to or refute your statement, alas here I am!
I'm interested in having urban and suburban communities of homeowners. I do think most people prefer the autonomy that comes with single-family and (occasionally cooperatively-owned) multi-family homes when it comes to long-term residential-use ownership, fwiw.
Buyers with means in supply-constrained markets don't really care about a seller's asking price (read: their acquisition price as a buyer) beyond having a lower bound, and a pattern of buyers just throwing money at sellers has the knock-on effect of increasing property values.
Acquisition prices drive values.
Basically, my thesis is we probably don't need to increase physical supply, we can probably get away with increasing market supply, and that the physical supply is actually probably sufficient to satisfy the physical residential demand.
If that isn't the case, obviously you have to build. But I don't see high prices as evidence that the problem is the lack homes for residents. It could very much be that the problem is that physical supply is over-consumed.
I think we tend to reach for high-density supply as a solution, without thinking about whether that's actually the best solution. It's definitely the simplest, but we don't even explore the other issues that cause distortion in the market. Like prop 13, the retiring generation treating their homes as retirement vehicles, etc.
It doesn't seem implausible to me that if we solve those distortions in favor of resident homeowners, that the "affordable housing crisis" goes away without requiring high-density housing in downtown Santa Cruz.
Additionally, the biggest piece of evidence for physical supply being the constraint is overcrowding: how many unrelated people are living in a single housing unit? Especially in college towns like Santa Cruz (and especially as we've not stood up new schools elsewhere), this seems particularly acute.
Need to find the case study, but the precedent for this is rents go up. There are more barriers to housing than the price. Better strategy is taxing unoccupied housing.
The broader idea is to tax absentee landlords and pied a terres, in favor of the people who actually live in the city. Moral justification of the tax is that if you want to profit off a community's residents while not living amongst them, you have to pay differentially higher taxes for the right (which would presumably benefit the civic life of those residents).
The point is taxing "absentee landlords" means taxing the people who rent from them. These sorts of policies sound clever, but they don't change the supply nor demand, and so just wind up raising housing prices more.
There isn't a loophole around supply and demand other than rationing, i.e. a community board deciding who can and cannot move in. (The answer is always white people.)
If a family is paying $3k/month to rent out a $800k single-family home, and we tax the landlord 15% the value on the home, could he find a family to pay $13k/month in rent (covering the tax)?
I think this would just cause the value of the home to crater, to come closer to a reality that tolerates $3k/month-ish rent. To the point where the property value is low enough that the resident family can just buy a property.
At that rate they'd sell. That would lower purchase home prices. But there is plenty of primary residential demand, so not by much. Unless that family has $100k+ for a down payment (and good credit, and a long-term outlook towards staying in the area, and all their paperwork in order), they're not in the running to buy it.
After that one-time transfer of housing stock from landlords to residents, you'd be back in the same situation: more demand than supply. Moreover, this would be something one could anticipate. So if Santa Cruz passed this law, I would help my parents pull together the cash to move there. Because once the supply surge is absorbed, you're likely to make money on the return to business as usual.
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.
This would be correct if rents were stable amidst rising home prices. that happens from time to time. But it tends to correct itself, and it is not the situation in Santa Cruz. Even at prevailing prices, there are more people who want to live there than there are spots; that’s why prices and rents keep rising.
The supply side for "current rental market prices" is different than the supply for all rentals. Rental turnover rate for places that have been rented out for 10+ years is quite low. A disproportionate number of newly-marketed rentals in the last decade are comparatively recent conversions from resident-ownership to rental (hence, rising proportion of renting population), and the cost basis of ownership for those landlords is an OOM higher than landlords from a couple decades ago.
We don't really know if the median paid rent "could afford" to rise to median market rent, I can't imagine that it would. That market rent prices are rising does not directly entail that more people want to live there than there are spots, the story is a bit more complicated.
There's also a bill out there that would simply preclude hedge funds ownership of single-family homes: https://www.housingwire.com/articles/democrats-introduce-bil...
The combination of taxing rented property + reducing corporate ownership would do wonders for affordability. It would also stall or crater any retirement/dynastic wealth plan based on renting SFH properties.
