Lookout: A Santa Cruz affordable housing primer – and why Measure C makes sense

By Don Lane

I get asked a lot about what’s happening with housing in the city of Santa Cruz, including all the current and planned construction, and what it means to call housing “affordable.” To start my response to those questions, here is a list of what I think are the most important housing projects:

• Pacific Station North – 128 apartments.

• Pacific Station South – 70 apartments.

• Jessie Street – 50 apartments.

• Library & affordable housing project – 124 apartments.

• Cedar Street Apartments –  65 apartments.

• Harvey West Studios – 120 apartments.

• Natural Bridges Apartments – 20 apartments.

• 831 Water Street – 140 apartments.

• Almar Village – 38 apartments.

• 136 River Street – 50 apartments.

• 525 Water Street  – 90 apartments.

Why are these the most important? Because every one of these projects consists of only “affordable” apartments – no “market rate” apartments. (More on “affordable” below.)

Yes, these buildings add up to 895 affordable apartments. 

This means about 1,800 people will get new homes in Santa Cruz between 2024 and 2027. Maybe one of these homes will be for your co-worker, your relative, the family of the health care assistant at your local clinic, the teacher of a kid you know or the worker at your favorite eatery. Or maybe one of those unkempt guys who’s been living in the park or under a bridge for the past few years. Maybe someone who’s been struggling to get by while working and living in her car. 

Not one of these homes will be for a wealthy tech worker from Silicon Valley.

Here are some other important housing projects in the local pipeline:

• Delaware Apartments – 352 new beds just for UC Santa Cruz students and 62 UCSC staff apartments.

• Swift Street – 100 apartments for local public school employees.

• Student Housing West/Family Student Housing – 2,400 new beds for students.

• Kresge College remodel/expansion – 587 additional student beds.

These other projects are important because they serve our local workforce and student populations, and they take the burden off the highly stressed rental market in neighborhoods. And rent won’t be collected at these places to make a profit – just to cover costs. 

As an affordable housing advocate in Santa Cruz, the questions I hear the most go something like this: “But are these places really affordable?” or “What does affordable really mean?” or “Aren’t these places really just for rich people from over the hill?”

With all due respect to those who ask these kinds of questions …  please knock it off and pay attention to reality.

The definition of “affordable” that folks who work in the field of affordable housing consistently use is this: If the rent is not more than 30% of the household’s income, it is affordable housing. All the 895 affordable apartments listed at the top of this article are using that definition and aim to set their rents accordingly. These are households that used to spend more like 50% to 60% of their income on rent.

And the only households that qualify for this kind of affordable housing are households with modest incomes or low incomes. Highly paid folks from the tech industry cannot live in any of these apartments.

Those wealthier folks have a shot at some of the new apartments in the big buildings being built downtown, near the river. But the number of apartments in the two new big “not affordable” projects is about 400. So the majority of new housing projects (895 from that first list) are actually affordable. 

Which brings me to Measure C, which is on the ballot in the city of Santa Cruz this fall. One might ask, why do we need Measure C if we’re making solid progress in building affordable apartments?

There are three key answers. The first is that we got so far behind in building affordable housing over the past 40 years that we have not yet caught up to meeting the current need. Hundreds more families who already live or work here will still be without affordable homes even when all the projects above are completed and occupied.

Second, almost all the affordable projects listed above were financed with public subsidies of one kind or another. The main source of local subsidy dried up a few years ago. That local source was the one that kick-started many of the projects on the list. We need to kick-start several more, and Measure C will provide the funds to do that.

Third, Measure C also has a modest amount of funding for prevention of homelessness. Essentially, this means funds to provide short-term emergency rent assistance so a family will stay housed rather than being evicted to the street.

I wish we could solve most of our state and national problems on the ballot this November. But we can’t. (Proposition 50 is the one hopeful exception.) However, as we find ways to resist the terrible things the Trump administration is doing, we still need to act locally, where we can have a more immediate positive impact. 

Measure C will do our community some real good.

By the way, the Santa Cruz County Association of Realtors, with major funding from the Sacramento-based California Association of Realtors, put together a sham called Measure B (perhaps it would have been more accurate if it were called Measure BS?). The only reason Measure B exists is to confuse voters and create the laughable impression that the real estate industry is a champion of affordable housing in Santa Cruz. 

The industry goes even deeper into dark comedy when it pretends that the measure will build low-income housing and fix West Cliff Drive and remedy the climate crisis for almost no money. We need only look at the hundreds of thousands of dollars the industry is spending to both defeat Measure C and to promote Measure B to see what’s happening here. The real estate industry is spending all this money to defeat C, even though C will create at least 10 times as much housing as their cynical and warped Measure B. 

I guess they believe they can get away with saying this is what leadership on affordable housing looks like in 2025. Let’s prove them wrong.

Don Lane is a former mayor of Santa Cruz. He is a co-founder of Housing Santa Cruz County, serves on the governing board of Housing Matters and has been a homeowner for 40 years.