Lookout Santa Cruz: Guest Commentary | For affordable housing and a humane Santa Cruz – vote yes on Measure C

By Christopher Connery

Why is housing in Santa Cruz so expensive? 

Some blame regulations, planning restrictions and fees, or an anti-development mindset dating back to the 1970s. But what about beaches, redwood forests, Pogonip, Wilder Ranch, farmers markets, sunsets, crisp air and everything else people love about this place?  

It’s a desirable place to live, and that desirability is a good part of what makes it such an expensive place to buy or rent. Brian Potter’s excellent June 2025 article “Why Are Homes in Western States So Expensive” has some great data on how a county’s rank on the Natural Amenities Scale, a measure developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, affects housing prices. 

It’s a lot. And by that measure, Santa Cruz County is at the top. If people can afford to live here and have the opportunity, it’s often an easy choice to make.

In a desirable place to live like ours, developers can sell as much expensive housing as they can build. We can’t count on the market for construction of the amount of affordable housing we need, especially for those at the low end of the income scale. 

Do we want the people who teach our children, clean our houses, check out our groceries, drive our buses, tune our cars, cut our hair, repair our bicycles or dry-clean our clothes to triple or quadruple up in shared housing, drive 90 minutes or two hours from Salinas, Los Banos or Hollister, sleep in their cars, couch-surf or live unhoused? That is not a tolerable or sustainable situation, unless you think there was nothing wrong with South Africa under apartheid, where Black Africans were forced to commute long hours from segregated suburban slums to their low-wage jobs in the cities. 

We need other incentives, new funding streams and new, creative thinking about how to house those who work here. 

Measure C — a modest $96 annual parcel tax with exemptions for seniors and low-income homeowners, plus a progressively structured real estate transfer tax applying only to homes with a price of over $1.8 million, and also with senior, family and low-income exemptions – is a good start.

California’s real estate transfer tax is, at $1.10 per $1,000 of sale value, one of the lowest in the United States (though in some states it is 0). Although counties are able to increase the rate, most, including Santa Cruz County, do not. This adds up to a little over $2,000 for the sale of a $2 million house. California municipalities can also impose transfer taxes. I was surprised to learn many years ago that Santa Cruz, unlike many municipalities in the state, did not; I had assumed that a progressive city like ours would have implemented one much earlier. Berkeley, Oakland, San Francisco, San Leandro, Richmond, Hayward, San Jose, Santa Rosa, San Rafael and Petaluma, to name only a few, all have higher municipal real estate transfer taxes than those proposed in Measure C.  

In recent years, Los Angeles, Santa Monica and other cities have passed substantial increases on sales of high-value homes. This has raised the hackles of the real estate industry, which has mobilized considerable resources to defeat real estate transfer taxes at the ballot box or in state and local government.  

Now the industry has its crosshairs on Santa Cruz. 

But rather than putting financial resources into a No on Measure C campaign, which would at least have been a transparent and straightforward advocacy, real estate interests here have invested considerable funds into crafting Measure B, which, though it would raise about a tenth as much money as Measure C would, might at least let its supporters claim that they support affordability, too. 

I hope no one is fooled.

We all know how much housing prices in Santa Cruz have increased over the past 30 years. My house, though according to Zillow it would sell for below $1.8 million and thus not be subject to a transfer tax under Measure C, is probably worth more than five times what we paid for it in 1995.  We’ve done a little remodeling, and have kept up with regular maintenance, but that’s about it.  

If we sold it tomorrow, our more than 400% profit would be due not to anything we’ve done to the house, but to the desirability of living in Santa Cruz. In a desirable area, homeowners’ wealth is created in substantial part by our location: the community we live in. Isn’t it only fair that if we sell, we then pay back a small bit of our profits for the benefit of all in our community, particularly during an era when changes to federal tax policy have disproportionately favored the wealthy?  

Will Measure C solve our affordability problem? Of course not, but it is an important step in the right direction. 

There is much more that we can do. Our city could learn a lot from Montgomery County, Maryland, Minneapolis, and Vienna, Austria (the gold standard), which is one of many cities that dispels the myth that public housing can’t work.

Passing Measure C now will not only provide substantial resources for more affordable housing over the next 20 years, but it will also send an important signal: that we as a community take housing affordability seriously; that we acknowledge our obligations and responsibilities for each other; and that we want a community where all can live well and flourish. 

Our votes are important. That’s why I say yes on C and no on B.

Christopher Connery taught at UC Santa Cruz from 1990 to 2025 as a professor in the literature and history of consciousness departments. He is now emeritus and lives in downtown Santa Cruz. He was a UCSC undergraduate from 1970 to 1975.