In most locales, from what I've seen, it's the retirement/dynastic wealth folks who are squeezing supply – they've been in this game for 30+ years and have a big head start on the PE firms.
Crafting a bill with popular support that targets those folks is going to be a bit more challenging, because these people are not all terribly extractive, and a lot of up and coming people still actively aspire to become those people. In my observation, the younger and less gainfully employed / marketably skilled these people are, the more extractive they are. As such, I think it's a matter of time before we hit a breaking point.
There's precedent for this in American history, where we've had dramatic step-changes to property law in response to varying-degrees-of-obvious injustice. I don't know if my generation will develop the political will to enact it, but it does feel inevitable that it'll happen in the next 80 years. It's either that, or we've become an effectively-feudal and urban society – which feels less likely, to me.
Over the past 5 years, I have gotten no shortage of "cash buyer offers" for our property, and I have no doubt the counterparty in almost all of those cases were corporations.
Remove that, and the lack of upward pricing pressure will force a reversion to the mean, which makes it more costly/risky to seek rents.
This is the same logic that says any tax simply increases the price. That's not how the price/availability curve works, there are many places that simply mint money because of collusion amongst landlords.
If rents CAN go up why wouldn’t they just go up absent the tax hike ?
Competition. The hike is symmetrical to a collusion agreement as it’s uniformly applied.
However:
- the size of the benefit is small
- my understanding is there is very little effort to confirm these for small owners
https://www.santacruzcountyca.gov/Departments/AssessorsOffic...
And to your point about the benefit being small, I'd suggest the tax should be fairly punitive. Not enough to make profiting off a rental impossible, but to make it barely beat, idk, inflation.
I've even thought about the idea of making it lever-up depending on the cumulative number of months you lease the property for. 12 months = X, 24 months = 2X, 36 months = cap of 3X, where 3X is that magically-painful amount that makes it almost impossible to make a >5% Internal Rate of Return.
Killing rentals is bad for anyone who find owning is not the best option for them. To own a house/condo you need a large down payment, then you need to pay maintenance fees (some of this can be personal labor if you are able), and worse if you move soon you need to sell. Buying a place can be a great idea for some, but for others it is wrong. Most of us will go through different phases in life and odds are until you are 25 or 30 years old renting is clearly the best decision, but after that many of us settle down in a location where we are likely to live for the rest of our life and buying starts to make sense for many.
There are a few houses in the world when some rich foreigner has bought the house and leaves it vacant. However so far all data I've seen suggests the number of people doing this is tiny (it is generally a stupid investment)
I think anybody who intends to be a long-term resident (5+ years) shouldn't be financially excluded from residential homeownership because nonresidents (who maybe used to be residents) bought up all the local property, when it was more affordable 20-40 years ago.
I'm trying to tax the intersection of nonresidency and single/multi-family homeownership, which includes empty houses and the many rentals.
Yes. I've paid more than 100% of the presumed costs of owning the rental unit I'm in, and have recently received a rude awakening as to my rights to the property whose equity I have fully funded for five years. It's a scam.
A number of my neighbors are Prop 13 'princelings'. Their parents snapped up a bunch of housing, have next to 0 annual cost, and extract fantastic wealth renting them out, all while receiving a huge tax subsidy. This position passes to the next generation, who essentially become absentee landlords and are heavily incentivized to prevent more housing.
A number of places in Santa Cruz and the rest of the county are completely underutilized because these families prefer to do absolutely nothing and collect insane rents on dilapidated properties to the detriment of everybody else who lives here.
In any case, I tend to think that outlawing for-profit ownership of multiple SFHs or multifamily units would actually go a long way toward increasing supply and dropping costs without building. Reduced centralized ownership means lowered capacity to play pricing and vacancy games.
The real enemy of affordable housing is that so many people benefit from housing being unaffordable. Tell them to kick rocks and find another source of income at the federal/constitutional level, please.
With the introduction of the rail trail, Santa Cruz has the potential to become one of the most livable places in the United States
I think San Francisco is an easy lesson in the politics of building - You get to choose density or destitution, and you don't get to opt out.
I lived in SF for 10 years and Boston for 5. SF is a worse place for the time, and Boston has only gotten better. I'm a firm believer that development is the reason.
Our permitting and building processes are completely broken. People who lost their homes in the CZU complex fires are giving up and donating their land because of the difficulty of rebuilding. Even applying for something as simple as rooftop solar is extremely onerous and time consuming.
Every piece of the permitting process would benefit from new tech to enable the county and developers to get moving. Plans are rejected for tiny reasons "No fire testing data sheets were attached for the aluminum rails that every neighbor has already used on their roof."
A recent real estate listing described years of frustration trying to build an appropriate multifamily on their correctly zoned land, and eventually giving up to sell the house.
https://youtu.be/iRdwXQb7CfM?si=j6g6TAm2uEw5aRb2
Outdated building codes require 2 stairs, making smaller multi-story housing infeasible. So only larger (whole block) projects pencil out, but people don’t like them because they don’t fit in well.
I wonder if smaller (the size of 1-2 normal lots) 4-6 floor buildings spread out more would face less resistance.
The data I have seen: Other countries without two stair requirements have better fire safety records than the US.
- more fire resistant building materials
- automatic sprinklers
- you are not allowed to smoke
Most of our code does not exist because of any sort of scientific vetting of ideas. It's mostly just winging it and trying to ban any housing except single family detached housing.
Why are two stairs so much more important than being close to a staircase? Why is having a loooong hallway with dozens of families using the same staircase better than having immediate access to a stairway and only a handful of families using the staircase?
Nobody ever showed that two means of egress are safer, they just went by gut.
https://old.reddit.com/r/yimby/comments/18g5dh6/why_north_am...
That also implies the inverse: nobody has shown that one means is safer, they just went by gut. Is being close to a stair really better worse than have two choices for exits it the open question and so far everyone seems to be asserting one or the other withing actually showing anything.
I can show that new US apartments with two stairways, and a lot of other modern safety features are safer than older ones with one stairway and also missing many other safety features. This is not compelling evidence that two stairways is better than one since I'm not aware of anyone controlling on other safety features, but it is enough to demand some real studies before getting rid of that one feature.
But this directly contradicts the entire point of requiring two staircases: that it would be safer.
The modern data we have shows that in countries with single stair exits and lots of people living in these units, they are safe, safer than the general outcome.
The question is about one particular rule, not repealing all the safety advancements, and that one bad rule is two staircases.
The data we have shows it's safe. I don't think there's any study that could be proposed that would satisfy critics, because ultimately this is not about safety, that's just a smokescreen. The point is to block convenient apartments, and whenever one safety study has been done exactly to the critics request, it will immediately be found lacking and an entirely different study will be demanded, or a new reason fabricated to shroud the true motivation: block convenient small apartments from being built.
Hong Kong is politically constrained.
That said, high rise is enough more expensive that I wouldn't expect cheap units to be in those buildings in general (unless the penthouse is valuable enough to subside lower levels). The mid rise (~5 floors) is a much better deal for most people.
One of the premier nature locations in the country, close to SV, great weather year round
Make it cheap!
Killing desirability is easy, actually.
I do think the city needs housing, for sure, but high rises? Baby steps maybe?
When did you last go? I remember when it was an idyllic beach town. I went a few months ago--it's a lot of Tenderloin south. Preserving a low-density community is exorbitantly expensive. Try it without cash and you overshoot into slum.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
the problem is that the NIMBYs exist everywhere, and housing has to get built somewhere. if a municipality wants to create a district covering some portion of their area that maintains the idyllic beach town vibe, that doesn't cause a problem so long as they're also willing to create a district where building houses actually is allowed. but as long as every single neighbourhood says it's charm and identity is based on having no new housing built, where are people supposed to live?
What you’re saying really amounts to saying you want to stop immigration into your town. While I can understand the sentiment, the problem is that people feel this way in so many places that it is creating a crisis of housing affordability.
Most of the people living in Santa Cruz owning homes are not commuting to the Bay to work. They made their money in tech and have retired to the beach.
Under the current state of California's pretty massive housing shortage, one city refusing to build housing just increases the financial burden on everyone else, and on top of that almost every city has, for decades, actively refused to densify in a reasonable manner. That's why the state has started with city-by-city explicit housing goals (with San Francisco looking like it will be the first city to hit the point of 'or else' penalties pretty soon).
> I'm not convinced doing so will even have an effect on housing costs
It's extremely straightforward supply and demand. It will take a while to catch up, though, because the country as a whole is still millions of housing units in the hole from decades of under-building.
It's really not. It houses a massive university, it's commutable to Silicon Valley and has been influenced by those booms and busts, it's steeped in counterculture and radicalism, and it has long faced serious issues with drugs and homelessness that are much more akin to a big city than a beach town.
I absolutely love Santa Cruz and I especially love the beach town aspects, but that's just one facet of the city and the surrounding area.
1) only the rich and lucky get to live there 2) build more housing 3) make the area less desirable
2 seems like the best option. Option 1 and 2 both could have the side-effect of causing 3.
There's plenty of other idyllic beach towns, but, unfortunately, this one can't stay this way.
Edit: Actually, forget all that. You're inviting me to live in Santa Cruz for a year? Do you have a place? I might take you up on that, what a lovely offer.
The folks who took Santa Cruz commuter shuttles at Google seemed widely miserable.
https://labormarketinfo.edd.ca.gov/file/commute-maps/santacr...
Speaking of single point of failure in Santa Cruz, there was a time when the entire area lost nearly all phone and internet because a cable was cut over in San Jose (https://www.mercurynews.com/2009/04/09/san-jose-police-sabot...). Sabotage!
alternate title: Santa Cruz plans high-rise living because they've run out of ways to prevent new housing from being built
The first issue(human nature) is the weather and lifestyle of these places is extremely desirable to people given most of the US is either very humid a majority of the year, very cold during the winter with snow, or extremely hot(100F for 20+ days of the year). So you have this extremely mild climate that is very family friendly and is by the beach and is also next to a funnel of money from the entire planet - silicon valley, where millions are getting extremely rich. It doesn't take alot to realize that the market is going to make these places very expensive due to housing supply and demand.
As for the second point(regulation) due to excessive building code regulations which make the cost of housing artificially high to ensure new buildings are up to code, even if you build hundreds or thousands of new units they are going to be very pricey(per unit) and unless the govt. heavily subsidies these units they will never be affordable to anyone making less than 200k a year(its just building materials, cost of labor and requiring the need for the building to be up to code). And then you have the first point being that you build the new units and people from all over the country and of course the bay area will jump on them and you are back to square one(high housing costs).
I don't see how this problem resolves itself as there is alot of money coming into the US the past few years during the tech boom and this is a absolute side effect of this unprecedented flow of money into CA and a few other places on earth. But trying to fight human nature and the market is a exercise in futility given how well thats gone in California the past 7-8 years.
As a side note I grew up in the south sf bay area and spent alot of time in santa cruz with my friends and know the area very, very well. Kind of surprised to say the least how expensive its gotten compared to the sf bay area proper.
Can it be both desirable and cheap ?
Take a look at some lakefront properties in Indiana: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/605-Roosevelt-Dr-Whiting-...
Why would anyone pay 2m vs 200k ?
Idk why all these people always pick the worst places to build and act surprised nobody wants more building there. Why not pick a reasonable place to begin with like somewhere that IS NOT developed.
It’s like people who want to turn Hawaii into a freakin resort mall.
Just don’t. Let SC be a cute beach town. Go Airbnb there.
People need to be reasonable and build somewhere that’s undeveloped. This is about as insane as proposing to build a high rise in sunset district. Why? Just go live elsewhere.
And I say this as someone who doesn’t own property. Save money and if you really want to own a house buy something in a up and coming area.
People literally did this throughout history. They moved to new places and developed those. Way easier today you’re not gonna travel in a caravan and suffer illnesses or get raided.
Let’s try to protect the environment and not ruin the few nice idyllic places we have left. Or better yet repeal prop 13.
SJ needs to build a ton more too. But Santa Cruz especially needs the housing.